One issue at a time?????

It's the economy, stupid. . .

It seems that Americans are worried about jobs, money, retirement, and just don't have enough room in the worry section of their brains to grapple with the threat imposed by global warming. Of the twenty big issues facing Americans today, in the worry poll, climate change comes in at number 20.

Okay, I can accept that we, like the poor polar bears in the picture, are, at the moment, focused on our own survival.

What I can't understand is why we've decided to cope with the problem by denying it. Why we're allowing our tired minds to get away with saying this is just too confusing, too overwhelming and so I'm going to just say it isn't real.

I can't understand why we are turning into a nation of science deniers. Why we are listening to people who, for whatever reason, are nay-saying the data of climate change?

Of course, there are those emails to be dealt with, which sullied the aura of scientific-ness around the science of global warming. And which, naturally, have been happily embraced by those nay-sayers. But there are decades of good, unsullied science to back up the assertion that the world is warming up.

The 200 nation conference in Copenhagen begins today. Do any of us really care what comes out of it?

There was a good, concise summation of the situation the conference has to grapple with on Morning Edition last Friday.

Tomorrow, in this blog, a JMU Kenyan student's account of how he's watched the snow cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro shrink during the years of his young life.