In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a report which said that global warming is caused by human activity. This was bad news for the White House, as President Bush had reneged on his campaign promise to sign onto the international Kyoto Protocols dealing with global warming. Someone must have told Bush and Cheney that reduced emissions mean reduced profits for the corporate sector.

Bush had to send a message to his corporate sponsors that he would not take any action to deal with global warming, Environmental Protection Agency be damned. When asked about the report, he dismissively told the media: "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy." Here's how the question and answer went down at a White House press conference (taken from the White House web site):

Q Mr. President, good morning, sir. Do you plan any new initiatives on -- to combat global warming?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I've laid out that very comprehensive initiative. I read the report put out by a -- put out by the bureaucracy. I do not support the Kyoto treaty. The Kyoto treaty would severely damage the United States economy, and I don't accept that. I accept the alternative we put out, that we can grow our economy and, at the same time, through technologies, improve our environment.

Interesting response. We associate bureaucracy with the worst that government has to offer. Bureaucracy is what causes snafus with our health insurance, takes kids away from their parents, convicts the innocent, spends $500 on a toilet seat and generally screws up whatever it sets out to do. We all hate the bureaucracy. So when the EPA told Bush that global warming is rooted in human activity, he in effect threw the report in the garbage and told us it was just bureaucratic bullshit.

Meanwhile, the world burns. The only planet that gives us life. In California, the heat wave has killed 100 people. According to the New York Times:

A searing heat wave nearly two weeks old is responsible for more than 100 deaths across California, the authorities said Thursday. So overwhelmed is the local coroner's office here that it has been forced to double-stack bodies.

. . .

The toll of such casualties has no recent precedent in California. According to data provided by the California Department of Health Services, the greatest number of heat-related deaths in the state since 1989 had been 40, in 2000. A department spokeswoman, Patti Roberts, said data prior to 1989 were unavailable.

. . .

A doctor and his assistant toiled here on Thursday in the coroner's office, which recently grew to 50 beds from 25 after getting a bioterrorism grant but has rarely had 25 bodies. On Thursday morning there were 58. The morgue was converted from an eyeglass factory several years ago and has no air-conditioning in crucial areas. Decomposition has been a problem, Ms. Cervantes said, and bodies have piled up because of the lack of space.

The Associated Press reported a few weeks ago that "Warmer waters disrupt Pacific food chain." The article reads:

On these craggy, remote islands west of San Francisco, the largest seabird colony in the contiguous United States throbs with life. Seagulls swarm so thick that visitors must yell to be heard above their cries. Pelicans glide.

But the steep decline of one bird species for the second straight year has rekindled scientists' fears that global warming could be undermining the coastal food supply, threatening not just the Farallones but entire marine ecosystems.

Tiny Cassin's auklets live much of their lives on the open ocean. But in spring, these gray-and-white relatives of the puffin venture to isolated Pacific outposts like the Farallones to dig deep burrows and lay their eggs.

Adult auklets usually feed their chicks with krill, the minuscule shrimp-like crustaceans that anchor the ocean's complex food web.

But not this year. Almost none of the 20,000 pairs of Cassin's auklets nesting in the Farallones will raise a chick that lives more than a few days, a repeat of last year's "unprecedented" breeding failure, according to Russ Bradley, a seabird biologist with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory who monitors the birds on the islands.

Scientists blame changes in West Coast climate patterns for a delay in the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters from the ocean's depths for the second year in a row. Weak winds and faltering currents have left the Gulf of the Farallones without krill, on which Cassin's auklets and a variety of other seabirds, fish and mammals depend for food.

"The seas are warmer. And the number of krill being produced is lower," said Bradley as he held a Cassin's auklet chick, the only one from a study of 400 nests he expected to survive.

"Normally we would have hundreds," he said.

. . .

"How many years in a row do you see this before you start raising your eyebrows?" said Frank Schwing, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Pacific Grove.

Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books recently summarized various books recently released on the issue of global warming. This is an article worth printing out and reading as it presents as comprehensive a summary of global warming as you'll want to read. Here's a taste of the analysis:

How much will sea level rise with five degrees of global warming? Here too, our best information comes from the Earth's history. The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when sea level was about eighty feet higher.

Eighty feet! In that case, the United States would lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami; indeed, practically the entire state of Florida would be under water. Fifty million people in the US live below that sea level. Other places would fare worse. China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people.