Mona Lisa's weak smile as climate change wrecks France

Op Ed: Climate change ignored by many in media

Mona Lisa’s “mystic smile” has been replaced by a frown as Europe is flooded by record rains.

Famous art works are being removed from flooded cities, including Paris. The Mona will stay safe on a higher floor.

Across the pond in Texas, five soldiers drowned when their tactical vehicle overturned in flood waters at Fort Hood. Others were missing.

Seventeen-hundred Texas prison inmates were evacuated.

But most news coverage didn’t even mention climate change, which many scientists believe is responsible for a growing number of wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, snowstorms, more heat waves and other weather events.

The Huffington Post reports heat is sapping productivity in India’s population of 1.25 billion.
But on Thursday some major news outlets, including the BBC, led some of their news casts with U.S. presidential news.

Radio France International reported: The rain and floods are due "to climate, and we have to get used to it, but also to us humans, settling into areas that we shouldn't live," according to climate risk expert Jeroen Aerts.

‘The last six days of torrential rain have caused the Seine and other rivers to burst their banks - this forced the evacuation of thousands of people in riverside towns south of Paris and in the Loire Valley,” RFI said.

Russia’s Sputnik news, in an article entitled “The Mainstream Media’s Climate Malpractice,” said:
“The simple fact is, these storms are directly connected to global climate change. More specifically, these storms are directly related to the ‘water vapor positive feedback loop’. Right now according to climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, there is about 5% more water vapor in the atmosphere above the oceans than there was in 1968 when Richard Nixon was sworn in, thanks to the fact that the oceans have already warmed one degree. We know that the planet is warming and that it's warming because of human activities: we rip fossil fuels out of the Earth and burn them into the atmosphere, we destroy our soils with industrial farming, and we clear cut carbon-rich rainforests to plant fields of monocrops.”

Trenberth is a member of the Climate Analysis Section of the U.S. National Research Center for Atmospheric Research.

The Sputnik article also said: If the mainstream media were doing its job responsibly, they wouldn't just tell you the estimated cost of disaster relief, they would tell you that according to Citibank, the estimated cost of climate inaction is around $44 TRILLION globally.

But they won't.

Because that sort of honest reporting in the public interest would fly in the face of major corporate sponsors and lobbying groups like BP, Exxon, and the American Petroleum Institute.”

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