Since the '60s, the scientific community has been hammering away
about the harm being done to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil
fuels. They knew that the planet would warm gradually, and that it was
necessary to start slowing down the use of CO-2 producing
energy. They didn't have any concrete evidence of what was in the future
but they knew it would cause change. Well, that was enough to get some
legislation passed that helped a little. In fact, it helped allot in Los Angeles
where smog had become a huge problem, but major changes in US and world
use of carbon based fuels were difficult to make happen.

For decades, oil companies and the Energy Industry hired scientists to
refute the claims of global warming. These "company scientists" gave
bogus reports and tried to disprove every attempt by the real scientific
community to bring a stronger awareness to the subject and get major
legislation passed.

In '96 an oceanographer named Wally Broeker discovered the connection
between ocean circulation and abrupt climate change. This was
absolutely mind boggling news - that the
result of global warming would be an abrupt (rather than the 10,000
year transition as had long been accepted) flip into "ice age type"
weather patterns. This new information was slowly being accepted
in the scientific community, and in '98 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for his discovery. This fact, that there is abrupt climate change
coming, jolted the neo-cons into running the, then, Gov. George W. Bush
in the Presidential Primary, and they did so using any means necessary
to guarantee a win (push polling Senator McCain, keeping democrats
off of Florida's voting rolls, etc.). When Bush became President he
immediately turned 180 degrees on his campaign pledges and started
on his disastrous environmental melt down.

So, in 2001, the scientific community decided to do something
that could not be refuted by anyone. They put together a world wide
commission of almost 3,000 experts - The International Arctic
Science Committee - who came up with several possible scenarios
from computer models of very dramatic changes, to more modest
climate changes, and averaged the entire array to one that they all
agree is very likely - The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.

Based on tons of data, these scientists have finally finished the report and
are releasing it to the public, the Congress, and the world. The data that
they gathered shows an alarming rate of warming in the Arctic, where
the ice cap is diminishing at increasing rates due to man's burning
of fossil fuels, and there is no question about that. What will happen in
the decades ahead is still, of course, unknown.....but there is consensus
that climate change has already begun, and that it will continue, and that
the rate of change will increase.

At some point, the ice caps will melt to a level which will shut
down the Atlantic Conveyor that distributes heat from the equatorial
region to the poles. At some point in the future, the growing season
in Kansas will likely be reduced to 5 to 10 weeks a year. This knowledge,
rather conspicuously, coincides with the right wing's blatant dismantling
of the Bill of Rights and the Democracy of the United States.

They too, now know what the result of their gluttony for profits
and their decades long neglect of the environment will bring,
and they are calling in all bets. They didn't know
about the Atlantic Conveyor (and it's sister in the Pacific) and that global
warming would eventually cause an abrupt climate change. That is, quite
frankly, very hard to understand without proof. But the proof has been
shown in study after study, and is irrefutable - and the right wing knows it.

President Bush was selected to lead our nation in this time of
"climate change awareness" very likely because of his coziness with
the oil industry, and the energy industry is still unwilling to make major
changes of their emissions or to curtail fossil fuel usage.

The current Administration has a despicable record on the
environment - the worst ever. They have rolled back laws, and placed
industry executives in oversight positions of the very industries they
came from. Things have changed. We can now expect environmental
concerns to be neglected even more than before, with the (supposed)
mandate Bush received in the November election.

You may not need to worry yourself about this if you can tuck your
family away in a mansion in the Caribbean or the Cayman Islands, like
all of President Bush's friends will be able to do when food supplies
start dwindling. If not.....perhaps you should worry.