The Day after Yesterday

LAST THURSDAY, a few hours before debating John Kerry, George W. Bush did another easy round of hurricane-victim politicking in Florida. This time he left the cases of bottled water in Jeb's garage and just pressed some newly homeless flesh before addressing a weary crowd. According to the Times' Jodi Wilgoren, who enjoys relaying choice Bush quotes to readers, the president asked a dazed elderly man who had just lost his home, "Did you get hit pretty hard?" And to a relief worker: "You'll help? Good."

Floridians, the president told the crowd of victims and relief-workers, are "coming through a trying time." He also thanked the "leadership of those who represent the armies of compassion."

Heartwarming stuff, but I can't help but think a better president would have praised the armies of compassion, then reminded Florida and the nation about an equally important army: the international army of esteemed climate scientists. Bush may have shown compassion regarding the devastation of a state worth 27 electoral votes, but it was left to John Kerry to utter the words "global warming" (twice) during the debate later that night in Coral Gables. Kerry didn't elaborate on the issue, and moderator Jim Lehrer never raised it. Regardless of what's happening in Iraq, it's pathetic that climate change got so little attention during a debate supposedly focused on national security, especially one staged in a state that looks like several atom bombs have been dropped on it.

The idea of putting climate change on the short list of urgent national security priorities is no longer limited to a noisy lobby of egghead scientists and dinghy-paddling Greenpeace activists. Last March, the Pentagon's in-house think tank known as the Office of Net Assessments issued a chilling report and advisory that concluded unchecked climate change warranted serious preventative action, despite the scientific uncertainties. The Pentagon report, which the legendary ONA director Andrew Marshall leaked to Business Week this February, warned of a 21st century defined by increasingly extreme weather leading to drought, monster storms, floods, food and clean-water shortages, the paralysis and breakdown of governments and all around anarchy.

In other words, Haiti.

The scenes that came out of that poor, storm-battered country last month made Mad Max look like a Disney production. Bandits looting UN relief trucks, entire villages under six feet of mud, rotting animal corpses hatching epidemics, thousands of skinny arms straining for a few bottles of randomly tossed cooking oil, reports of widespread depression and suicide-the list of horrors is long. (Meanwhile, the U.S.-installed government of goons in Haiti-anyone remember the Aristide coup from February?-has failed its country, to the extent that its response to the crisis can be located at all.)

It's true that devastating hurricanes are nothing new. What's new are hurricanes of this frequency and intensity. Never before has Florida been hit with four hurricanes in the span of six weeks. That it finally happened should not have come as a surprise. Since climate scientists first began modeling the effects of the greenhouse effect in the early 1970s, increased tropical-storm activity resulting from warmer oceans have been boilerplate.

You have to search long and hard to be reminded of this while consuming mainstream media, including the popular Weather Channel. For a society so obsessed with small talk about the weather, there is precious little discussion of the background trends affecting weather patterns around the world. Each major storm is still treated as an isolated event; it might as well be a boxing match or plane crash. Even when, as happened last month, the next storm is barreling toward a target city before its denizens can catch their breath, it too is boxed off. Trends, patterns and big-picture context cease to exist. Networks race to get people outfitted with windbreakers and in place to report via choppy satellite feeds, but rarely are the questions asked: Is this normal? How does it relate to the established phenomenon of rising sea temperatures? (Not that the straight-story approach to extreme weather is without its pleasures. During its coverage of Hurricane Ivan last month, CNN offered the happy spectacle of Anderson Cooper nearly getting swept into the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe next time.)

As the media stays busy covering the damage to Florida's tourist economy, the Journal of Climate last week published a comprehensive new study predicting a sharp increase in the average intensity and rainfall of hurricanes as a result of rising ocean temperatures. It's nothing we didn't know, but the science does get tighter and tighter with each new report made possible by advances in computer modeling.

For the Bush administration, the report won't even be thrown unread into a pile. There isn't even a pile in this White House. The Bush administration is never going to admit that increased carbon emissions are anything but glorious. Bush has always reserved a special kind of sneer for the Kyoto Protocol, and he famously dismissed a moderate report on climate change from his own EPA as "the report put out by the bureaucracy." But perhaps the best Bush-clique climate line came from the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Conrad Lautenbacher, who claimed emissions could not be curtailed "unless everyone on Earth goes to sleep for 30 years." Then there's Trent Lott, who recommended that instead of trying to limit greenhouse gasses, the U.S. should simply build stronger buildings. Call it the Three Little Mississippi Piggies approach.

Such comments have led John McCain to call the administration's climate policy "disgraceful." He's right. Just as the "party of Lincoln" has become the party of Jefferson Davis, so has the "party of Teddy Roosevelt" become the party of ExxonMobil.

The news doesn't get much better when you leave Washington, either. The international community in 2004 is hardly closer to coming to terms with the magnitude of climate change than it was 10 years ago. While last week Russia agreed to ratify Kyoto after sustained EU arm twisting-"It's not a decision we are making with pleasure," admitted Putin's top economic advisor-the Europeans themselves are struggling to hit their Kyoto goals; without aggressive U.S. participation, the groundwork represented by the world's first binding emissions treaty is unlikely to be built upon. The best thing that can be said about Russia's signing is that at least a precedent has been set, one that awaits leadership from the world's leading producer of greenhouse gasses.

Another tiny ray of hope that's too little, too late, is Tony Blair's recent trumpeting of his intention to make global warming the centerpiece of Britain's 2005 presidency of the EU. Blair has always understood and spoken boldly and eloquently about the severity of the climate threat. Virtually alone among major world leaders, he repeatedly uses his pulpit to warn that warming could soon become "irreversible in its destructive power."

But Blair should have thought of that before lending his voice to the case for war in Iraq. Among the many good reasons for opposing that adventure was the likelihood it would black out every other important issue facing mankind for a long, long time. As last Thursday's debate on national security made clear, it was as good a reason as any. o