Global warming link to natural disasters

[jpak]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/336682_amy25.html

Fires rage through Southern California. Massive rainstorms drench New Orleans. The Southeast U.S., stretching from Tennessee across the Carolinas and into Georgia, is in the midst of what could be the worst drought on record there. While the media do an admirable job bringing us live images of extreme weather, it doesn't explain why those events are happening.

What links these crises? Global warming. Two words that have all too often been vacuumed off government Web sites and erased from government scientific studies.

If the press isn't making the connection, Bill McKibben is. In 1989, he wrote the book "The End of Nature," one of the first books to describe global warming as an emerging environmental crisis. Now he is leading a campaign to draft mass grass-roots participation to publicize the potential catastrophe of climate change and to demand federal action to "Step It Up." The first Step It Up day of action, April 14, 2007, organized in local communities (including Seattle) through a central Web site, saw 1,400 coordinated activities pulled together in just three months. The second day of action is planned for Nov. 3, organized through stepitup2007.org.

"What's important to remember and the reason that we spend all our time organizing now, trying to change all this, is that so far human beings have raised the temperature of the planet about 1 degree Fahrenheit," says McKibben. "The computer modeling makes it very clear that before the century is out, unless we take very strong action, indeed, we're going to raise the temperature of the planet another5 degrees Fahrenheit."

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