If doubters about global warming are looking for a real-case metaphor, they can go back several decades to the debate over whether smoking caused cancer.
Through phony front groups and rigged studies, tobacco companies convinced Americans that smoking was safe. Now, however, cemeteries are filled with thousands who swallowed that cruel deception, and millions of living smokers are coughing their way toward painful ends.
Conservative politicians protective of smokestack industries and CEOs of industries that spew pollutants are replaying the tobacco sham. Global warming, they assert, is a matter of Nature's temperature cycles with no "good science" proving it's manmade. Most Idahoans, according to pollsters, wisely believe something is afoot, however.
While waiting for the Earth to be fried, species are dying, glaciers are melting, water resources are imperiled and new dust bowls are driving ranchers and farmers into ruin.
Had gullible smokers listened to the warning voices about cancer and simply read mortality statistics, millions of lives could've been saved.
Likewise, if Americans heeded alarms of scientists about global warming and read the evidence, they'd be howling for immediate measures, however small and piecemeal such as U.S. Sen. Harry Reid's (D-Nevada) proposed bond financing of renewable energy systems for public schools to stem destruction of the climate.
The pity is that leaders, including President Bush, won't acknowledge a real weapon of mass destruction—global warming—when they see it and lead the way to remedies on a larger scale.
