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Meanwhile, back at Washington DC, the unseasonable warmth is pushing up spring irises and preventing the zoo’s bears from hibernating. Pretty much the only things that haven’t thawed are the minds of our nation’s leaders, who are consumed with finding the political azimuth on a way forward and out of the Iraq quagmire, where Americans and Iraqis perish and war profiteers stuff their pockets with billions in tax payer dollars. The tragic irony is that a likely raison d’etre for war, the black gold at the end of the Iraqi rainbow, is not only the fountainhead of unconscionable human suffering and hundreds of billions in American taxpayer debt, but also one of the world’s largest reserves of carbon – the stuff that causes those Manhattan-sized ice floaters adrift in the arctic.

Despite an overwhelming body of scientific evidence tying carbon emissions to global warming, a dwindling but vocal few claim that a debate still rages regarding the cause, even the reality, of global climate change. While this debate is largely confined to the air conditioned, fair and balanced cocoon of Fox News, back here on planet Earth, things are getting hot hot hot, and there is virtually no disagreement among the world’s leading (and credible) climatologists as to the cause.

A leading contender for bible for lay global warming skeptics is Michael Crichton’s fictional State of Fear. In State of Fear, a suave, super spy/scientist/Olympic athlete with the aid of his girlfriends (could someone be experiencing a mid-life crisis?) saves the world from a deadly organization of eco-terrorists (“NERF”). The diabolical NERF, more akin to James Bond’s SPECTRE than PETA, employs Dr. No-esque gadgetry to stage spectacular environmental disasters in order to frighten ordinary folk into backing (and funding) their evil scientific agenda.

After bombarding the reader with reams of cherry-picked data denying the very existence of global warming, Mr. Crichton concedes in his fine print author’s message that the Earth’s climate really is warming after all, and that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is probably due to human activity. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists must have missed these little details before awarding Crichton their annual journalism award in February 2006.

The debate is over. The notion that carbon emissions have nothing to do with global warming is as dumb (and tragic) as the idea the cigarette smoking is good for you. Wasting precious time, resource, and wishful thinking on further debates and studies to confirm the reality and causes of global warming is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Nearly 95 years ago, Titanic lookout Frederick Fleet cried: “iceberg, dead ahead!” The crew attempted in vain to port around the berg, but the frantic last-minute jibe had no hope of saving the doomed vessel. That’s because it takes a long time to turn a big ship around. The real missed opportunity to save Titanic actually came long before, when the ship’s captain caved to the White Star Line’s captain of industry, who insisted on driving the ship at full speed, dismissing those annoying iceberg warnings. The iceberg turned out to be real after all, the unsinkable ship sank, and hundreds of people died. The story of Titanic is a parable for our times, as our present day captains of industry implore us to ignore the warnings of science and drive our carbon-emitting engines at full speed toward that iceberg, which truly is dead ahead.