Last year, Mother Jones put out a special package on global warming and the Bush administration’s determined refusal to take it seriously. As expected—to quote Jon Stewart—the issue was never a problem again.
Or so we thought. David Ignatius, in his Washington Post column, sets us straight:
Every week brings new evidence that global climate change is real and that it’s advancing more rapidly than scientists had expected. This past week brought a report in Science that the Antarctic is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year. Last month researchers reported that glaciers in Greenland are melting twice as fast as previously estimated. One normally cautious scientist, Richard Alley, told the Post‘s Juliet Eilperin he was concerned about the Antarctic findings, since just five years ago scientists had been expecting more ice. “That’s a wake-up call,” he said. “We better figure out what’s going on.”
Animals don’t have the luxury of ordering up more studies of global warming. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times reported in January that colorful harlequin frogs found in Latin America are dying at alarming rates because of a fungus that seems to be linked to global warming. Doug Struck explained last week in the Post that climate change is helping the ravenous mountain pine beetle devour forests in British Columbia, killing more trees than wildfires or logging. Similar findings are stacked in a depressing pile in my study that keeps getting taller.
And no, still nothing halfway serious on this from the Bush administration or Congress.