There’s a fascinating article on global warming by Mark Hertsgaard in Vanity Fair. Catch the blurb:

The Queen of England is afraid. International C.E.O.’s are nervous. And the scientific establishment is loud and clear. If global warming isn’t halted, rising sea levels could submerge coastal cities by 2100. So how did this virtual certainty get labeled a “liberal hoax”?

Apparently Queen Liz tried to sic the Poodle on Bush last year.

At the time of his meeting with the Queen, Blair was being attacked on climate change from all ideological sides, with even the Conservatives charging that he was not doing enough. …

… It was no secret that Bush opposed mandatory emissions limits, but Blair, who had risked his political future to back the deeply unpopular war in Iraq, was uniquely positioned to lobby the president. Bush owed him one. At the same time, Blair needed to show his domestic audience that he could stand up to Bush, that he wasn’t the presidential “poodle” his critics claimed.

Yet the Poodle proved to be toothless, partly because he was distracted by the July suicide bombers in London, and the G8 summit failed to get Bush to budge. So it was a terrible irony when Katrina struck the Gulf seven weeks later.

It cannot be known for certain if global warming caused Katrina.

The scientific rule of thumb is that one can never blame any one weather event on any single cause. The earth’s weather system is too complex for that. Most scientists agree, however, that global warming makes extra-strong hurricanes such as Katrina more likely because it encourages hot oceans, a precondition of hurricane formation.

“It’s a bit like saying, ‘My grandmother died of lung cancer, and she smoked for the last 20 years of her life—smoking killed her,'” explains Kerry Emanuel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied hurricanes for 20 years. “Well, the problem is, there are an awful lot of people who die of lung cancer who never smoked. There are a lot of people who smoked all their lives and die of something else. So all you can say, even [though] the evidence statistically is clear connecting lung cancer to smoking, is that [the grandmother] upped her probability.”

Just weeks before Katrina struck, Emanuel published a paper in the scientific journal Nature demonstrating that hurricanes had grown more powerful as global temperatures rose in the 20th century. Now, he says, by adding more greenhouse gases to the earth’s atmosphere, humans are “loading the climatic dice in favor of more powerful hurricanes in the future.”

Yet American news media didn’t say much about the global warming-Katrina connection.

The online article describes illustrations that can be viewed in the print issue showing the potential effects of global warming —

In New York, it would leave much of Lower Manhattan, including the Ground Zero memorial and the entire financial district, underwater. La Guardia and John F. Kennedy airports would meet the same fate. In Washington, D.C., the Potomac River would swell dramatically, stretching all the way to the Capitol lawn and to within two blocks of the White House.

A number of scientists are quoted who say that it’s too late to stop global warming. But there is still much that can be done to reduced its effects if we start working on it now. One scientist said “We still have a choice between pain and disaster.” However …

Unfortunately, we are getting a late start, which is something of a puzzle. The threat of global warming has been recognized at the highest levels of government for more than 25 years. Former president Jimmy Carter highlighted it in 1980, and Al Gore championed it in Congress throughout the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher, the arch-conservative prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, delivered some of the hardest-hitting speeches ever given on climate change. But progress stalled in the 1990s, even as Gore was elected vice president and the scientific case grew definitive. It turned out there were powerful pockets of resistance to tackling this problem, and they put up a hell of a fight.

And you can guess who we’re talking about — the VRWC and Big Oil. Big Oil spends millions every year funding organizations that downplay the problem, and right-wing media parrots what the organizations say.

The public discussion about climate change in the U.S. is years behind that in Britain and the rest of Europe, and the deniers are a big reason why. “In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers are deeply skeptical of climate-change science and the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” says Fiona Harvey, the environment correspondent for the Financial Times. “In Britain, the equivalent body, the Confederation of British Industry, is absolutely behind the science and agrees on the need to cut emissions. The only differences are over how to do that.”

America’s media coverage is also well behind the curve, says Harvey. “In the United States you have lots of news stories that, in the name of balance, give equal credence to the skeptics. We don’t do that here—not because we’re not balanced but because we think it’s unbalanced to give equal validity to a fringe few with no science behind them.”

Ah-HEM. As Paul Krugman has said, if the Right wants to believe the earth is flat, the headlines would declare “Shape of Earth–Views Differ.”

Toward the end of the article we learn that the rest of the world — plus many state and local governments in America — have pretty much decided to ignore the Bush Regime and charge ahead with greenhouse gas-reduction programs. At the same time, investors are pressuring Wall Street to take the problem seriously. In fact, Bushies seem to be the last holdouts on the planet.

“It is very clear that Congress will put mandatory greenhouse-gas-emission reductions in place, immediately after George W. Bush leaves office,” says Philip Clapp of N.E.T. “Even the Fortune 500 is positioning itself for the inevitable. There isn’t one credible 2008 Republican presidential candidate who hasn’t abandoned the president’s do-nothing approach. They have all adopted the approach the rest of the world took at the Montreal talks—we’re moving forward, you’re a lame duck, and we have to deal with it.”

U.S. presidents used to be regarded as “the leader of the free world.” Ol’ Dubya blew that one out of the water, didn’t he?