« Monday Gumpagraph | Main | Today's Bush Joke »

June 26, 2006

DC Tastes Its Future

Environment

If you've seen Al Gore's movie, you know that global warming is expected to produce torrential rains and flooding in some locales, drought in others. Today, the pols in Washington got a preview, as the capital got more than a foot of rain, with more rain forecast for the remainder of the week.

It's clear that somebody at ABC saw the movie. Excerpt:

The massive downpours this morning shorting out government buildings with flooded basements, seizing up legislative communications, snarling traffic access to white columned buildings, fit exactly the pattern predicted decades ago as a consequence of global warming.

It's a simple fourth grade science lesson: the warmer the air, the more moisture it can hold.

Winds suck up more water vapor from oceans and farmlands — leaving more agricultural drought behind — and when they finally do dump that moisture out as rain, the downpours are much heavier.

Not just in the United States. Worldwide, such downpours have been increasing markedly over recent decades — exactly as predicted by scientists.

In the 1980's, leading American climatologists stood in front of Congress, trying to get across the reality of this planetary threat.

One of the world's most resepected climatologists, NASA's James Hansen, even used a dice metaphor to make it clear.

If you paint one side of the die red, you'll roll red about one in six times. Paint four red, and you'll roll red on average four in six times.

Manmade greenhouse gas emissions, Hansen explained, were loading the dice so that we'd have such extreme weather far more frequently. And, exactly as predicted, we and the world have — well above what the frequency of any natural weather cycles can explain. [...]

And the president amid this morning's wind and rain?

In the White House, only hours after that old elm had fallen, Bush was addressed by a reporter, thus: "I know that you are not planning to see Al Gore's new movie, but do you agree with the premise that global warming is a real and significant threat to the planet?"

"I have said consistently," answered Bush, "that global warming is a serious problem. There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused. We ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary ... to be good stewards of the environment, become less dependent on foreign sources of oil..."

The President — as far as the extensive and repeated researches of this and many other professional journalists, as well as all scientists credible on this subject, can find — is wrong on one crucial and no doubt explosive issue. When he said — as he also did a few weeks ago — that "There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused" ... well, there really is no such debate.

At least none above what is proverbially called "the flat earth society level."

Not one scientist of any credibility on this subject has presented any evidence for some years now that counters the massive and repeated evidence — gathered over decades and come at in dozens of ways by all kinds of professional scientists around the world — that the burning of fossil fuels is raising the world's average temperature.

Or that counters the findings that the burning of these fuels is doing so in a way that is very dangerous for mankind, that will almost certainly bring increasingly devastating effects in the coming decades.

One small group of special interest businesses leaders — those of some fossil fuel companies — have been well documented by journalist Ross Gelbspan and others to have been fighting a PR campaign for 15 years to keep the American public confused about the wide and deep scientific consensus on this.

They've aimed, as Gelbspan explains, to keep us thinking that (to borrow the president's words this morning) "There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused" — though no open and thorough journalism this reporter knows of can find any such thing. [...]

Meteorologists predict more heavy rain this week along the mid-Atlantic seaboard.

Climatologists predict much the same for the coming decades. [Emphasis added]

If you haven't seen Gore's extraordinary movie yet, you should. Your survival may ultimately depend on it. Before long, the irresponsibility of Bush and the rest of the puerile know-nothings will be seen for what it is. Hopefully, before it's too late.

New Orleans was only the beginning.

Posted by Jonathan at June 26, 2006 11:36 PM  

Comments

This is all very good birth control. I fear for my child, and even more for his children, and grandchildren... seven generations? I shudder to think.

Posted by: Erin at June 27, 2006 10:22 PM

Kim Stanley Robinson's global warming book "40 Signs Of Rain" features a major flooding of DC - I wonder how many of his predictions will come true...

Posted by: Big Gav at June 28, 2006 04:47 AM

This is the biggest problem I see now-a-days. Not global warming or peak oil. It's human greed. This greed fuels all sorts of creative ways in which to self perpetuate. Dishonesty and disonformation is at the heart of all this. We live in a world where no one trusts what anyone says anymore. How can we actually get the truth about anything anymore when it is completely mired in layers of capitolism, corruption and hidden agendas?

If we didn't have these problems with vanity, greed and power to begin with, peak oil and global warming would never have become issues.

Posted by: todd Siechen at July 3, 2006 04:34 AM