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" Don&amp;#039;t know about you, but I&amp;#039;m really going to miss Louisiana. In the past eight decades, Louisiana has lost 1,880 square miles of coastal marshes, or an area about the size of Manhattan every year. With another hurricane season upon us, it is land that Louisiana and the nation can ill afford to lose. The same threat of lost barrier islands and wetlands stalks more than half of the coastal properties of the continental United States, extending from Maine to Texas. But here in southeastern Louisiana, it&amp;#039;s at its worst...&amp;quot;The sea is rising and the land is sinking,&amp;quot; says Louisiana state climatologist Barry Keim of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. &amp;quot;The two together mean that wetlands are disappearing here at unprecedented rates worldwide.&amp;quot; Add in the threat of more powerful hurricanes spurred by climate change, Keim says, &amp;quot;and you have to worry about the past repeating itself here.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Louisiana is in many ways, one of the best examples of starting to see some of the near-term implications of climate change,&amp;quot; says environmental policy expert Jordan Fischbach, of the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Pittsburgh, part of the team that last year developed tools for the state to decide what coastal restoration projects to pursue. &amp;quot;In some ways, I feel like it is the canary in the coal mine because they are seeing effects that change people&amp;#039;s day-to-day lives.&amp;quot;  The inability of the world&amp;#039;s most advanced democracy to confront a problem that&amp;#039;s as obvious as houses falling into the sea is the most serious consequence of the ongoing war on science, and the ongoing waterboarding of science, and the ongoing derision of expertise that has become an important element in the governing coalition of one of the two major political parties that we have allowed ourselves. It&amp;#039;s going to be the consequence of those phenomena with the most serious -- and irreversible -- repercussions for every one of us. (Even the Iraq War, which was a singular triumph of the derision of expertise, especially in the intelligence community, is finally pretty much over.) And, right on cue, and as a perfect illustration of what my running mate was discussing earlier today, here comes Congressman Steve King of Iowa, deciding to be stupid on a topic other than immigration for a change. &amp;quot;It is not proven, it&amp;#039;s not science. It&amp;#039;s more of a religion than a science,&amp;quot; he said. He said that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm, environmentalists only look at the bad from that, not the good. &amp;quot;Everything that might result from a warmer planet is always bad in (environmentalists&amp;#039;) analysis,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;There will be more photosynthesis going on if the Earth gets warmer. ... And if sea levels go up 4 or 6 inches, I don&amp;#039;t know if we&amp;#039;d know that.&amp;quot; Yeah, he&amp;#039;s right. Nobody will notice. Not in Iowa, anyway, until the inevitable day down the line when Des Moines is a Gulf Coast paradise. Cemeteries are sinking and washing away in towns like Leeville, La., on their way to becoming isolated spits of land. Onetime orange groves and cotton fields are now covered with water.  The only thing we can hope for is that, somehow, there stops being a political market among Republican voters for Steve King&amp;#039;s dangerous brand of nonsense. Until then, I continue to despair of the rebranding, and of the fate of the planet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19194/louisiana-global-warming-and-wetlands-080713/?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_14829944>