Meanwhile, Back on Earth...

The U.S. political campaign is involving and expressive, and it is very definitely important.  Today's Rabid Right Republicans are wrecking the potential for this country--and hence a good part of the world--to address the challenges of the future.  A Romney victory would be catastrophic, especially at this moment.

But also at this moment we are witnessing the surreal spectacle of a contest for political leadership that studiously avoids the most important issue facing the country and the planet.  Referring to the latest--and scariest--studies of fast-melting Arctic ice and what that portends, the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert writes:

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this development. We are now seeing changes occur in a matter of years that, in the normal geological scheme of things, should take thousands, even millions of times longer than that. On the basis of the 2012 melt season, one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic ice cap, Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, has predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer by 2016. Since open water absorbs sunlight, while ice tends to reflect it, this will accelerate global warming.  Meanwhile, recent research suggests that the melting of the Arctic ice cap will have, and indeed is probably already having, a profound effect on the U.S. and Europe, making extreme weather events much more likely...

Yet, as big as the almost certainly irreversible retreat of the sea ice will figure in the future of the planet, it has attracted relatively little attention in the here and now. A study released on Thursday by Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group, found that over the last few months, Representative Paul Ryan’s fitness routine—he’s a big fan of what’s known as the P90X workout plan—has received three times as much television coverage as the ice loss."

Kolbert notes how little the climate crisis has been even mentioned in the presidential campaign.  Romney brought it up in his convention acceptance speech only to mock President Obama for believing in it, and President Obama gave a stern and definite but brief rejoinder in his acceptance speech.  And that's pretty much it so far.

I expect it will come up in the debates somehow, and it will be interesting to hear what's said about it, and what impact it might have.  But it seems that politicians will be the last to confront this onrushing reality.  In Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy, it takes Washington D.C. being flooded for lawmakers to demand action.  I'm not sure even that would be enough in today's Washington.

But the reality is going to be harder and harder to ignore.  As Rolling Stone notes, the math of catastrophe is so daunting that it can be overwhelming, which I'm sure is at least partly why as a society we won't face it.  I have high hopes for Obama's second term, especially given his determination to marshal public support for change.  (It's forgotten now, but that's how President Kennedy forced the Senate to ratify the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.)  But as of right now, it's a sad, sad thing. 

Note that one scientist says the Arctic will be open in 2016.  That's the next presidential election.  Will anybody be able to ignore the climate crisis then? 

But I believe I've said that before.