The Pot's Beginning to Boil

In his must-read book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann talks about a method for cooking lobsters that reduces the human guilt-inducing feelings caused by dropping the crustaceans live into a pot of boiling water. In this alternative method you place them in a pot of cold water, and gradually turn the heat up. This way they are warmed into a comatose state without kicking and screaming, and before they know it - they're dead! He compares this method to what is taking place in the human community with regard to one of my favorite topics - global warming. So far climate change has been happening gradually and "someplace else," like the polar ice cap, and come on, really - who cares?

Comatose condition or not, anyone who has been paying attention to the weather the past five years or so knows that something's up. Many of us have been murmuring about the strangness of weather patterns : heat waves in Europe, violent Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes coming earlier and stronger than ever, droughts in the western USA, summer heat records broken all over the planet. We've even been murmuring: "Global warming, do you think?" under our breath to one another. But, well...now the scientific community is right there with us.

I've been reading about a report published by a climatologist, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which shows for the first time that major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific since the 1970s have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent. There was a CS Monitor article about it yesterday, and I've been gathering my forces and sources to do a post on this news. Before I could get there, however, the folks at the American Progress Action Fund today published a fine article with many links in The Progress Report, called The Politics of Weather. They have enabled me to continue in the August dog days mode of not doing a lot of work, yet still give you a very complete report.

One note - when you read about Laurie David's virtual march to stop global warming, do me a favor. Instead of clicking on the link in the Progress Report (which will take you to somebody named John's personal page for signing up joiners to the March) come click this link and go to my personal page instead. After all, you don't know John, do you? And you do sort of know me.

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