Year 7, Month 7, Day 17: DFH! NIMBY?

The Washington Post acknowledges the hippies:

Wildfires? Record thunderstorms? Blast furnace heat? An earthquake, even?

At least that’s what one group of folks is thinking, even if they don’t voice it quite so crassly.

“We don’t want to do it in an I-told-you-so kind of way,” demurs John Topping, who is the president of the Washington-based Climate Institute.

But see, people! This is what all the global-warming Paul Reveres have been shouting about.

Now some are finally paying attention, at least in the Washington region.

“Granted, we’ve only lived in the area for 25 years,” one reader wrote to me. “But the first 15 left an impression that this was not one of Dante’s circles. The last ten: approaching inner circle quickly.”

Apparently, a tree falling on a house hits much closer to home than a melting ice cap.

Because it will be sooooo excellent to be smug while we circle the bowl on our way to the Venus effect. Sent July 6:

For decades, climatologists warned us that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would trigger chaotic and destructive weather. We’ve were warned of rising temperatures and rising seas, of droughts, invasive species, wildfires, tropical storms — all consequences of global climate change.

And for decades our media and politics have ignored and derided those scientific specialists and their findings. Whether it’s tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists convinced that Al Gore is out to confiscate their SUVs, petroleum-backed politicians protecting their puppetmasters, or ordinary citizens with more immediate concerns, the unavoidable fact is that Americans have too long assumed that climate change is a problem for other people, other places, other times.

No more. While we’ll always pay more attention to what’s happening in our own backyards, there is no escaping that this is a crisis of planetary scope and millennial span. Earth is the new neighborhood, and a century is the new now.

Warren Senders