Hurricane Sandy closed the stock market on Wall Street and caused President Barack Obama to cancel campaign stops in Florida. How long its 50 mph winds and torrential rains will dominate the last frantic days of the presidential campaign is any pollster’s guess.
A key question Sandy asks will go unanswered: will the president win votes by doing all he can to lead the government’s response to the devastation — or will he lose critical ground by turning from vote-getting to do his White House job?
Because he will respond to the needs of the hundreds of thousands of east coast Americans who are under siege by Sandy and cancel as many campaign stops as that requires, the question will go unanswered.
After Sandy runs its course and the next president and Congress are elected, the country would do well to take advantage of the lull to think deeper about climate change. The global climate has been steadily warming at about a third of a degree a decade. Ocean levels are rising. Polar ice is melting. Droughts are becoming more severe in certain areas. Storms are measurably stronger. Sandy may demonstrate by setting a record or two.
Climatologists believe these changes are partly the result of natural weather cycles, partly caused by the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by people. Because continued global warming could have enormous economic and social effects everywhere on Earth, it would be a good idea to play it safe and invest in a worldwide campaign to curb the production of CO2 and the other gases which trap heat in our atmosphere.
Doing so would create millions of new jobs to replace the jobs lost by retiring problem-causing generators, engines, etc., or so some economists have calculated.
The alternative is to do nothing and let history tell us whether Al Gore’s inconvenient truth was on the mark or just a nervous guy’s anxious guess.
But ignoring science, doing only short-term math and closing our ears to the warning bells sounded by record heat spells, droughts and ever-more powerful storms doesn’t seem like the American way of dealing with challenges.
It would be much better to over-react, really cut back on the greenhouse stuff, be proved wrong and retreat than to be standing in ocean water on Miami’s streets muttering that Al was right, after all.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
