Terror! Terror! Danger, Will Robinson!

It's been obvious for quite some time, to any thinking person, at least, that the Bush junta uses terror to try and bolster Bush's popularity. For a while, it even worked. Studies done in 2004 showed that when reminded of terror, Americans supported Bush by a larger percentage than if they hadn't been reminded of terror. (Why this should be so is a separate, but interesting, question, as, Goddess knows, Bush has made us less secure, rather than more secure. I was in a cab today where Limbaugh was bloviating about how liberals want Americans to be scared of terror. Projection. I'm telling you, Jungians will be studying these folks for generations There is a shadow at work here that is absolutely incredible in both size and force.) Of course, Bush was telling biographers even before he was elected that he believed that the road to a "successful presidency" where he could get "everything passed that he wanted to get passed" (aka tax breaks for the rich and the chance to raid the treasury) was to be a "war preznit" and, then, when he ran in 2004, he kept repeating, whether it had anything to do with the topic or not, that he was a "war preznit." It was like the creepy guy at the bar who keeps telling you, apropos of nothing, that he's a "successful business man." Nothing could make you want to get away faster. And, FINALLY, Americans appear to be getting tired of hearing Chicken Little run around and cry wolf, to mix some barnyard metaphors.

But I got to thinking today about reasons why people truly should be terrified, or at least as terrified as it is possible to be and still engage in rational thought and action. There is a real crisis threatening the very existence of our civilization, but it's not radical Islam. For example, today's BBC reports that The meltdown of Greenland's ice sheet is speeding up, satellite measurements show. Data from a US space agency (Nasa) satellite show that the melting rate has accelerated since 2004. If the ice cap were to completely disappear, global sea levels would rise by 6.5m (21 feet).

If you've seen An Inconvenient Truth (and if you haven't you should, right now!), you know that a rise of even part of that amount of sea water will result in the loss of a huge swath of currently-habitated land. The people who currently live in those places aren't going to grow gills and build beautiful bubble-shaped cities under the sea. They're going to move into countries, states, and towns that are already inhabited by other people. At the least, we're talking massive social disruption and strains upon the remaining lands. More likely, we're talking wars, which, although they'll be for land, will be caused by rising waters.

BBC notes that: [e]stimated monthly changes in the mass of Greenland's ice sheet suggest it is melting at a rate of about 239 cubic kilometres (57.3 cubic miles) per year. This figure is about three times higher than an earlier estimate of the mass loss from Greenland made using the first two years of Grace measurements. I find it interesting that this data came from NASA satellites. The Bush junta has been trying very hard over the past few years to change NASA's mission and funding to focus on bullshit macho trips to Mars and to make it impossible for NASA to engage in this sort of monitoring of the Earth.

Some have argued recently that over-hyping the dangers inherent in global climate change may do more harm than good. That would only be true if there were nothing that we could do about it. But there's quite a bit that we can do about it, from the very micro level (part of my exercise today will come from carting grey water from my bathtub to my garden) to the city level (see, e.g., Chicago), to the national level (see, e.g., throwing the Bush junta out of office and taxing their sponsors, the oil companies, until they are small enough to be drowned in a bathtub) to the global (see, e.g., World Water Week in Stockholm). We should be afraid. We should be very afraid. And, then, we should do something about it.