Hot and bothered: facing up to global warming

AS I WRITE these words, the season's first named storm--Alberto--is developing in the Caribbean. We're now in what everyone refers to as hurricane season, which is joining winter, spring, summer, autumn, Christmas and football as a fixture on the calendar. (It probably has a brighter future than winter.)

A few years ago, words like these would have been scoffed at by most mainstream Americans, treated as the unlikely emanations of radical greens. (Trust me on that.) But within the past year or so the tide has turned. Katrina had something to do with that. So did Al Gore.

The success of Gore's movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, has consolidated public sentiment. Americans now understand, as Europeans and Japanese did a decade ago, that global warming is real and dangerous. The doubters have dwindled to an insignificant minority, lobbing increasingly erratic volleys from their Exxon-funded bunkers.

The reason, as Gore makes clear in his movie's PowerPoint presentation, is that the scientific evidence is overwhelming. Burning fossil fuel = carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide = more trapped heat. More trapped heat = a world going increasingly berserk. Look at the pictures of melting glaciers, look at the charts for increased rainfall, look at the data on storminess.

Last year saw 27 named storms, breaking the old record of 21. Hurricanes appeared off the coasts of South America. Hurricane Wilma set a record for lowest barometric pressure recorded in our hemisphere. The year's last hurricane, Zeta, formed on December 31, was still circling in the Atlantic on January 6. This is the way God used to deliver messages back in the not very subtle day of plagues and floods.

Gore is calm and precise--if anything, he is conservative in his use of the data. He also uses PowerPoint better than almost anyone on the planet. The DVD should be required viewing for anyone putting together a presentation on climate change. (He does not put words on the screen and read them aloud, as if to slow first-graders.)

Gore begins with hero scientists like Roger Revelle, who first began to imagine the magnitude of this tragedy, and continues through the latest scientific findings, like last fall's revelation that the ice over Greenland seems to be melting much faster than anyone had predicted--news that carries potentially cataclysmic implications for the rate of sea-level rise.

The long prelude is over--the nearly two decades when those of us who knew about global warming felt like prisoners in a bad dream, unable to convince anyone else that the bear was real, the poison deadly. As the strange reality-defying fog of the current administration finally lifts, global warming will become, as it is elsewhere, a political given--something like crime or low test scores that every politician is pledged to fight. Their methods will differ (and those differences will be crucial), but the essential facts will be noncontroversial. It shouldn't have taken us 20 years to reach this point (and it wouldn't have, if the energy lobby hadn't poisoned the waters of public debate with bogus research), but it's cause for celebration that we've come this far.

In an odd way, it's also cause for celebration that we've reached this point with only modest contributions from the realms of business and religion. That means that there are reserves unspent in two crucial institutions.

Like their European counterparts, American insurers have begun to signal that the core of their business (actuarial tables, which depend on the future behaving something like the past) are increasingly unreliable; meanwhile, investors have begun to understand that the next set of energy technologies, whatever they turn out to be, represent a money-making opportunity dwarfing even the Internet.

JUST AS INTERESTING is the role Christianity has and hasn't played in responding to this crisis. So far climate change hasn't been a central concern of any faith communities, but that may be starting to change. Earlier this year, a group of leading evangelicals released a proclamation of sorts, saying global warming is real, is caused by humans and needs to be brought under control.

It wasn't, on the face of it, all that much, and not as rhetorically strong as resolutions adopted by the mainline denominations years ago. But consider the circumstances: this was the first major issue on which important evangelical leaders had broken with the Republican right--something that took real courage. In fact, the signers came under immediate attack from the tub-thumpers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. But most--including pastors like Rick Warren and a slew of seminary presidents--held firm.

Such change doesn't happen overnight, of course. In fact, many years of careful organizing and writing by men like Calvin DeWitt of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies and Paul Gorman of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment had helped set the scene. Sir John Houghton, an evangelical scholar and scientist who played a key role in the international panels studying climate change, sealed the deal with a speech to a prayerful meeting that gathered quietly more than a year ago in a Maryland conference center.