No place to hide

I want to share a short, pointed article with you called "We Must Reverse Global Warming" by Jeffrey Sachs. Here's how it gets started:

The world is in the midst of a great political transformation in which climate change has moved to the center of national and global politics. For politicians in persistent denial about the need to act -- including President Bush, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper -- there is no longer any place to hide.

These political leaders have pretended that climate change is a mere hypothesis. For several years, the Bush administration tried to hide the facts from the public, deleting references to man-made climate from government documents and even trying to suppress statements by leading government scientists. Until recently, ExxonMobil and other companies paid lobbyists to try to distort the public debate.

Yet truth has triumphed over political maneuvers. The climate itself is sending a powerful and often devastating message. Hurricane Katrina made the U.S. public aware that global warming would likely raise the intensity of destructive storms. Australia's great drought this past year has similarly made a mockery of Howard's dismissive attitude toward climate change.

Scientists themselves have operated with great seriousness of purpose in educating the public. We can thank the United Nations for that. This year, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a worldwide body of hundreds of climate scientists, is releasing its fourth round of reports, starting with the one issued early this month.

That report was unequivocal: There is a powerful scientific consensus that human activity -- mainly the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), as well as deforestation and other land uses (such as growing paddy rice) -- leads to massive emissions of carbon dioxide into the air. This is causing climate change, which is accelerating and poses serious risks to the planet.

An old friend of mine sent me an email today that was obviously also sent to everyone in her address book. She urged us all to see An Inconvenient Truth and then said something astonishing. She asked people to respond by sending her information about the "other side" to global warming if we didn't agree with her.

Hey! There is no other side. The evidence is in. Global warming is real and humans are causing it. This is the consensus of reputable scientists. People who dispute this are in serious denial - a denial that is threatening the continuation of life on this planet. The stakes are high, everybody. They couldn't be higher.