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"Killer heat waves. Melting
glaciers. Floods that strand millions of
refugees. Global warming is not some futuristic
doomsday. It's already here - and the death toll is
rising."
Once again, Rolling Stone magazine is at
the forefront of the newsstand taking a serious
look, this time at the environment, as the majority
of the media spends its time taking pot shots at
the movie The Day After Tomorrow and the
government does its usual spin categorically
dismissing the impact of the hole in the ozone
layer, the contribution that its rollback of
emission and mileage controls on SUVs and other
vehicles might have, and on and on while pursing a
course to dig up what little oil is left in the
Alaska wilderness. The Environmental Protection
Agency included no mention of global warming in its
2002 air-quality report, the first time that's
happened since 1996. And the censorship continues.
The White House made wholesale revisions to the
climate-change chapter of the EPA's "Report on the
Environment", playing down human influence,
deleting references to the health impacts of global
warming and inserting climate data funded in part
by the American Petroleum Institute. But, after
all, the Commerce Department which monitors climate
change is headed by Secretary Don Evans, a former
oil and gas executive. And Senator James Inhofem,
chairman of the Environment and Public Works
Committee, dismisses global warming as a
"hoax."
The mass media has pretty much followed suit.
After all, do you remember hearing much about the
10 day heat wave that hit Europe a year-ago killing
15,000 French and another 15,000 in Europe at
large.
"Global warming. It doesn't just make the world
hotter - it makes the weather more extreme.
Droughts are longer, torrents heavier, flooding
more severe. Heat waves are turned up to
eleven." The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, the United Nations scientific
organization that is literally the world authority
on global warming forecast in 2001 that Earth would
soon see "higher maximum temperatures, more hot
days and heat waves." It only took two years until
Europe was hit by Extreme Summer 2003. The weather
has become a WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction
causing more death and destruction that any of our
little wars.)
"Nineteen of the twenty hottest years on record
have occurred since 1980, with 2003 the
third-hottest year ever. The warming projected by
the IPCC for this century - between 2.5 and
10.4 degrees - is unprecedented in the last 10,000
years.
"Some would write off the French heat wave as a
tragic blip. Ditto that 2003 was the hottest
European summer in 500 years. Ditto that it came so
quickly after extreme floods soaked the continent
in 2002, forcing the evacuation of 50,000 in
Prague. But these are hardly the only blips. In
March, Brazil was hit by its first ever hurricane.
Last June, a heat wave scorched India with
twenty-seven consecutive days of 120 degree
temperatures, killing nearly 2,000. Flooding in
China that used to hit once every twenty years now
recurs almost annually; a deluge last August left 4
million homeless. The American West is suffering
years of record drought, and last May, 562
tornadoes struck the Midwest - 163 more than the
previous monthly record. A retractable barrier
built to protect London from floods was expected to
be used once every three years. In 2000, it was
used twenty-four times. The glaciers are retreating
worldwide with Kilimanjaro expected to disappear
within the next 15 years. Glacier National Park in
Montana will be glacier free by 2030. In Alaska,
where temperatures have soared four degrees in the
last fifty years, the state's permafrost is
thawing. Oil pipelines are sinking in the softened
earth, polar bears are starving, and 2 million
acres of spruce have been lost to bark beetles,
thriving in the lovely man-made weather. At the
South Pole, a mass of ice the size of the island of
Hawaii has broken away from the Larsen Ice Shelf.
Over 500 billion tons of ice broke off the Larsen
Ice Shelf in Antarctica in a single month.
What's the future look like? Not too good.
Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman joined
forces last year to introduce a measure that would
have capped carbon emissions well below the Kyoto
levels and allowed industries to trade pollution
rights. The White House opposed the plan claiming
it would cost $106 billion to implement - even
though the EPA put the price tag at only $2
billion. The bill lost by twelve votes."
Get a copy of this issue and read the entire
article. As John McCain warned, "Every day there is
no action on this issue, the more serious the
consequences will be."
Source:
Rolling
Stone, June 10-, 2004
Related Topics: Ecology
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