A Perfect Storm Descends on the Nation's Capital

Drenching Rains, a Fallen Elm, a Supreme Court Decision and President's Words on Global Warming

By BILL BLAKEMORE

June 26, 2006 — - A perfect storm of drenching rain, irony, political rancor, public fear and -- at the last minute like a fierce stroke of lightning -- word from the highest court in the land, descended on the nation's capital today.

This storm -- pulling in many parts of the global warming emergency -- also broke through the White House perimeters and helped bring down a century-old elm tree, laying it across the driveway.

Even President Bush was drawn into the storm this morning, talking about climate change in a way he may find difficult to explain.

The brewing battles of and about global warming are now being joined.

The massive downpours this morning shorting out government buildings with flooded basements, seizing up legislative communications, snarling traffic access to white columned buildings, fit exactly the pattern predicted decades ago as a consequence of global warming.

It's a simple fourth grade science lesson: the warmer the air, the more moisture it can hold.

Winds suck up more water vapor from oceans and farmlands -- leaving more agricultural drought behind -- and when they finally do dump that moisture out as rain, the downpours are much heavier.

Not just in the United States. Worldwide, such downpours have been increasing markedly over recent decades -- exactly as predicted by scientists.

In the 1980's, leading American climatologists stood in front of Congress, trying to get across the reality of this planetary threat.

One of the world's most resepected climatologists, NASA's James Hansen, even used a dice metaphor to make it clear.

If you paint one side of the die red, you'll roll red about one in six times. Paint four red, and you'll roll red on average four in six times.

Manmade greenhouse gas emissions, Hansen explained, were loading the dice so that we'd have such extreme weather far more frequently. And, exactly as predicted, we and the world have -- well above what the frequency of any natural weather cycles can explain.

Amidst this morning's capital chaos -- including that White House elm bowled over and uprooted in the storm-drenched ground -- the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in.

The nation's highest court announced that it will indeed hear the case brought against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds that it should have regulated carbon dioxide emissions in order to combat global warming.

The case is brought by a dozen states from New York and Massachusetts in the East (as well as Washington, D.C.) to California and Oregon in the West, along with a number of cities, plus some environmental groups.

Whatever the Supreme Court finally decides, their agreement to hear the case will only amplify news and discussion about what so many now -- including all credible scientists -- recognize as a grave planetary emergency.

And the president amid this morning's wind and rain?

In the White House, only hours after that old elm had fallen, Bush was addressed by a reporter, thus: "I know that you are not planning to see Al Gore's new movie, but do you agree with the premise that global warming is a real and significant threat to the planet?"

"I have said consistently," answered Bush, "that global warming is a serious problem. There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused. We ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary ... to be good stewards of the environment, become less dependent on foreign sources of oil..."

The President -- as far as the extensive and repeated researches of this and many other professional journalists, as well as all scientists credible on this subject, can find -- is wrong on one crucial and no doubt explosive issue. When he said -- as he also did a few weeks ago -- that "There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused" ... well, there really is no such debate.

At least none above what is proverbially called "the flat earth society level."

Not one scientist of any credibility on this subject has presented any evidence for some years now that counters the massive and repeated evidence -- gathered over decades and come at in dozens of ways by all kinds of professional scientists around the world -- that the burning of fossil fuels is raising the world's average temperature.

Or that counters the findings that the burning of these fuels is doing so in a way that is very dangerous for mankind, that will almost certainly bring increasingly devastating effects in the coming decades.

One small group of special interest businesses leaders -- those of some fossil fuel companies -- have been well documented by journalist Ross Gelbspan and others to have been fighting a PR campaign for 15 years to keep the American public confused about the wide and deep scientific consensus on this.

They've aimed, as Gelbspan explains, to keep us thinking that (to borrow the president's words this morning) "There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused" -- though no open and thorough journalism this reporter knows of can find any such thing.

Drenching waters, president's words, high judges' scrutiny, worried voters, journalists scrambling to get their arms around this enormous story, oil executives looking at spread sheets while they explore for more oil in Canada and the Arctic, and one elm down ... so far.

Meteorologists predict more heavy rain this week along the mid-Atlantic seaboard.

Climatologists predict much the same for the coming decades.

Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures

Flag-waving for political gain

6/24/2006
By LEONARD PITTS
Original
Thank you, Dianne Feinstein. Composition teachers all over the country are indebted to the Democratic senator from California for an article published Tuesday in USA Today.

Instead of tearing their hair out trying to instruct students in the finer points of logic, rhetoric and critical thinking, teachers will henceforth be able to simply pull out Feinstein's piece and say, "Don't do this." They will never find a better illustration of a bad argument badly made.

Feinstein is co-sponsor of something called the Flag Protection Amendment, the latest congressional effort to amend the Constitution to protect the U.S. flag from "desecration" - an interesting word, given its connotations of religious devotion.

Her commentary in support of the amendment certainly hits all the patriotic sweet spots, invoking the image of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, reminding us that the flag is a symbol of "our democracy, our shared values, our commitment to justice, and our eternal memory of those who have sacrificed to defend these principles."

Feinstein also notes that Congress has power to protect the Lincoln Memorial from defilement, so it should have similar power to protect the flag, "our monument in cloth." She denies the amendment would infringe on free speech, because, "There is no idea or thought expressed by the burning of the American flag that cannot be expressed equally well in another manner."

As arguments go, this one has it all - pathos, tears, drama. Everything except actual, you know, logic.

The comparison to the Lincoln Memorial, for example, might make sense if the flag were a single iconic structure housed on federal land instead of a banner that shows up on T-shirts, used-car lots and mailboxes.

As for the idea that anyone who wants to express an idea by burning the flag can express the same idea equally well through other means, that's not her call. Who is she to tell me - or you - what means we may or may not use to express a political opinion? If someone loathes their country and wants to express that opinion, who is she to decide what words, methods or approach that person is allowed to use? If free speech means anything, it means that she doesn't have that right.

Feinstein, by the way, is reacting to a crisis that does not exist. You know how many flag "desecrations" there have been this year? A dozen? There've been three. This is according to the Citizens Flag Alliance, a group that "supports" the proposed amendment. Three. More people were struck by lightning. Heck, I bet more people spontaneously combusted.

So essentially what we have here is an effort to amend the Constitution and abridge the First Amendment in order to stop people from doing what people aren't doing. Am I the only one who finds this more than faintly ridiculous?

The rapper Chuck D, among others, calls them "weapons of mass distraction," these periodic outbursts of noise and inanity whereby our leaders attempt to hijack the public's attention, direct it away from anything that means anything. As the use of those weapons goes, this one feels especially cynical, playing as it does on love of country and respect for the sacrifices of forebears.

But maybe we should love the one and respect the other enough to stand up for real American ideals and demand that our representatives do the same, rather than play games of symbolism that solve no problems, address no issues and insult our collective intelligence in the process.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. "And" to the Republic for which it stands. But there's a big difference between honoring the flag and fetishizing it. Especially at the cost of doing violence to the Constitution.

Apparently nobody cares if we desecrate that.

Miami Herald