George W’s mind seems to operate in a
bass-ackward fashion. When there is zero evidence to warrant a presidential
rush to action, he plunges dead ahead, facts be damned. Yet when there is
an abundance of evidence on an issue crying out for presidential action, he
does nothing. As we now know, Iraq had no weapons of mass
destruction, had no connection to al-Qaeda or 9/11, and posed no threat to
our security. But there we are, with our soldiers mired in Bush’s
bloody mess. Meanwhile, despite the administration’s insistence that
global warming isn’t happening, a new report shows that Greenland is
melting in front of our very eyes. Using satellites, a research team from NASA and the
University of Kansas has discovered the alarming fact that
Greenland’s vast glaciers are melting more than twice as fast as they
were only 10 years ago. This is no small matter — the Greenland Ice
Sheet is as much as two miles thick and covers an area nearly as big as
Mexico. Over the last two decades, the air temperature over the
country’s southern glaciers has increased by 5.4 degrees, causing a
larger and faster ice melt that, in turn, is causing a worrisome rise in
sea levels. In 1996, Greenland lost 22 cubic miles of its ice sheet. Last
year, it lost 54 cubic miles. How much is that? Only one-fourth of a cubic mile of
ice would supply all of the water that Los Angeles consumes in a year. This
melt rate mirrors the findings of researchers analyzing other ice sheets,
from the Himalayas to Bolivia. This drastic change not only threatens
people on seacoasts but also means that the globe will see more and bigger
storms. Someone please tell Bush to get his butt in gear.
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2006.
