Reply To: Bush the anti-scientist and global warming obfuscation

[Martin W]

Boston Globe has column re US administration’s foot dragging, and behind the times attitude, re global warming. Includes:

Quote:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calling on the United States and China to take global warming as the “challenge of our age.” In his address that accompanied the release of the IPCC report, Ban said, “The world’s scientists have spoken, clearly and with one voice. In Bali, I expect the world’s policy makers to do the same.”

Ban listed several threatened world “treasures,” such as melting Antarctic ice and the drying out of the Amazon rainforest into a savanna. He talked of children wearing protective clothing for ultraviolet radiation in Punta Arenas, Chile, under the hole in the ozone layer. “These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie,” Ban said. “But they are more terrifying because they are real.”

Bush officials treat this as fiction. The United States reportedly tried to eliminate a part of the report that detailed possible outcomes of global warming, such as a melting of ice sheets more rapidly than originally thought. The prospect of melting is considered so dire that it “would make it not just difficult, but impossible to adapt successfully” to climate change, Princeton scientist Michael Oppenheimer said in The New York Times.

Yet, when queried as to what level of global warming the White House found acceptable, senior environmental adviser James Connaughton said incredibly, “We don’t have a view on that.”

Here at home, many governors with a longer view, both Democrat and Republican, are taking matters into their own hands.
…
In dire scenarios of climate change, many islands will be swamped. The White House is the last island of ignorance in a fast-rising sea.

Hesitance on the warming front