Credit: Mark Weiss
Growing up in New Orleans, I always thought of our local paper, the Times Picayune, as a conservative, establishment voice, one fond of kissing up to Louisiana's powerful oil and gas interests. In 2000, partly for reasons of energy policy, the Picayune firmly supported George W. Bush over environmentalist Al Gore for president. "That is a big-time pocketbook issue for Louisiana, and it is a compelling reason to choose Mr. Bush," the paper editorialized. "He lives right next-door, and he's an oilman."
How times have changed. Exactly three months after hurricane-driven floodwaters enveloped New Orleans, I caught a Times Picayune editorial on global warming, an issue that had gone totally unmentioned in the paper's 2000 endorsement of George W. Bush for president. The new editorial took the form of a stern rebuke to the Bush administration, expressed in tones that might have made Al Gore himself proud. "Americans have now seen what can happen when rising waters overwhelm a major coastal metropolitan area," wrote the Picayune post-Katrina. "The United States should be leading efforts to combat global warming, instead of straggling behind."
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Every time I hear griping and complaining about the United States' intransigence on global warming, my mind reverts to that Times Picayune editorial. Without a doubt, the US owes the rest of the world an apology for its frustrating inaction on this issue. We ditched Kyoto without offering an alternative. We suppress and ignore our taxpayer-funded government scientists. We put our fingers in our ears and scream "la-la-la" when countries want to discuss anything other than voluntary means for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But the Times Picayune editorial tells a different, more hopeful story—about how the treatment of global warming in the United States may begin to differ considerably from the past. What will break our national impasse, a situation of policy gridlock that is of grave concern not just at home, but to nations of the world? If change comes, it will surely be triggered by real impacts of global warming in Americans' backyards—or, as in the case of New Orleans, the increasingly apparent threat of such impacts.
Global warming didn't cause Katrina. But the ensuing disaster rightly heightened concern about global warming's impacts on hurricane strength, precipitation and sea level rise. And for other regions of the United States—from the Great Lakes to the Southwest to the Rocky Mountains—the story is similar. California, for instance, is worried about declining mountain snowpack, which poses an ominous threat to water supplies in an already parched region. That, too, remains a concern for the future, but some devastating impacts of global warming are already underway. The Arctic, for instance, is quite literally melting. A definitive scientific work, the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, stated that global warming is responsible for declining sea ice and loss of permafrost in the region—which have had a severe impact on native Inuit cultures. Alaskans at the present moment are experiencing the most dramatic climatic change on earth.
In response to these current and future changes, the time is more than ripe for a political shift in the American global-warming debate. This isn't an abstract discussion about atmospheric processes anymore. That story has been told and retold ad nauseum. Now, it's time to talk about real-world effects of global warming, many of which are already taking place.