Global warming is one of many crucial issues that continues to be buried here in America.
There's nothing "sexy" about it. There aren't any explosions for slick cable news bumper graphics. People aren't melting like that hissing Cheney-ish Toht character from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The chief spokesman for the issue is former Vice President Al Gore, who, however compelling and awesome, is still unfairly stereotyped as a slow-talking turtley cartoon character. Even the name, "global warming," doesn't carry the same pulse-pounding GOTCHA! beat as, say, "This Week At War" or "Cavuto Talks To Endangered Hooters Girls!" or "Cavuto Talks To Endangered Hooters Girls Who Look Like Scarlett Johansson And Who Are Killing Cavuto By Crushing His Skull With His Own Horseshit Machine!"
But now I think we have enough meat on the issue to rocket it towards the top of the This Is Kind Of Important, No? issue list. There's officially nothing else that ranks as being more important. Not the Libby trial, not the war, not the minimum wage, not stem cells or abortion. A distant second might be nuclear proliferation, but I can't think of another issue that carries the potential of literally crushing the human race.
Especially today.
Achim Steiner, the executive director of the UN Environment Program, has requested an emergency summit to address the findings of the landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which is due to be released this Friday (AP stories here, here and here). Some of the most shocking parts of the draft, however, have made it to the press today. Here's what your children can look forward to by 2080 (my daughter will be 88 years old), if man-made global warming is allowed to continue at its present rate:
--200 to 600 million people will starve. That's the equivalent of twice the current U.S. population. Meanwhile, we can't feed the 3 million starving children here in the United States -- today, in 2007.
--Upwards of 3 billion -- BILLION -- people won't have enough drinking water to survive. That's just under half of the entire 2007 human population. And thus water will become the new oil. The only difference will be that wars for water could be much more violent than our present wars for oil. Shortages of oil cause problems with running machinery and maintaining economies. Water shortages encompass both of those things, but the effects are literally felt in your mouth. Then it stands to reason that a war for water would be much more visceral and personal and, hence, more violent. If you're evil, you could buy up stock in Bechtel now. They're really good at horking up an entire water supply then selling it back to you at a profit. They also like to work with dictators to make it illegal to gather rain water for drinking.
--7 million homes will be overtaken by rising sea levels. Put it this way: 200,000 homes were destroyed in New Orleans during Katrina. Now imagine 35 Katrinas. 7 million homes. And that doesn't even take into consideration the following...
--There will be fewer hurricanes and typhoons, but taken individually they'll be much more powerful, according to the UN report.
--And finally, writes the AP, "[The UN report] considers it 'very likely' -- a probability of more than 90 percent -- that the rise since the mid-1900s was caused by man-made greenhouse gases. In its last report, in 2001, the IPCC said this probability was "likely," or 66 percent or less."
What accompanies a crisis of this scale? Al Gore outlined some of the possibilities in An Inconvenient Truth. War, rampant disease, anarchy and a lot of public officials who will be just as reactionary and politically exploitative as they are today. Perhaps more so.
Even in the conservative American Spectator today, William Tucker made serious mention of some of the causes of this impending catastrophe (probably written before the UN news made the wire). Among a lot of analysis of the president's energy plan, Tucker acknowledged the following:
"In 1976 we burned 500 million tons of coal a year. Today we burn more than a billion. There are 90 more coal plants being built right now. The Department of Energy points out that -- because of various loopholes in the law -- 80 percent of these plants still use the same old-fashioned dirty technology."
And...
"A carbon tax would truly drive Americans toward conserving gasoline. Everybody agrees it's wasteful to be splurging on SUVs and Hummers, but people will do it as long as gas is $2 a gallon. The real danger is that we're going to start running up against world supply limits, particularly if China and India go car-happy. As long as we've got the carbon excuse, why not start easing into a situation of scarcity with some kind of carbon levy?"
That's amazing. A conservative publication calling for a carbon tax. It's good to know they all haven't succumbed to the brainwashing lull of the Bush administration's dingus approach to global warming.
There's that name again. Global Warming. Progressivism and liberalism carries with it some of the most creative minds in the world. So let's come up with something better. Here's some options to get the ball rolling:
-The Global Killer (imagine Billy Bob Thornton saying it in Armageddon)
-Armageddon
-Death By Weather
-Global Disaster
-Molly Hatchet (for persuading our red state brothers)
As much as I dig "Global Killer," a la Billy Bob in Armageddon, the second-to-last one is my favorite -- in as much as something like this can be described as "a favorite." Global Disaster. Drop the pleasant "warming" and replace it with the succinct and urgent "disaster." No gray area in that word. Besides, "warming" tends to confuse people who aren't properly informed about the actual chaotic temperature shifts we're facing in the crisis known, in my vernacular, as Global Disaster.
So perhaps in a few months, the cable news networks will be featuring sensational graphics and theme music warning us of the Global Disaster. Maybe then, it'll become a campaign issue ranking higher than its present status (as "global warming") somewhere above tooth decay and below video game violence.
According to yesterday's AP poll, a staggering 13 percent of Americans have never even heard about Global Disaster and only 42 percent of Americans believe it's a "very serious" problem -- and that was a survey conducted on the internets where people tend to be a little more informed. But when the White House is actively engaged in deceiving the public, it's not difficult. Yet another AP story today:
"The [Union of Concerned Scientists have] presented a survey that shows two in five of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to "global warming" or "climate change" from a report."
That pretty much describes the disaster preceding the real Disaster.