MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Image: DonkeyHotey)Now, it is getting personal: Someone is enabling circumstances that might result in my death, your death and the death of countless people around the world.

I am referring to an infamous statement Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) statement made in a May 11 interview with This Week:

Rubio - who expressed deep skepticism about whether man-made activity has played a role in the Earth's changing climate - told [ABC news reporter Jonathan] Karl he doesn't believe there is action that could be taken right now that would have an impact on what's occurring with our climate.

"I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it … and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy," he said.

Given ongoing major reports, including last week, that we may have crossed the threshold into a catastrophic cauldron of brewing and already-present climate change, Rubio is condemning much of the earth to catastrophe and death.

That is because most scenarios that scientists have outlined will create a new atmospheric reality on earth, one that will unleash disastrous forces. It is unlikely that large-scale death will be avoidable under any of the current predictions.

Furthermore, as the record-breaking dry spell and heat wave in California reveal, the ability to grow sufficient food to feed the people of the world is being threatened - even more so in southern poor nations that are closer to the equator. Shortages of fresh water are predicted as the earth's temperature rises - and large coastal cities will likely experience massive flooding from ocean and seawater reaching new heights.

When This Week's reporter confronts Rubio about the vulnerability of Florida's coastal cities, all he can offer the state that he represents in the Senate is some mumbo-jumbo about how there have always been hurricanes and how the state's housing needs to be built better.

Given that extremely recent studies have all proven that the Arctic icecap, the Antarctic shelf and the Greenland glacier are all rapidly melting down, Rubio is signing on a death warrant for an incalculable number of people. (The three together would raise the ocean level by enough to put Miami and NYC - and all the world's coastal cities - under perhaps a foot of water, thus making them inoperable as cities.) This could, in one scenario, mean entire populations could be decimated in the hottest areas, and the rest of us subject to unpredictable deadly weather outbreaks and basic food and water shortages. In some scientific predictive scenarios, that is one of the lesser destructive possibilities.

Rubio gave his sordid interview to semi-officially announce that he is running for the GOP nomination for president. In fact, the headline of the ABC article is, "Sen. Marco Rubio: Yes, I'm Ready to Be President."

It might trivialize the serious risk that a candidate such as Rubio poses to life on this planet that he simultaneously claimed in his interview that science, in contrast to dire climate change predictions, does prove that abortion is a crime. This is what he told Sean Hannity last week:

"Let me give you a bit of settled science that they'll never admit to. The science is settled, it's not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life begins at conception," Rubio said. "So I hope the next time someone wags their finger about science, they'll ask one of these leaders on the left: 'Do you agree with the consensus of science that human life begins at conception?'"

So Rubio wants more children born into a world where they will be doomed to battle for human survival against hyper-volatile forces that could have been prevented with wise leadership.

Whether Rubio is announcing his death sentence for so many lives on the planet through abject ignorance or calculated political ambition (to win the votes of climate-change deniers in GOP primaries) does not really matter.

Sen. Marco Rubio is putting my life and yours at risk. We have a right to protest and change US and international policy to protect more lives from a threat far greater than what any terrorist group could cause.

For one thing, let us convert at least half of our military spending to a budget for implementing policy changes that work to reverse the climactic damage we've caused, to the extent that it is reversible.

As for Rubio, he would like us to believe that he represents the promise of the United States.

He doesn't; he represents a threat to our very existence.

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