Darrell Maloney

Pandemic Darrell Maloney

Even when faced with record-breaking high and low temperatures, storms of severity never before witnessed by man and expanding hurricane and tornado seasons, scientists cannot agree on what's making our climate and weather patterns go haywire. In recent years the problem has been deemed more political than scientific. In the halls of Congress, finger pointing is the order of the day. One camp blames the few scientists who still deny climate change as being bought and paid for. Nothing more, really, than paid lobbyists trying to protect the fossil fuel industries in the face of a decreasingly-deniable problem. The other camp says the vast majority of scientists who've concluded that climate change is a real thing are merely trying to further a liberal agenda. To finally strengthen pollution standards and reduce carbon emissions to levels which have had them salivating for years. Everybody wants cleaner air. But conservatives claim that obtaining that clean air will shackle big oil and the coal industry and raise costs for everyone. "Clean air is nice," they say. "But we don't want the nation to have to pay five dollars a gallon for gas to get it." And therein lies the crux of the problem. Each side is too busy blaming the other side to actually deal with the problem. It's far more important that their side doesn't get blamed for whatever ugliness is coming. But what if both sides are missing the point? What if both sides are spending so much effort blaming the other side that they've lost sight of the fact that people are dying unnecessarily? And that the problem could very possibly get much worse unless they stop sitting on their hands and do their jobs? Most people assume it's the damage from more powerful hurricanes, tornados and floods that's the biggest hazard of climate change. But what if the problem is none of those? What if the biggest hazard from climate change is something different? Something the scientists haven't even considered yet? Something that has the potential of eradicating humanity itself? "Pandemic" delves into one such possibility...