Starting the summer out right

Updated It's amazing how the skeptics can keep denying the reality of global warming - more accurately called global climate change. Every time you turn your head, you find yourself facing a new confirmation of it.

Washington (Toronto Star, June 16) - Climate change is already occurring and immediate steps are needed to slow it down and adapt to the changes that will occur anyway, scientists said yesterday.

There is no question there will be effects from climate change, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Washington said at a briefing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

At a separate briefing held by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, William Easterling of Pennsylvania State University echoed the sentiment.

"The time to act is now," he said.

Even the White House has been forced to agree despite its best attempts to avoid the issue in favor of the profit margins of energy corporations.

The National Academy of Sciences has indicated that the increase is due in large part to human activity, White House science adviser John H. Marburger III said.

Hell, even some oil companies admit it.

So how and why can some people still insist that it's a "myth?" Simple: A closed-minded commitment to corporate power and "free market solutions" that allows them, indeed impels them, to ignore science, logic, and evidence in pursuit of their self-serving ideology. Want an example? How about globalwarming.org? What a nice name - sounds like a group devoted to concern about climate change or at least an impartial consideration of the science involved. It's a project of the "Cooler Heads Coalition." How's that for a comforting name? The Cooler Heads Coalition, in turn, is a sub-group of the National Consumer Coalition, formed in late 1996 as "an on-going coalition of market-oriented national and state-level policy and activist groups." Oh, really? Formed by who? By Consumer Alert, an "organization for people concerned about excessive growth of government regulation" whose "mission is to enhance understanding and appreciation of the consumer benefits of a market economy."

See the pattern? Does the term "greenwashing" ring any bells?

In fact, the effects of global climate change are not only real, they are likely already visible. This is also from the June 16 Toronto Star.

United Nations - The world is turning to dust, with lands about half the size of Prince Edward Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says.

One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one per cent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 93,000 square kilometres to desert - an area the size of Indiana - since the 1950s. ... Despite the efforts, the trend seems to be picking up speed - doubling its pace since the 1970s.

"It's a creeping catastrophe," said Michel Smitall, a spokesperson for the U.N. secretariat that oversees the 1994 accord. "Entire parts of the world might become uninhabitable."

Slash-and-burn agriculture, sloppy conservation, overtaxed water supplies and soaring populations are mostly to blame. But global warming is taking its toll, too.

As scientists have already discovered, one of the effects of even small changes in climate can be to redirect rainfall from areas where it's needed to areas where it's already abundant, turning a more-or-less stable balance into floods here and droughts there.

I think it's worth repeating what I said back on November 17:

It's true that there is much about the insanely complicated fluid dynamics of weather and climate which is still not understood. But the fact is, we do understand some and the studies based on what we know, no matter how the variables are tweaked, overwhelmingly point in the same direction: We are screwing around with the climate on an unprecedented scale and in a way all but guaranteed to have disastrous results.

That's the issue, that's the reality, and no amount of greed-driven, PR-designed, fact-fudging obfuscation can change it.

Footnote, FYI: The Pew Center on Global Climate Change is an industry organization of companies that at least theoretically accept the reality of climate change and are looking to develop voluntary means of reducing greenhouse emissions, either because they think it's good business, they believe in the necessity, or they want to head of regulation - or all three. Among the roughly two dozen companies that set it up were BP, Shell, Alcoa, Enron, Georgia-Pacific, and Toyota.

Updated to add the link to "oil companies" and the information about the Pew Center.