We are supposed to love our Mothers. They brought us life and nurtured us. So when hearing about how we treat our Mother Earth, it pains me. She now has the flu. We have given her a fever by burning the fossil fuels that she had hidden in her body for millions of years. We have warmed and acidified her oceans to the point that coral reefs and fish are dying. The warm oceans also power ever-intensifying weather events. They are going to have to come up with new names for weather. If you have a hurricane such as Patricia that has the wind speeds of a tornado, should it be called a toricane or a hurrnado?
To humanize Mother Earth, perhaps we should refer to her as Patricia, in honor of the most intense “sneeze” she has ever had. She is going to sneeze more often and as with the flu, she will try to flush us out, as our own bodies do with the pathogens that harm us. The sad thing is, companies knew that they were harming Patricia decades ago and have been denying it ever since. They needed climate model projections to engineer for the melting permafrost and melting polar ice that would ultimately occur. They then denied the very US and Canadian climate science they used. This type of denial strategy worked for years to maintain the profits of the tobacco industry. It also resulted in a large monetary settlement. See https://en.wikipedia.org/... So, if the tobacco settlement resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in damages for the adverse effects of smoking, what does that say for the fossil fuel industry? Perhaps we should file a class action suit in the name of Patricia. The settlement will pay to subsidize our ever-increasing insurance premiums, transition us to a renewable energy future and move all the coastal dwellers to higher ground. Several trillion may be a start.
In the mean time, we need to show some love for Patricia before her next “sneeze” blows or flushes us all away. We rely on her for our lives.