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Hot Air Charlie, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne . . . sounds like a bunch of forty-somethings at a swingers party. But if you live near the Delaware River, it was no ball. Theres nothing like tag-team hurricanes to point out the flaws in your roof, curl the file papers stored in your basement, and remind you why you passed on that adorable Cape Cod in the flood basin for only 85 K. Yes, the floods brought out strains of poison sumac that left yours truly eligible for a spread in a burn victim medical textbook. But its bordering on self-indulgent to complain about that туры в Ленинградскую область or about having to boil water to brush your teeth when the Channel 12 roof-cam atop the defunct Hotel Easton shows tankers, decks, mobile homes, and gable roofs slamming against the Route 22 bridge. With water levels rising faster than the national debt, these are high times if youre a fungus. Theyre also boom years for cartographers. Ice shelves the size of Madagascar are floating around looking for a home. Finally, a luxury liner that runs clean. Theyll be putting casinos on them any day now. Here on dry land, we can run an office pool on which country will take the next hit. The last time land masses were shifting like this, the Navajo were living in Asia. Now, for the first time in recorded history, you can navigate from Russia to Canada over the top of the globe. This spanking new waterway makes the Panama Canal look like a tire track. Suddenly, the great circle route is for boats too. Thats great if youre a fisherman on Victoria Island. Its not so great if youre anyone else. The Earth isnt merely sickits incontinent. Get ready for allergy season, flea season, flu season, and poison ivy season to overlap into one long, year-round season of misery. But whats good for Merck, Dow, and Pfizer is good for the rest of us. Spring has been cancelled, but most people are more concerned over whether The Sopranos will run an extra season. Our actual seasons now go something like this: winter, drought, summer, rain. However, its always open season on liberals. You know, liberalsthose subversives who dream of a white Christmas. Not to worry. It could take another 20 to 30 years before we lose the other two seasons completely. By then, George P. Bush will be on his second term and Kennebunkport will be on stilts. Those who say the Bush clan is indifferent to global warming didnt follow GW and Jeb through Florida last week handing out federal aid to hurricane victims like Santa Claus at the Salvation Army. The Western Hemisphere hasnt seen this kind of nobles oblige since Pablo Escobar gave out US dollars to Colombian peasants. Theres nothing quite like a natural disaster in a swing state to flout whats left of McCain-Feingold. Jeanne and Ivan have done more for the Republican Party than Karl Rove. I could warm up to the Bushies reaping political rewards from the greenhouse effect if they could just bring themselves to concede there was one. The way they tell it, a billion thermometers are lying, but the folks who sold you the WMD story are telling the truth. There have been too many other public policy meltdowns lately for most folks to recall that just a few months ago, the administration was caught doctoring an EPA report on climate change. Of course, this was not exactly a low-water mark for the good people who deleted 28 pages on Saudi Arabia from the congressional report on 9/11. Or for the people who told you lower Manhattan on 9/12 smelled like a Rose Garden. George W. Bush edits a lot of term papers for someone who speaks broken English. But no matter how much disturbing data gets watered down by the current administration or goes the way of the erased Watergate tapes and the time-capsuled Warren Commission files, the war on the environment is a two-party effort. If I had a five spot for every Kennedy that drives an SUV, I could stop writing this column. There are promising technologies out therefuel cells, solar energy, windmillsall vastly superior to sticking a big dehumidifier in the Everglades and having Jeb dump it once a week. But the truth is, most people are too busy driving the Jeep to the mall to pick up a pack of AA batteries to care much that four percent of the worlds population consumes 25 percent of its fossil fuel. An American compact car is one that fits in your garage. The Mazda is on the endangered species list. Forget Kyoto. We should sign an accord with ourselves. Weve got a Ford F150 with the engine running in the parking deck while were in Sears shopping for a riding lawnmower. Meanwhile, skeptics seek the high ground. Along with former members of the OJ jury, they claim the correlation between the sharp rise in greenhouse gases and the precipitous rise in global temperatures is just a coincidence. They sit in saunas and air conditioned conference rooms, discuss David Hume, and blow hot air on the lack of hard, cold evidence that would demonstrate clear causality. Matter of fact, right after theyre done poking holes in the 1964 Surgeon Generals report linking cigarettes and cancer, theyre going to pen a rebuttal that would make Rush Limbaugh proud. Far scarier than the skeptics, however, are the pseudo-naturalists. These petroleum-funded Cato Institute sycophants predict air pollution will, in effect, counterbalance the heat otherwise trapped by CO2 gas by reflecting incoming solar rays back out into space. In other words, were not burning enough fossil fuels. Crank the A/C. Floor those Hummers. Ironically, maddeningly, the very people who have the least respect for nature are the ones who tell us that nature will straighten the whole thing out. Perhaps the only homeostasis theory that holds less water is the one that has the federal budget deficit closing itself. In the warmed-over age of transferring credit card debt to another credit card, thats the general idea--keep doing the wrong thing and something good will happen. Click here to rant back. |