Guardian: The Florida Building Collapse was a George Floyd Climate Action Turning Point

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to The Guardian, all the bad things which happened last year should convince society to embrace carbon taxes and renewable energy.

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Rebecca Solnit
Mon 12 Jul 2021 22.31 AEST

People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

A building collapsing is an ideal specimen of news, sudden and specific in time and place, and in the case of this one on the Florida coast, easy for the media to cover as a spectacle with straightforward causes and consequences. A crisis spread across three states and two Canadian provinces, with many kinds of impact, including untallied deaths, was in many ways its antithesis. There was a case to be made that climate change – in the form of rising saltwater intrusion – was a factor in the Florida building’s collapse, but climate change was far more dramatically present in the Pacific Northwest’s heat records being broken day after day and the consequences of that heat. In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.

A turning point is often something you individually or collectively choose, when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. George Floyd’s murder was a turning point for racial justice in the US. Those who have been paying attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades back. For some it was Hurricane Sandy or their own home burning down or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush or the IPCC report in 2018 saying we had a decade to do what the planet needs of us. Greta Thunberg had her turning point, and so did the indigenous women leading the Line 3 pipeline protests.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/12/our-climate-change-turning-point-is-right-here-right-now

In my opinion this is an example of what happens to people who only talk to those who reinforce their fears.

I’ll never forget a time many years ago, when someone invited me to a meeting which turned out to be a small group of student trotskyites. They kept saying “The people are with us”.

So I asked “Which people?”.

All I got was blank stares. Nobody had actually thought to check with ordinary people outside their little cabal, to see if normal people felt any connection with the radical ideas the group was discussing.

I was not invited to the next meeting.

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2hotel9
July 14, 2021 4:47 am

Really? The building collapsed because it swallowed a bunch of stamp bags full of fentanyl when it saw some cops coming to arrest it?

Rod Evans
July 14, 2021 4:48 am

I read the article by Rebecca Solnit.
There were only two things wrong, as far as I could see.
1. The fact someone that lacking in factual knowledge is allowed out on their own.
2. The fact a published news paper, even one as crazy as the Guardian, would carry it as a serious viewpoint.
The Guardian is far from alone sadly, when it comes to journalists being allowed to write nonsense pieced with zero scientific value.
Even the Daily Telegraph have writers paid to pen such rubbish. One such numpty , I won’t name him, wrote yesterday, the heat pulse in the North West USA last week was caused by man made CO2 emissions.
That is how crazy it has got here in the UK newspaper business.

Trying to Play Nice
Reply to  Rod Evans
July 14, 2021 5:10 am

Britney Spears isn’t the only one who seems to need a conservator to make sure she doesn’t harm herself.

Gerry, England
July 14, 2021 5:03 am

‘Fruit is being cooked on the tree.’

Not in my orchard as there is hardly any fruit at all thanks to the relentless cold of April and early May with nightly frosts and low temperatures. My worst year on record (in true warmist style I will gloss over only having been here 6 years) – it’s unprecedented.

Bruce Cobb
Reply to  Gerry, England
July 14, 2021 10:35 am

For Climate Hyperbole, that one is a keeper. It makes me think of pie a la mode. Yum!

July 14, 2021 5:32 am

So far NOT ONE mention of REBAR. Look again at the photos, videos of the rebar in the columns and scant rebar in the flooring. Then consider this building was built 40+ years ago in a moist, salty environment. Just like potholes grow from freezing and thawing (Climate Change), any exposure of the rebar to the air will allow salty moisture to contact the rebar, this causes the rebar to rust. the rust increases the size of the gap between the rebar and allows more salty moisture to penetrate the gap, which travels by capillary action to propagate the corrosion. Flooded basements and the constant presence of salty moisture create the failure. The salty moisture is the Climate where the building is so again, Climate Change. Actually it is what those in the construction business call “Concrete Cancer. Any Muscle car buff knows that you do not want that “Dream Car” from Florida. They have seen more salt (or at least have the potential) than one from northern Minnesota, and for 12 months of the year!

Abolition Man
Reply to  Rich Lentz
July 14, 2021 12:48 pm

I think UBC now requires rebar used in marine environments to be coated! Sadly, 40 years ago they did not!
This sounds like a deadly game of kick-the-can-down-the-road; let someone else make the decision and break the bad news to the owners! The only benefactors will be some trial lawyers

July 14, 2021 5:46 am

George Floyd might not be a good analogy.

Rights come with responsibilities, expectations, behaviors.
Obeying the laws is big one.
Disobey the laws, lose some rights.
In a capital case, the right to breath.
Civil behavior is another.
 
Chicago, Heyjackass.com:
YTD 375 shot & killed!!!!!! Every 11 h 33 m.
YTD 1,799 shot & wounded!!!!!!!!!!!! Every 2 h 07 m
WTF?!
82.6% BLACK!!
Chicago, where black lives really do not matter.
Same in Detroit, Baltimore, KC……
Shot by police: 4 dead, 6 wounded.
I guess not newsworthy enough for the fake news MSM woke talking heads to foment riots.
If Garfield Park, Austin, Englewood, Humboldt were plantations the Massa would roll through with shot guns and dogs and put an end to that shit – it’s bad for the bottom line.
Maybe blacks NEED slavery!
Kaepernick, Rahm and Obama should hold a “cease fire” kneeling celebration.
Ballistic vest and helmet recommended.

BLM & SJW should be be collectin’ the guns.

n.n
Reply to  Nick Schroeder
July 14, 2021 8:10 am

Some, Select [Black] Lives Matter in the street, in the store, in the neighborhood… deja vu. Social justice anywhere is injustice everywhere.

That said, Baby Lives Matter.

n.n
Reply to  Nick Schroeder
July 14, 2021 8:14 am

Yes, all dual-use weapons, including: guns, bats, cars, and especially scalpels, too.

Ian Coleman
July 14, 2021 5:50 am

The constant problem for the climate change catastrophists is how to get regular people to care about climate change. In fact, the only people I have ever read on the subject of climate change are people who are being paid to stir up fear of it. Nobody else gives a rat’s rear end.

When was the last time anybody spontaneously admitted to fear of climate change in an ordinary conversation? It just doesn’t happen.

Carlo, Monte
July 14, 2021 6:20 am

They can’t call it a tipping point because it collapsed downward? Thus:

tipping point ——> turning point

AlexBerlin
July 14, 2021 6:22 am

Criminals are Victims, Policemen are Murderers, Fossil Fuels hurt our Planet, Renewables are our Future. Black is White, Evil is Good. The same tired lie all over again.

Robert Hanson
Reply to  AlexBerlin
July 21, 2021 1:06 pm

You forgot “we have always been at war with Eastasia”….

Komerade cube
July 14, 2021 7:10 am

Does Griff write for the Guardian?

fretslider
Reply to  Komerade cube
July 14, 2021 7:38 am

He fits the profile alright

Dave Andrews
Reply to  Komerade cube
July 14, 2021 7:44 am

No. But I think he dates Rebecca Solnit

Reply to  Dave Andrews
July 14, 2021 10:23 am

Always had the Grifter down as a she, but maybe he’s on too much soy, that’ll do it.

Rory Forbes
Reply to  Dave Andrews
July 14, 2021 10:42 am

I very much doubt that either Rebecca or Griff date. That’s why their brains keep misfiring.

Mr.
Reply to  Komerade cube
July 14, 2021 3:58 pm

Yes he does, but he has to bring his own crayons.

ResourceGuy
July 14, 2021 7:31 am

Guardian: It’s a ‘news’ business model don’t ya know.

fretslider
Reply to  ResourceGuy
July 14, 2021 7:39 am

One that constantly fails to break even

n.n
Reply to  fretslider
July 14, 2021 8:03 am

Au contraire, what is the cost to sacrifice a few [million] babies…. facts, annually, when the rite is politically profitable with a depraved state of mind.

Steve Z
July 14, 2021 8:39 am

So, one building collapses along the Florida coast, and all of a sudden “global warming” caused saltwater intrusion that supposedly caused the building to collapse? Saltwater intrusion is primarily due to people using fresh water from the aquifer faster than it can be filled with seepage from rain water, so that salt water fills the void. But whether a space between underground layers is filled with salt water or fresh water would have little effect on its structural stability.

Several years ago, a major bridge across the Mississippi River near Minneapolis collapsed during the summer, but nobody blamed that on “global warming’, but on structural defects which had not been properly repaired. Instead of rushing to judgment about the Florida building collapse, let’s have some civil engineers inspect the rubble and determine whether or not it was structurally sound or properly maintained.

Shortly after the building collapse in Florida, I was visiting relatives who lived in another condo along the Florida coast, and they mentioned that it was discovered that the building which collapsed had been built on sand, while they had no fear for their own building (which was built about the same time as the collapsed building) since its foundation was on bedrock.

About 2,000 years ago, Jesus said that a house built on sand would be swept away by storms, while a house built on rock would withstand the same storm. Nobody worried about global warming back then, but it’s common knowledge that the east coast of Florida gets frequent hurricanes. Whoever built that collapsed building didn’t take Jesus’ advice, and suffered the consequences.

Dave Fair
Reply to  Steve Z
July 14, 2021 5:29 pm

The condo was not built on a foundation of sand.

Big Al
July 14, 2021 9:28 am

The apartment building contained virus. Not Wacked Virus destroyed this building.

Rory Forbes
July 14, 2021 10:15 am

That is even fit to line a bird cage. Rebecca needs to find some other line of work.

Greg
July 14, 2021 11:40 am

Why even bother arguing with the content of an “opinion piece” on a left wing campaign platform which does not even pretend to be journalistic content.

You may as well go and argue with Twitter !!

July 14, 2021 11:48 am

Quite amusing reading this after reading Curry’s 5-minute synopsis…

Spanner
July 14, 2021 3:21 pm

Unfortunately, this is mainstream. It is getting increasingly difficult to argue against it. Most people I know give me funny looks if I stray onto the subject, if I am not “on message”

July 14, 2021 3:24 pm

“The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record.” 

If you were keeping track of the temperature record you would know that the earth is not warming.

And in the next quote not only did they not mention the name of the town (Lytton) and why not, but they used 8F degree higher than the old record from 1937. Why use 8 because it’s a bigger number than 4.6C. Canada uses C as does Britain so why F, because it looks better for warmunists than C

“In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.”

WXcycles
July 14, 2021 8:17 pm

eh? … George Floyd?! … climate action?!
Is this juxtaposition for some sort of circus-performance? Will there be clowns?

July 14, 2021 9:29 pm

Yes, it was hot here in calgary during the heat wave
As a result my garden is off the hook, booming, I have 8’ tall delphiniums for Pete’s sake

And I got 2” of rain in last 7 days

Loving the heat, at least my garden is