Not Fictional

It was a mostly ignored hearing on a busy news day. Only three Senators bothered to show up. But the words of the new head of the National Science Foundation were fateful.

Ralph Cicerone, who happens to be a climate scientist, spoke to the Senate Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on climate change. There were other witnesses, from the Bush administration. They hedged on the problem. Yes, one grudgingly admitted (as did Prez Bush recently) that it appears human activity has contributed to climate change.

Climate change is caused primarily by human activity, principally the burning of fossil fuels, Cicerone said bluntly, and that’s the consensus of climate scientists throughout the world.

A different Bush official talked about the need to balance measures to ameliorate climate change with economic growth.

But while in some sense that makes sense, Cicerone had a different take on what it meant. It’s not clear from this story whether he was asked about the 2004 Pentagon report that even many scientists dismissed as extreme, or whether he volunteered his view.

“It was well done,” Cicerone said. “I didn’t think it was fictional.”

The report made news partly because it described a possible scenario similar to that dramatatized in the movie, “'>The Day After Tomorrow,” in which global heating causes the sudden onset of a new Ice Age by 2020. It also predicted the possibility of widespread flooding of coastal areas by 2007---less than two years from now.

Not too surprisingly, the Senators who showed up were from states with coastal cities.

The prospect of coastal cities being flooded was mentioned last week by President Clinton in South Africa. But that’s only a near-term scenario presented in the Pentagon report. It also discussed major warfare over water, as droughts spread over the next few decades.

Speculative, yes. But those two words from the head of the National Science Foundation ought to be echoing through the halls of government, and reverberating through cyberspace:

Not fictional.