A Very Inconvenient Truth

As I walked to the bus this morning in my light fall jacket with some post-Christmas drizzle (not flurries) hitting my face, I let the realization sink in that white Christmases, exceptional enough as they are, are not something I should waste my time wishing for in the coming years. "That's okay," I thought, "I hate bulky winter jackets anyway." Then later this morning, I read the following in the UK's The Independent newspaper and remembered what's really at stake-

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities...

As someone who lives and works on two of New York's islands, this news is very disturbing to me. Obviously, only low-lying islands/areas are in immediate danger, but this is definitely a wakeup call. An island was just swallowed by rising sea waters. That computer model Al Gore showed in his film was dismissed as hyperbole by some critics, but it is climate reality.

Unfortunately, until the day that the American press finds information like this as important as their overseas counterparts-- and certainly more important than faux-journalism like pretending that Bush is at his ranch on a holiday week to 'think' about 'Iraq', or excitement over the possibility that he may have read a newspaper-- than people will not know these things. And they should.

It's for this reason I second Bob Cesca in naming Al Gore 2006's 'Voice of Reality'.