Get on up and testify!

A funky rhythm begins, soon punctuated by a staccato horn section...ba-DA-DA-DA-DA-DAH! A figure (right) steps up to the mike:

Brethren, we are gathered here today to hear about a New Thang...Papa's brand new bag!...called climate change. Is it happening? Is it real? Just listen to this 80-year-old farmer as he watches a (much needed) hard rain fall in Queensland. Say it, brother!

I thought I knew something about the weather, but now I'm not so sure.

I had some criteria that I lived by for a lifetime and none of them now with this global warming are worth talking about, they're non-existent.

Normally we get rain in March, April and then some in June, well that didn't happen.

Good Lawd!! The weather's gettin' funky...Just listen to this farmer from Wisconsin tell of the wild weather over the last year! Testify!

The weather turned against us in May of last year. We had a nice rain on Mother's Day, then for nearly three months we watched the pastures dry up, the corn shrivel, and the dust blow...In early August, the rains returned to Southwestern Wisconsin, in some places nearly 20 inches in a week's time...

Unh!

The cows were on good pasture until early December when the snows started and never seemed to let up. Over 100 inches of snow fell from December through April...The snow melted slowly and...we waited for the warm winds of spring. And we waited.

Yeeeoww!

It was an abnormally cool spring and a wet one. Some of the early planted corn didn't come up or came up yellow and stunted. We plant our corn late...Then on June 7-8, we got another hundred-year rain: 10 inches in 36 hours. Flooding was worse than last August.

Help me! -- But tell me, isn't it still Man's World? Don't we still run the show? What have we done wrong? Let's hear from this Maldivian government minister:

Why have the warnings of the past 20 years gone unheeded?

Why does mankind continue to pursue manifestly unsustainable economic growth strategies at the expense of the global ecosphere?"...[H]ow can we change the global debate on climate change? And how can we move the world from an attitude of self-indulgent negligence to one of shared responsibility and global solidarity?

The world has failed to humanise climate change.

Oh Lawd have mercy! Lawd have mercy! ...Fred, let me tell ya something...I don't feel good...Can we just hit it and quit?

As the band groovingly ad-libs along, the disembodied voice of the last witness chides:

...attitude of self-indulgent negligence...

...shared responsibility...global solidarity...

The world has failed to humanise climate change.

Hit it!

ba-DA-DA-DA-DA-DAH!

***
Image: James Brown in the Blues Brothers, via Google Image. I added the caption.