Threats forecast decades ago

By Cindy Thompson-Adhikari

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‘Clever and creative people become rich and famous by exploiting the public and media weakness for alarming scenarios [to wit, ‘man-made global warming'],” writes Kesten Green, in “Too vivid to be true” (July 15 guest column).

One might well ask: Who's paying him? And what has he learned from the Bush-Cheney-Rove cohort?

“Unfortunately, policies that make most people worse off have and will be [sic] implemented,” Green warns darkly.

He suggests that opportunists have co-opted a perfectly natural phenomenon, attributed it to human folly and induced all manner of policy havoc just to feather their personal nests.

The assertion that uncontrolled carbon emissions would alter the composition of the atmosphere and cause the planet to inexorably warm, with undetermined, but certainly destabilizing, consequences, surfaced about 30 years ago, before discernible effects appeared. People yawned in droves; I did not, however, since I happen to know that Venus is a torrid hell precisely because of its dense carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

And now we enjoy unprecedented flooding right here in Cedar Rapids (2008). Extraordinary drought grips Texas and parts of the South. Wildfires. Mudslides. Unusually virulent tornado outbreaks. Disturbingly high nocturnal temperatures, indicative of a devolving atmosphere.

Some tidbits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

l Plant hardines zones are shifting northward.

l In the western United States, the growing season is 20 days longer than when first measured; in the east, six days.

l Glaciers across the globe have lost 2,000 cubic miles of their mass since 1960, and sea levels are rising accordingly. (Go to epa.gov/climatechange for more; at www.

climatehotmap.org, find detailed examinations of the “hot spots” so far identified by scientists.)

There is actually an Investors' Network on Climate Change, comprising 100 institutional investors with assets totaling

$10 trillion. A more gullible bunch you could hardly find, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, “ocean acidification” - the formation of carbonic acid as the ocean absorbs excess carbon - is threatening the entire maritime ecosystem.

I have no stomach for mass extinctions, climate refugees, fresh water shortages as glaciers erode and winter snowpack in the arid west lessens, tropical diseases headed our way, and so on. And to think we could have started doing something about this 30 years ago!

Cindy Thompson-Adhikari of Cedar Rapids is a freelance writer and a self-described weather junkie since childhood. Comments: cat7raj@msn.com