Re: SC36

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16630798.htm

Iraq won't be remembered as Bush's low point

The debacle in Iraq has become such a dominant feature of the daily news that it's pretty much assumed that George Bush's legacy will be all about the war. It seems certain that he'll be remembered, mostly, for soldiers killed, billions wasted, terrorism spawned and worse decisions on top of bad ones.

His weekly poll numbers, thanks to the escalating horrors in Iraq, are as dismal as any president's in history. But history may shrug off Iraq as a failure of middling consequence.

Ask our kids 30 or 40 or 50 years from now.

They'll remember George Bush in near apocalyptic terms. He'll be the denier-in-chief who failed to acknowledge, much less confront, the coming ecological catastrophe.

Unhappily, our kids will think of their parents as the selfish lot happy to go along with Bush rather than make the sacrifices needed to fix the mess.

The latest indicator of our children's dire inheritance came, appropriately enough, on the hottest Feb. 2 on record in South Florida. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a compilation of six years work by 2,500 scientists from 130 countries, warned that we have just begun to cook..............

............The administration -- up against 2,500 scientists -- acknowledged the overwhelming evidence cited by the climate change panel last week. But there was no indication that Bush would make any major policy changes to stanch greenhouse gases.

Hugh Willoughby, senior scientist at the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University, a one-time global warming skeptic himself (15 years ago, before the data became overwhelming), said Monday that what worries him, more than the known problems cited by the panel, are what he calls ''the unknown unknowns,'' the unanticipated climate changes.

Weather patterns and ocean currents, the product of ''unevenly heated rotating fluids,'' are already difficult enough to predict. ``It's like being at a bank when a crack addict robs it. You don't want to get the crack addict excited.''

Too late.

The climate has been excited and the scariest results may be beyond knowing. Its the big surprise we've left our kids...........

The world continues to pump C02 and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere at ever accelerating rates. Despite the alarms, the dire warnings, humanity is still pursueing economies based on constant growth and expansion, which of course will require even more vast quantities of hydrocarbon fuel to run them. Efforts to make the very small cutbacks of CO2 production, as in the first stages of Kyoto, have met large scale resistance, causing the failure to meet even these small measures. Climate meltdown, and dwindling energy supplies will force change in our societies in response to the looming crisis situations coming on many fronts. It won't be pleasant to say the least.