Some people don’t believe in climate change. They just don’t. Despite an overwhelming consensus of world scientists insisting that global warming is real, and repeatedly warning of dire consequences, some people refuse to accept that reality.

Their reality is that long-term weather variances and increasingly destructive meteorological events are just normal cyclical extremes that will right themselves as time passes. All that has nothing to do with mankind’s industrial revolution against nature or our now unstoppable Edependent energy addictive activities. Mankind isn’t to blame. Human activity’s “carbon footprint” isn’t at fault. Certainly, their own individual behavior isn’t a causation or a contributing factor.

The mainstream media seems to lie in that camp. It isn’t that they themselves are climate change deniers. It’s just that they’re rarely capable of connecting even the most obvious dots of severe environmental crises and such events’ relationship to a crisis of the environment overall. They especially fail to make a connection between environmental harm and the bottom line concerns of their corporate sponsorship. They report on the environmental movement as if it’s a curiosity they’re aware of, and continue to report on, but a subject in which they have no real interest.

Just imagine how public awareness and concern would change if the corporate news media devoted as much attention to environmental impacts as it does to quasi-entertainment reportage or to the 24-7 coverage of self-perpetuating military conflict around the planet that, always the important bogeyman takeaway, might at anytime wreak havoc right here at home.

To watch the evening news is to expect world conflict as the lead story, unless an “act of God” has occurred or a celebrity has fallen from grace or deemed of extra special infatuation. The American public never seems to tire of warfare as a dominant news item or as our foremost means of global dominance.

It’s also never particularly interested in serious journalistic inquiry into why we’re endlessly engaged in armed conflict. Terrorism is readily accepted as a senseless threat born out of an incomprehensible motivation opposing “our way of life.” The acquisition of oil, theirs by us or our proxies, is ignored as if completely unrelated.

Coverage of floods and droughts is likewise never tiresome in its complete disconnect from environmental irresponsibility. The addiction to oil is a powerful enabler of denial and conveniently ignored as a foremost connector of troublesome dots.

Here along Maine’s coast we’re famous for lobstering and military shipbuilding. Last year was the sixth in a row of record breaking lobster harvests. Statewide revenues reached 495 million within an entire Maine fishery of 631 million.

Wikipedia reports that the cost of a Bath built Zumwalt destroyer will eventually average out at 7.5 billion per ship. That’s a lot of lobsters.

Global warming is supposedly an impending threat to Maine’s fishery, especially lobster. Some will say that six consecutive record harvests obviously refutes that, ignoring the already inarguable devastation of our shrimp harvest as Maine’s canary in the planetary ecological mine shaft.

Zumwalt-class destroyers have now become so cost prohibitive that the Navy can’t even afford adequate ammunition for such advanced weaponry’s capability. A single high tech bullet for its futuristic guns costs $800,000. Nevertheless, such weaponry’s realization is unquestioned by most taxpayers, and understandably supported by those who rely on such manufacturing’s direct or indirect profit. That includes much of Maine, the city of Bath being at ground zero.

That regional economic reliance encourages blind allegiance to such pork barrel rationalizations. Our local, state and national economy is held hostage by such militaristic economic dependence. Our earnings are taxed most to finance such ongoing military-industrial deal-making.

Maine’s coastline is 228 miles as the crow flies but over 3000 miles in tidal shoreline, greater than the distance between America’s East and West Coasts. For a state so tied to a now warming and rising North Atlantic, climate change threatens Maine’s livability and livelihoods.

The difference between the threat of global warming and war is that there are no war deniers.

I don’t believe in war. I say that as a veteran. When I say that, it’s understood that I mean not as an acceptable means of obtaining peace or lasting security.

What if I were to say that I literally don’t believe in war? That is doesn’t exist, or not to the extent as it’s reported or believed?

As with climate change denial, where’s the obvious irrefutable evidence? All we get are a lot of military-industrial claims that aren’t apparent in everyday experience. Far less apparent than climate change.

911 was way back then. Hardly a war, it consisted of an attack by four unarmed commercial aircraft. Since then, homeland terrorist threats have been few and far between. None here in Maine.

Can anyone really believe that, given our unequaled military might, we’ve actually been endlessly at war overseas without ever winning?

All I know is that terrorism has little to do with why I have to purchase Canadian cold water shrimp instead of what used to be Maine shrimp aplenty.

Then again, let’s try to connect the dots.

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.