comment36

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Commentary The world has been experiencing a run of violent weather, and the US has not been exempt. We have had hurricanes of once-in-a-century force, floods, heat waves, cold waves, tornados and drought. In imperial China, where the Emperor's main job was to maintain balance in the universe, he would have seemed to have lost the mandate of heaven. We are not into mystical speculation about the causes of natural disasters – we know the cause of most of them, especially the weather-related ones. We are the cause.

Our factories, power plants and farms have been pumping greenhouse gases into the air at an accelerating rate for the last century. Trapping heat, these gases make increased energy available for extreme weather, and change the flow of air and ocean which maintains our climate. Storms become more violent and more frequent; weather patterns shift, moistening arid areas and making wet ones dry. Moderating ocean currents move and leave formerly temperate areas more vulnerable to extreme cold, while other parts of the globe become warmer. The changes are far reaching and have profound consequences for food production, energy usage, transportation and property damage, not to mention the potential loss of human life.

Over the past decade, scientific opinion has coalesced into a general agreement that global warming is real, is caused by human activity, and, if anything, is being somewhat masked by normal climatic trends. Most of the industrialized nations are committed to taking effective action to slow or reverse the warming trend; the US government is still pretending that the issue is debatable and refuses to do anything that businesses object to. We call upon the Bush Administration, as it enters its second term, to reevaluate its stance on global warming and realize that the long range consequences of inaction far exceed in cost to business the short term savings achieved on their behalf. Business are exceedingly good at determining and accomplishing short term goals. They are generally extraordinarily stupid about the long term, often doing in the short term the things that cause their destruction over time. Leaving climate change to the short term mentality is a gross error.