Finally We Seem To Agree: Global Warming Exists

It's easy to despair over the issue of global warming. When exactly will the U.S. (and to some degree China, although the U.S. plays by far the lead role) start actually doing something on an official level to address climate disruption?

Experts have been warning for fully two decades, and we've continued in our planet-destroying ways.

But here's one indicator of hope that has gone uncommented on to my knowledge. It's a simple one. It's a threshold we seem to have passed over in 2005.

The voices questioning whether global warming actually exists seem to have gone silent.

CBS's "60 Minutes" mentioned this in passing in a segment on polar bear extinction Sunday night. I wish the report had clarified that we're ultimately destroying not just bears but human life — a point The New Yorker continues to drive home in its appropriately apocalyptic series. At a certain point, as we saw in New Orleans, even an advanced civilization is helpless against ferocious natural forces. From The New Yorker: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." (May 9, 2005, p. 63).

I'm sure in the Toxic Right, there are still think tanks churning out white papers with obscure ideological postulations and scientific citations intended to discredit global warming. It's been only a little more than a year since the libertarian Cato Institute and writer Michael Crichton issued weighty tomes casting doubt on the whole climate change thing.

But Crichton's book tanked and he is not exactly burning up the lecture circuit. (And his blithe "we always bounce back" assessment seems to have been plowed under with the debris of Katrina.) Moreover, my over-the-transom monitor has gotten almost no ticks on the anti-global warming meter over the past six months or more.

It used to be any time the subject showed up on the mailing lists and forums, someone was sure to check in with a "poppycock!" assertion and cite various journals and opinions. Maybe it was the tsunami and Katrina, maybe it's the news media's shift, maybe the signs themselves are having greater impact and affecting more people's lives. When the frogs go still and the butterflies disappear, our collective unconscious may shift as well.

Whatever the reasons, the outright denials have waned. This is a great first step, although at the current rate we will be debating what to do in the Halls of Congress even as rising floodwaters moisten our esteemed senators' Guccis.

For now the debate (such as it is) seems to have moved to the issue of whether global warming is as bad as they say it is, or reversible. Or how humans will be able to adapt to and tolerate serious climate change.

For a long time I said, not even half-jokingly, that the American solution to ozone depletion was to raise the SPF rating on sunscreen. Now 2005 has given us a new strategy that I call the Katrina Remedy, based on the post-hurricane efforts in New Orleans.

Where global warming creates havoc, we simply bring in the bulldozers and scrape the terrain clean. Where trauma visited, there is now cleanscape. Out of sight, out of mind.

It won't save us from global warming's relentless endgame. But having removed the untidiness and depressing reminders, we'll feel a whole lot more serene as the maw of annihilation advances.

— Paul Andrews, Green For Good