Your Move, George

It took awhile, but the Corporate Media are finally starting to realize that global warming is the "real deal." This is from Time Magazine:

Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.

But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers.

By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.

I can't wait to see how the Bush Administration responds to this. Although I was encouraged by the fact that Bush didn't retaliate against NASA scientist James Hansen when he broke the Administration-imposed silence on global warming earlier this year, that doesn't necessarily mean that BushCo is going to do a 180 on this issue. After all, this administration still cannot admit that the decision to invade Iraq -- arguably the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history -- was a mistake.

Bush will never admit that he and his people were wrong on global warming, particularly given the effort that he and his administration put into discrediting the whole notion. Bush wouldn't even listen to his own defense department on this issue. The only way I see something like that happening is if Corporate America forced Bush to make such an admission, and the only hope on that front is an insurance industry that is tired of paying class-five-hurricane-related claims. But something tells me the insurance industry would rather cancel homeowners policies by the bushel instead of confronting Bush on the issue of global warming.