Global Warming Gotcha!

Photos:
Bottom is the Pasterize Glacier in Austria in 1875.
Top is the same glacier in 2004.

It isn't news that the Bush administration has not only played down the threat of global warming, but has actually fought even the most timid attempts to do something about it.

This very week, The New York Times reported that an e-mail from the Environmental Protection Agency sent to the White House suggesting greenhouse gases be taken seriously was deliberately ignored. Adding injury to insult, the White House then ordered the EPA to write another report more in line with the Bush administration's hands-off approach.

Another recent report, this by the CNA Corporation, a non-profit group aligned with the U.S. military indicated that "climate change is a very serious threat to national security." It is likely this report will also be ignored by Bush and friends.


Unfortunately, while more and more Americans have become attuned to the dangers the world faces from global warming, there are still too many who get their news from right-wing radio commentators who spew their trash-talk out onto the airwaves baffling the benumbed and the dumb.

One young man told me the other day that global warming is a myth. There is no danger, he says. Coastal areas of the United States are not about to be washed away by the rising seas. When I pointed out that the evidence is massive and that the great majority of scientists are in concurrence with not only the threat of global warming, but with the rapidity of change which is occurring, he told me that the scientists can't be trusted because their funding and thus their livelihood is based upon their global warming "discoveries." If they told the truth--that global warming is a myth--they would thus lose their funding and their livelihood.

This is not, I think, an unpopular view among many in the mythical "heartland" who deny reality because they are unable to think the unthinkable -- that maybe "everything" is not going to be all right.


James Hansen, one of NASA's top scientists, began warning about global warming 20 years ago. Today Hansen's warnings have taken on a new urgency. Our only hope, he says, is "drastic action."

Hansen appeared before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming this week to state unequivocally that we have gone way past "the dangerous level" with regard to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Because the Earth's atmosphere can handle the current load of man-made carbon dioxide for only about 20 more years, we must take action now. Hansen said that "We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," and will be visited with mass extinction, the collapse of the ecosystem, and rapidly rising sea levels.

One of the major creators of carbon-dioxide emissions are coal-fired power plants that fail to install capture mechanisms. The world can no longer afford to utilize such power plants.

But there is no easy way to shut them down without a major effort on the part of the world's leading nations. Such an effort is not in the offing: a recent report indicated that many countries around the world are at this moment actively engaged in constructing coal-fired power plants, including the United States and Great Britain.


I have just finished reading Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth - The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It." This is a sober, descriptive and challenging work, which effectively destroys the arguments of the naysayers. No one can read this book without beginning to understand the scope of the problem because Mr. Gore has included scores of photographs and diagrams and charts to buttress his argument about the danger of global warming, which is not so much "argument" as it is a plea for action.

The NASA scientist, Hansen, noted that the "tipping point" so far as the destructiveness of global warming will be seen in the Arctic, and "We see a tipping point occurring right before our eyes. ... it's occurring exactly the way we said it would."

Within the next five to ten years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer, said Hansen.


Or maybe it will occur this year! CNN.com, in a report by Alan Duke of June 27, notes that "The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. ...

"It's a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole."

One of the things that has astounded these scientists is the rapidity of change! Five years ago, they would not even have considered the possibility of North Pole ice melting in the summer.

Furthermore, these scientists insist this is not merely part of a regular historic cycle. "It's not cyclical at this point. I think we understand the physics behind this pretty well ... We've known for at least 30 years, from our earliest climate models, that it's the Arctic where we'd see the first signs of global warming."


Now scientists are further warning that because the sea ice (and the glaciers) are melting so much faster than anticipated, we can expect rising seas to begin damaging coastal areas around the globe in just a few years.

We may be too late, but Dr. Hansen and other climatologists believe we have a small window of opportunity to turn things around...but time is of the essence.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration is more interested in fighting wars of empire for oil to enrich its members and its friends than it is in preserving the Earth for our children and grandchildren. And the attitude prevalent among the Bushites is still too common among the masses.

It doesn't help that morons like Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, keep getting elected to Congress. Inhofe, a far right extremist, believes global warming to be a myth. In a recent statement he said that "Hansen, (former Vice President) Gore and the media have been trumpeting man-made climate doom since the 1980s. But Americans are not buying it."

Unfortunately, for the rest of us, global warming isn't a religion in which you can choose to believe or not. Global warming is a real as a 9,000 foot cliff and we are walking straight to the edge with little sign that we even know the cliff is there. To walk off the edge of the cliff ... well, you know what happens then.

(FYI - An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore is available at Barnes & Noble at a reduced price.)