In one of the best (and concise) editorials I’ve read recently from a major daily newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution yesterday ripped into President Bush and his administration regarding their lies about Global Warming:
If the scientific “debate” over global warming was reduced to a game of strip poker, the Bush administration would be wearing its boxer shorts right now. The president and his advisers have tried every gambit imaginable to trump mounting evidence that human activities are dangerously heating the planet, but they keep drawing a losing hand.
(continued below the fold)
At first, they mostly dismissed the dire warnings as environmental hysteria. When that no longer worked, they insisted global warming was a function of strictly natural processes. After hundreds of climate studies concluded otherwise, the White House resorted to bluffing; Bush has conceded that humans are partly responsible for the problem, but wants to indefinitely defer taking decisive action until additional studies of the causes and effects of global warming are complete.
Last week, the first of 21 studies commissioned by the administration was released by researchers with the federal Climate Change Science Program. Read it and weep: After studying the temperature at the Earth’s surface and its inner atmosphere, they discovered “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.” Furthermore, the study states that burning fossil fuels for energy was the major factor in the higher-than-normal temperatures that have been recorded over the past 50 years.
Imagine that. Bush commissions a study by our government scientists, and it actually determined that his administration has been dead wrong on the issue of Global Warming. In other words, Bush got undressed by his own hand picked climate scientists. I guess they didn’t get the memo. Still, the study is out there. So, how did the Bushistas respond?
The White House said the report showed that President George W Bush’s decision to spend nearly $2 billion a year on climate monitoring and research was working.
However, officials cautioned that it was only the first of 21 assessments by the Climate Change Science Programme, which was set up in 2002 to tackle “unresolved questions”. They said the administration remained committed to studying the other questions and to using voluntary rather than compulsory means to slow the growth in carbon emissions.
Oh yes, Bush’s plan to monitor the environment is working all right. That is, if you define “working” as “stalling” or “delaying” taking any action on Global Warming. Certainly it is working to the benefit his friends in Big Oil and in Saudi Arabia who are raking in monster profits these days. Imagine how much larger their profits will get while Bush’s 20 other studies wind their way to completion.
His plan ain’t working for you and me, though. It ain’t working for the folks on the Gulf Coast and in Florida preparing for another hurricane season and hoping it won’t be as damaging as the last one. And for anyone who depends on glaciers and snow melt for water reserves, it sure ain’t working. Just ask the people in Tibet and China, where drought and sandstorms will soon be a perilous reality because the glaciers that feed the great rivers of East Asia are melting away.
But then, as we learned last week at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, President Bush is a better comedian than anyone else on the planet. So laugh at his “global warming success” strip tease routine, if you will. Just remember, however, the joke’s on all of us.
