Once upon a time, children were born into a world that offered promise and hope for the future. Opportunity was just around the corner. But now, what looms ahead is sheer climate horror unless humanity can quickly bend the curve on the heating up of our planet.
The last five years—from 2014 to 2018—are the warmest years ever recorded in the 139 years that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tracked global heat. And 2018 was the fourth hottest year ever recorded. — NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
The Sound of Climate Silence
The following video is adapted to a Simon & Garfunkel tune with new lyrics by Julie Wornan. It will make you weep.
The Change of Climate – Lyric Video
Published September 18, 2019
Standard YouTube licence
The lyrics:
I saw on the news today
A hundred homes were washed away
Stormy waters pouring from the skies
Met the seas as they began to rise
Elsewhere, of water there’s no drop
This man’s crop
Was lost due to the change of climate.
Forests going up in fire
Ice caps melting, seas going higher
Well, you want to know, how can this be
Will we too be touched by tragedy –
You and me
Should we worry ‘bout the changing climate?
Once folks cooked their food on wood
And kept warm as best they could
Then some wonderful black rocks called coal
Warmed our homes and made the railroads roll
And when oil came gushing up we could go far
In our car
Without thinking ‘bout the changing climate.
Oil and coal and nat’ral gas
Were created eons past.
Carbon locked within them will go free
When we burn them for ‘lectricity
Carbon joins with air to make up something new:
CO².
Too much of it will change our climate.
Fact’ries whirl and spew out stuff
No one tells them “That’s enough!”
Bringing all that stuff from here to there
Planes and trucks have to pollute our air
Make us sick and spout that carbon to the sky
Way up high
Where it’s going to change our climate.
Famine stalks the parched land
Verdant pastures turn to sand
Glaciers shrink and mountain streams run dry
Lightning flashes from a heated sky
And who will help those people when they flee
Refugee
Victims of the changing climate?
How to fix the mess we’re in
Well, here’s how we can begin
Catch the wind and then the sparkling sun
And our atom friend Uranium
Whose tiny size belies enormous powers
Which are ours
To use against the changing climate.
Keep those fossils in the hole
Yes we’ll fight a war on coal
Make polluters pay the laws they flout
Plant some trees to suck the carbon out
And we’ll get our power in ways that are carbon free
You and me
We’ll work to stop that changing climate.
What Climate Emergency?
Our youth is engaged in a fight for their lives—trying to save their future—while millions of adults stand by on the sidelines just looking the other way. We have a climate emergency but we’re not acting like it.
In fact, Canadians just re-elected a government whose climate plan misses the IPCC red lines by a country mile.
Related articles:
Human And Environmental Health Go Hand In Hand
#AllHeartsOnDeck: Save Youth From Climate Despair
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.