While politicians play for votes and ignore the evidence of a rapidly changing climate, Mother Nature has made the consequences heartbreakingly clear.
Four days after 24-year old Jake Vogelman was killed by a hurricane-toppled tree, NYPD detectives came to his house with his personal effects: a black leather wallet still wet from the rain and a watch that was still working
The first friend placed the watch down on a table beside the contents of the wallet, which were set out on paper towels to dry. The watch continued marking the seconds that Vogelman and all the others killed in the storm would never see.
Each second was also one closer to the next extreme weather event, disasters certain to come ever more frequently as a result of climate change.
Each second was also one closer to the time when it will be too late to do anything about it.
The next critical moment will come on Election Day, Tuesday, when Vogelman would have voted at Public School 321, directly across the street from his Brooklyn home.
“Obama lost one vote,” his mother, Marcia Sikowitz, noted on Friday.
Vogelman certainly had not been swayed to the other side by Mitt Romney’s speech at the Republican National Convention in which he mocked Barack Obama’s concerns regarding climate change.
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