Startlingly fresh climate change commentary from a medical doctor in Salt Lake City:
As I listened to Mitt Romney deliver his energy plan for America and read the Republican Party platform, I was struck by parallels to a book about the atrocious medical care given to President James Garfield after he was shot on July 2, 1881.
Garfield would have survived the bullet, but died weeks later from infection after gross medical malpractice. Most American doctors of the time dismissed the "germ theory" pioneered by non-American scientists, such as British doctor Joseph Lister.[snip]
Because they couldn’t see them, American doctors ridiculed belief in bacteria, comparing it to the silly, contemporary belief in fairies. Doctors even took pride in their filth, carrying blood, pus, and dirt from one patient to the next. In 1881 American country doctors were still applying hot cow manure to open wounds. Doctors treating Garfield routinely performed surgery without changing their clothes or washing their hands and held instruments in their teeth for convenience.
Much like the Garfield assassination attempt, fossil fuels burned by industrialized civilization have gravely "wounded" the ecosystems necessary for human survival.
Our current response to the "fever" and "infection" spreading through our own habitat is to allow the most ignorant and disingenuous of us to bully the rest of us to inaction. The level of scientific sophistication Romney and congressional Republicans are applying to the task is on a par with Garfield’s doctors in 1881. You can’t see CO2, therefore it must not be a problem. CO2 is natural, just like bacteria. Therefore, linking it to a climate crisis must be a hoax.
The whole piece is great, and a great excuse to publish this stark drawing on denial from the recent global warming contest in The New Yorker, a personal fav from Jonathan Bean:
