What’s wrong with saving polar bears?

And I agree with you, it’s been warmer and colder – climate’s changing, always has, always will. Doesn’t mean carbon credits are bogus. But you seem to be saying that just because there’s people getting rich off it, and there’s conspiracy and poor science and even lies, the whole concept of climate change as potentially being caused in part by human’s moving massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere from the geosphere is null and void. Plain old commons sense would say otherwise – moving lots of ancient carbon into the atmosphere from the ground probably will do something to the atmosphere. And the science does back up this common sense understanding as well.

Jack,

I am an Emergency Management student and am in my second year. Listening to this ‘cast made me smile due to the comparison you gave of disaster probability v disaster preparedness. At least that is what I think you said. The term disaster is defined as: Deadly, destructive, and disruptive events that occur when a hazard(or multiple hazards)interact(s) with human vulnerability.

The vulnerability plainly put is not being prepared to mitigate a disaster in your life, whether that be a death in your immediate family,loss of income,loss of your home,natural/man-made or technological disasters. To not prepare is a death sentence for your family and yourself in any event. Gold/silver will not feed your family when there is not food to be had if and when infrastructure collapses.

I was part of a damage assessment team for 31 days for both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We were assigned a parish that was pretty rural and had spread out utility services and severe damage to all in place infrastructure. When we were done with our assessment and turned our findings in to the powers that be to determine when and where rebuilding efforts will start.

With this in mind the response we received from FEMA was that “they are in the outer areas, they will be last to receive relief or reconstruction services”. How crappy is that?! Because you do not live in a municipality you are pretty much on your own. I had an idea from serving 11 years in the military that “Uncle Scam” would hang us out to dry and that help will not come in enough time to save my family or immediate community members.

The US Government pretty much triaged off over half of an oil producing state and region during a major natural disaster and said they are on their own until we determine we can get to them. When the team and I heard this we sped back to the parish emergency mgr/sheriff. We had to sit down and tell a man that had been holding together a community on a thread that help was not coming. You could see all emotions run through his face, and when he finally spoke he said “I had a feeling they were going to do this to us”. They being our own government.

As I sit here and type this I think what if this happened here locally, what would we do, if we had to evacuate-where would we go, what would we eat? These are alot of questions to answer and digest. My answer for all of these, is to prepare for what I can and mitigate the rest as they come along, and the whole time building my preparedness measures to check one more box on the list of things to prepare for. Having basic preparedness measures in place for an “All Hazards” approach to the possibility of a disaster.