As the globe warms up, 
Bush won't believe it 

DERRICK Z JACKSON / Boston Globe 7jun02

AT THE WHITE HOUSE, where science is a séance by ExxonMobil, the driftwood of the South Pole itself could float up the Potomac, flood onto the grass of the Rose Garden, and President Bush still might not believe in global warming.

The mystics and their oodles of cash remain capable of freezing Bush into the world's most cataleptic leader on climate change, absolutely unmoved by chunks of Antarctica falling off or projections in our children's lifetime of pronounced disease, hunger, storms, bleaching of coral reefs, and swamping of island nations.

With eyes frozen and lips moving at the controlling wave of big oil, big gas, big coal, and ridiculously big cars, the same Bush who demands that students and teachers be held accountable to mandatory standards in math refuses to account for the data on climate change.

As a presidential candidate, Bush said: ''I don't think we know the solution to global warming yet. And I don't think we've got all the facts before we make decisions.... I'm not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world's air.''

During his presidency, the United Nations panel on climate change and the National Research Council have said global warming is real.

Reams of articles in scientific journals, ''Nova'' documentaries, and the change of flora and fauna before our very eyes confirm that scientists are not some aggregate Chicken Little. The sky is falling apart.

Despite these data, Bush decided to let the world carry our burden for fouling the air. He rejected the Kyoto Treaty to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that fuel the greenhouse effect. The United States, with 4 to 5 percent of the world's population, bellows out a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide through the fossil fuels used to generate energy for our cars, massive homes, and industries.

There is no question that Kyoto alone will not solve global warming, a fact that Bush turned on its head to launch a scorched-skies campaign.

While the European Union and Japan have accepted Kyoto, Bush trashes it as ''not based upon science.'' He has said for months that he would come up with his own plan, based upon ''sound science.''

While waiting for science, he took back his pledge to reduce emissions in the United States and wants to let the same industries that gave us acid rain police themselves again. He wants to open up vast new tracts of federal lands for oil and gas drilling. Fuel efficiency standards have not moved. That is what energy and natural resource-extracting companies get for giving Bush $2.9 million in the 2000 presidential election, nine times more than they gave to Al Gore.

This week, it looks as if the sound science Bush was ''waiting'' for is here. His own Environmental Protection Agency slipped a copy of a report it filed with the United Nations onto its Web page that says the greenhouse effect is real. The culprit, as in all previous studies, is the ''human activity'' of burning fossil fuels.

The EPA report confirms that global warming is likely to result in increased flash floods in Appalachia, degraded water supply in the Great Lakes, the drying up of ponds for waterfowl in the Great Plains, the displacement of forests by grasslands in the Southeast, erosion and loss of coastal ecosystems along the Southeast coast, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and the endangering of fish in the Pacific Northwest.

''Hence,'' the report says, ''national policy decisions made now and in the longer-term future will influence the extent of any damage suffered by vulnerable human populations and ecosystems later in this century.''

Never underestimate the power of the séance to shroud enlightenment. Even though the report was reviewed before publication by officials at the State, Treasury, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture departments, the industry mystics worked Bush over so fast that less than a week after publication, Bush dismissed it as a ''report put out by the bureaucracy.''

The EPA now says its report is not news. That would be right except that it came from the Bush administration, which made it stunning.

Now it is news again because of how obviously even Bush's own research still does not matter.

With ''sound science'' finally at his disposal, Bush still has no plan other than to let the fossil fuel foxes run the greenhouse.