The Planet Can't Wait - David Ignatius - WP

[hatrack]

EDIT

Giant corporations such as General Electric and Citigroup have concluded that global warming is real, and they are beginning to mobilize their resources to do something about it. This business activism may offer the best hope of moving government off its duff. I asked Tom Donohue, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of Washington's savviest political operators, when he might commit his organization's considerable clout to taking action on this issue. He's still in the "needs more study" mode, but he added, "When the time is right, we'll be as helpful as we can." Hey, Tom, the time is right.

Every week brings new evidence that global climate change is real and that it's advancing more rapidly than scientists had expected. This past week brought a report in Science that the Antarctic is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year. Last month researchers reported that glaciers in Greenland are melting twice as fast as previously estimated. One normally cautious scientist, Richard Alley, told The Post's Juliet Eilperin he was concerned about the Antarctic findings, since just five years ago scientists had been expecting more ice. "That's a wake-up call," he said. "We better figure out what's going on."

Animals don't have the luxury of ordering up more studies of global warming. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times reported in January that colorful harlequin frogs found in Latin America are dying at alarming rates because of a fungus that seems to be linked to global warming. Doug Struck explained last week in The Post that climate change is helping the ravenous mountain pine beetle devour forests in British Columbia, killing more trees than wildfires or logging. Similar findings are stacked in a depressing pile in my study that keeps getting taller. And now we come to the Bush administration -- the folks who once warned that it would be folly to wait so long for evidence that the "smoking gun" might be a mushroom cloud. Their spirit of vigilance was applied to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist -- but not to climate change, which does. In a meeting in Montreal last December, the chief American delegate, Harlan L. Watson, got so peeved about a proposal for new global "mechanisms" to carry out the 1992 Kyoto Protocol that he walked out. The American side relented after the wording was softened to "opportunities," and there's now at least a hope for future talks about talks about global warming. But woe unto any administration official who becomes so concerned about global warming that he actually tries to sound the alarm. James E. Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, found that political minders at NASA headquarters had ordered a review of his lectures, papers, interviews and Internet postings after he called for quick reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to ease global warming. A 24-year-old former Bush campaign worker who allegedly had been involved in efforts to muzzle Hansen later resigned -- after reports surfaced that he had fudged his résumé.

EDIT

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701199.html

[motocicleta]

1. Nice. I really like tying the preemptive war in Iraq to not taking

action, preemptive or preventive, on climate change. We can use that.

Just looking for the silver lining, here.

[yurbud]

2. in the top two sleeper issues along with Peak Oil

[Lisa]

3. BC is going to lose all its pine forests, in the province's interior ...

And the rivers in the Okanagan are already maxxed out, in terms of human uses. Ironically, some of those areas (though not all!) are represented federally and provincially by pro-business types who think global warming is an invention of the "treehuggers". Even the right-wing BC premier was shouted down in cabinet by some of those MLAs, when he dared suggest that BC might be able to make some money from carbon dioxide abatement. Some of the local residents have seen the writing on the wall, and do not want to "wait and see" any longer ... but there are so many in power who can ignore lots of warnings, if they think it's to their benefit to do so.

I fear that they will simply walk away from the projected devastation (forest fire damage, collapse of agriculture and forestry jobs) and let the voters -- both conservatives and progressives -- deal with it.

[hatrack]

4. That's what politicians do these days - they leave the mess to us

Except this mess is going to be well beyond us, I fear.

[tom_paine]

5. Call me Amerocentric, but I being to wonder if 2000 and the end of

Old America (for all it's faults and flaws, it was still a damned fine and mostly free country) didn't represent the Point of No Return for the Human Race to Extinction.