Climate Truth or Climate Death?
By Peter Gerler
6/11/26
"Everybody's crying justice
Just as long as there's business first"
--Mose Allison
One of the best films I've seen in recent years is A Private War, starring Rosamund Pike as the real-life war correspondent Marie Colvin. Active for 30 years in the Middle East and countries such as Chechnya, Serbia, and Sierra Leone, the award-winning Colvin was credited in 1999 with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children from a besieged compound at East Timor.
In 2012, covering the Syrian Civil War, she described "merciless" shelling and sniper attacks against...people on the streets of Homs by Syrian forces, expressing "immense shock at the utter disregard of the government troops for the lives of the city residents."[15][2]
Colvin told Anderson Cooper, --Every civilian house on this street has been hit....There are no military targets here....The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians."[33]
At the same time, thousands of soldiers, opposing the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, were deserting the Syrian army.
Colvin died in the assault. People of Homs mourned in the streets in her honor. She received tributes from across the media industry and political world.
***
A similar war runs in the United States, as we speak. The deaths take longer and bring less noise. And just as in Syria, they are denied or ignored.
At a February conference of climate-change deniers, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin hailed a recent decision that revoked the EPA's own Endangerment Finding. In 2009, that finding stated "that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases...threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations."
"Since 2009, the scientific evidence for endangerment has only strengthened," according to Stanford University's Woods Institute, which finds "climate change is driving more severe heat waves, larger wildfires and more wildfire smoke-related deaths, rising seas, growing food insecurity, and a range of health problems.
In June, Stanford also reported that "rising global temperatures will dampen the world's capacity to produce food from most staple crops, even after accounting for economic development and adaptation by farmers."
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