Letter: Global warming is real and now

Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005 | 9:19 a.m.

New Orleans is a prelude to the fate awaiting coastal cities all over the world and some island nations. Global warming is not a theory or a prediction. It is real and it is now. Thousands of square miles of the Antarctic ice shelf have vanished in the last 10 years. Glaciers everywhere are retreating. Soils in the Arctic that have been frozen for a million years are thawing out. The 1990s were the warmest decade of the 20th century. In our own valley, July 2003 was the warmest July ever recorded. This record was broken in 2004 and that record was broken this year.

For a million years during the Ice Age much of the Earth's precipitation was stored as ice and did not return to the ocean. This dropped the sea level more than 100 feet. The Greenland and Antarctic ice caps are thousands of feet deep. This is a tremendous amount of stored water.

As these ice caps melt, sea level will rise and coastal cities will build dikes to hold the ocean back. Sea level will continue to rise, dikes will be built higher and cities will be farther below sea level. The longer the cities can hold the ocean back, the deeper will be the lake that drowns them. Last year's tsunami was bad enough, but think of the catastrophe when all of the world's coastal cities are below sea level.

All of the world's leaders except one consider global warming to be the greatest threat mankind has ever faced. Tony Blair convened a meeting of the world's leaders to strengthen the Kyoto treaty, which all had signed except one, by adopting effective measures to reduce the air pollution responsible for global warming. President Bush attended that meeting with one thought in mind -- make sure nothing comes out of it.

Bush won. The world lost.

VERNON BOSTICK