As if you had nothing else to worry about ...

Steve Shalom from the Poli Sci department passes on this article from Tom Englhardt entitled "Xtreme weather meets Xtreme media bubble." Englehardt surveys how the mainstream media have been eager to assure viewers that this extreme hurricane season has nothing to do with global warming. This nugget caught my attention:

It's often been said that, in tossing the Kyoto Agreement out the Ozone hole, relaxing fuel-emission standards, burying or altering governmental global-warming research and the like, the Bush administration, with an Ivan-the-Terrible-style environmental record, has stuck its head in the proverbial sand (probably Tar sands at that). And this couldn't be truer. Ignoring global warming -- and so any preparations to safeguard the world for our children and grandchildren -- is but another form of global terrorism; it's a way of loading and locking another kind of weapon of mass destruction. But in this behavior, as it happens, the Bush administration isn't alone. The American mainstream media has been a major aider-and-abettor in the process.

[snip]

Perhaps it's the fact that global-warming math is so self-evident -- and so devastating -- that causes our media so insistently to look the other way. We in the United States make up 4% of humanity and yet are responsible for 25% of global greenhouse emissions. Facing the phenomenon of global warming, we have actually upped our greenhouse emission patterns, created vehicles that use yet more carbon-dioxide producing fossil fuels for less punch to the mile, made no serious national efforts at fossil-fuel conservation, put no significant national funds into quick-fix programs to find less harmful, more sustainable ways to run our world, and turned global warming into a money-making night at the movies – Nightmare on Earth Street. It's not a pretty record, either for the Bush Administration or for the media.

But there's much more in the article about the many scientific reports from around the world.

The only journalist Englehardt cites approvingly is Mark Lynas, whose new book High Tides: The Truth about our Climate Crisis should frighten us all. This description comes from the Washington Post Book Review, posted on Amazon.com:

In High Tide, Mark Lynas, who is part climate-change specialist, part environmentalist and part adventurer, takes us on a worldwide tour of vanishing glaciers and listing Alaskan houses built on once solid -- but now thawing -- tundra. To those in disbelief or denial, Lynas says simply, "Come with me -- see what I have seen." And so, with him we suffer through freakish sweltering summers in Europe, lean into hurricane winds and splash through rising tides on Tuvalu, a low-lying island nation in the Pacific Ocean that looks likely to disappear beneath the waves before too long.

Under dangerous conditions, Lynas climbs toward a glacier in Peru, holding in his hand a grubby photograph of the site that his father had taken 20 years previously, showing "an enormous fan of ice completely dominating the little iceberg strewn lake." He is stunned to find that the glacier has completely disappeared.

Personally, I am betting it's all a battle for world supremacy between the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser. Whose side are you on?