Lewis Pugh’s mind-shifting Mt. Everest swim
After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip. Then, he heard of Mt. Everest’s Lake Imja — a body of water at an altitude of 5,300 meters, entirely created by recent glacial melting — and began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach both swimming and think about climate change.
August 12, 2010 @ 7:18 pm
With all due respect Mr Pugh and activists are always focused on the wrong aspects of the climate change issue.
1. What has to be done first and most urgently is to deal with the realities of what’s happening on the Earth and how it is impacting humans. Structures, damns, flood control systems, emergency response infrastructures to floods, droughts wildfires, typhoons etc. must be built and put in place for defense against rising sea-levels.
The Maldives, for example, will be gone before too many years, perhaps in a single day soon, if they don’t construct massive seawall protections. These are the kind of things that environmentalists should be discussing and arguing for.
2. Human activity, fossil fuel pollution etc. as the cause of climate change, which always seems to the center of the debate, is another issue altogether. A useless waste of time and political effort.
The climate changes every day. No year, or day, is ever the same in terms of rainfall temperature etc. There can be no argument otherwise.
The cause doesn’t matter so much as the effects.
3. The particular argument about man-produced pollution is annoyingly stupid.
The question about pollution should be:
Is man-made pollution good for the Earth and its inhabitants?
If you believe its probably not good for the planet then a long-term curtailment is in order.
If you believe pollution is good for the planet…have your head examined.. or go live in a Moscow for the next month.