Finally! Reality comes to the masses...

Now when is it going to seep into the White House?

LEIGH POMEROY

The White House has been in denial about global warming ever since that son of a Texas oilman stepped through its front door. The common response of the Bush II White House to questions about the mounting evidence that the planet is warming has been, at best, "The jury's still out."

Hate to clue you, Mr. President, but the jury is definitely in, and its verdict is near-unanimous: In the words of the immortal Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

I say "near-unanimous" because there are always naysayers — those who put ideology and personal belief before facts. This is the same crowd that promotes creationism — the belief that just because we can't explain every aspect of the development of living things on earth (yet), that means God did it.

Oh, how I wish that the naysayers were right and the scientists who've been warning us about global warming for the last several decades were wrong. It would make life much easier. Our chief problems then would be nuclear proliferation, terrorism and the usual stuff like famine, pestilence and whether to watch "American Idol" or "Lost" on Wednesday night.

But when global warming becomes the lead story and special report in TIME magazine ("Be worried. Be very worried."), it means we all — including you, Mr. President — need to take our heads out of the sand and smell the ozone.

Not that the TIME article is surprising anybody who has an inkling about what's going on in the world. Other journals have been covering this subject for years, beginning with a few mentions here and there in purely scientific tomes all the way up to and through National Geographic, which warned us about it at least fifteen years ago (Matthews, Samuel W. "Under the Sun—Is Our World Warming?" National Geographic, October 1990).

Recognition of a problem is one thing, but what to do about it is another. The U.S. is seeing a similar situation in Iraq: to pull out or not to pull out? (That is the question.) It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. (See "Déjà vu all over again" earlier on Vox Verax.) Another example is dealing with Iran and its quest to develop nuclear technology. Again, there are no easy answers.

Many global warning deniers — George Will is a case in point — say that even if global warning is occurring, the cost of reversing, stopping or even just slowing it down is so great that to try will create economic chaos. Well, George, let me clue you: It's time to pick your economic chaos. Either humankind makes some tough choices or Mother Earth will do it for us. It's that simple.

Yet some of us believe that if humans take the lead in dealing with the problem they have caused, the economic hardship this will create will be mainly to the entrenched powers, both economically and politically, that have brought us to this crisis point. In fact, innovation often shifts power to the upstarts and the nimble — those who do not have a vested interest in the status quo. We certainly have seen this in every major technological shift, from the Renaissance through the industrial revolution up to this era's boom in information technology and communications.

So maybe, if we do something about global warming, the pain won't be so bad after all.

Those of us who have seen the light need to keep trumpeting the message: No, not "the sky is falling" but "hey, the planet is finite and we have to begin to work within the boundaries it gives us."

Makes sense to me. And it makes sense to the overwhelming number of others, scientists and lay people alike, who have come to know the issue.

But the question remains: When is it going to make sense to the White House and its automatons in Congress?

For more on global warming from Vox Verax, go here.