Seattle -- Global warming, according to King County Executive Ron Sims, is the challenge that will define what humanity will be in the 21st century. Sims was receiving the Sierra Club's Edgar Wayburn Award, jointly with Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, for making his county a climate-solutions leader. Sims issued an impassioned call that, in addition to framing global warming as an economic opportunity here in the United States, the Sierra Club should ensure that it becomes an economic-development engine for the Third World: "Show them the technologies they can use to become zero-carbon emitters themselves, and then export to create jobs and wealth for their people. Global warming is going to kill 10 million people in Africa alone -- we need to make the connection."
Last Wednesday the Seattle Times wrote "They're not laughing at Ron Sims now," recanting a 1988 editorial in which the paper blasted Sims when he was a member of the County Council and called for a county study of the global warming problem. In 1988 the Times wrote that Sims was belching "hyperbolic clouds of rhetorical gas," and that "the sky-is-falling, icecaps-are melting, oceans are rising rhetoric must be tempered by common sense."
In 2006, he is featured in a cover story in US News and World Report for his leadership.
While the Seattle Times in 1988 may merely have been skeptical, those who continue to deny the science are worse than that -- they are calculatingly cynical. U.S. Senator James Inhofe, in particular, seems determined to prevent Congress from recognizing reality. He went on CNN to declare that Al Gore was "full of crap" on global warming, that the whole concept of climate change was a "hoax." Then he "turned up the heat" on reporters like AP's Seth Borenstein and Tom Brokaw, for honestly reporting global warming science, calling Brokaw "a pawn of the Democratic party."
And, in yet another alarming piece of evidence, a new study shows that an increase in the forest fire season due to global warming is the main source of the increase in catastrophic fires in the west.
Inhofe is increasingly isolated. Today's USA Today reports that even GOP conservatives in the west are rising in rebellion at the Bush Administration's proposals to open up areas like Valle Vidal in New Mexico and the Rocky Mountain Front to oil and gas, with Wyoming Senator Craig Thomas declaring that "most" of our national forests should be off limits to oil and gas drilling. And in the House, Republicans have announced oversight hearings into whether the Bush Administration has been cooking the books on climate science.
What part of the future doesn't Inhofe get?