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TODAY Wednesday 4 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Roll, Storms, Roll

Total bummer. It will rain a ton tonight here in New York, and the winds will blow in excess of 50 miles per hour, but it won't be a blizzard because the air's not cold enough to turn the rain into snow. City officials are pleased, of course, because it looks as if $17 million in the snow-removal budget will go unspent this season. The guys in Sanitation are going to miss the overtime pay, as well as the chance to operate the new $150,000, 12-million BTU snow melter -- which "produces enough energy to heat 80 suburban homes," reports The New York Times.

More's the pity, we say. We want storms galore, with massive inconveniences and many chest colds. Most of all we want TV weather forecasters to go into exhaustive detail as they track the disturbances and to wonder aloud whether the current storm is somehow related to larger patterns of climate change. We want people talking about "the weird weather" in coffee shops.

We want these things for political purposes, of course. We want people to blame spectacularly unfortunate weather events on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, even if it's not provable, and we want them to support the Kyoto Treaty to stabilize emissions, even though it would take 30 years or so to reverse the atmospheric momentum. There; we said it. We want bad weather for the American people (pray for terrible floods in the spring, devastating fires in the late summer), and we want them to blame it on the combustion of fossil fuels.

New York may not be pulling its weight, but other parts of the continent are doing wonderfully. "El Nino Brings Flooding and High Winds to Coastal California," reads the headline this morning. Beachfronts assaulted; freeways closed; towns evacuated. (All in all, great television, lacking only some more shots of celebrities packing sandbags. Pamela Lee Anderson at the barricades of Malibu!) Things are gratifyingly terrible in Florida, too, where 200,000 people are without power. "Worst winter storm in 25 years," says a Miami fisherman. The great ice storm which hit northern sectors of New York State and New England last month was just a few degrees off course, latitude wise, or else Floridians and Californians could have enjoyed the video heaven of seeing 8 million New Yorkers grievously discomfited. Instead we all had to settle for the lesser fun of watching Quebeckers sleeping in gymnasiums.

Come March and April we might get some good footage of Midwesterners in rowboats, clutching the family photo album. And if next fall, at the follow-up-to-Kyoto meeting in Buenos Aires, the Clinton Administration can persuade China and India and other big Third World countries to adopt some language about being part of an emissions-reduction effort from the gitgo, and if the winter of 1998-1999 is sufficiently horrific, and if the economy keeps humming along -- well, you never know.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

However much political cold-bloodedness we muster around this office, it's not a patch on the realpolitik of Hibernicus, our resident politico. Today the Irish Iceman returns to his post as Capitol Hill Spy to urge environmentalists to pick just two senators committed to oppose the Kyoto Treaty. Then see to it that they are defeated. Hibernicus makes no mention of impaling their heads on pikes along Pennsylvania Avenue, but you get the idea.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

2/3: Land Purchase Fever
2/2: Groundhog Day in the Persian Gulf
1/30: Trees and Hormones
1/29: Things To Come (2)
1/28: Things To Come
1/27: 'Bye, 'Bye Brazil
1/26: Jaywalking and Jaydriving
1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish
1/20: Electromagnetic Sleuthing
1/16: Good News Way Down Under
1/15: Twenty-Four Forty or Fight!
1/14: Your Tax Dollars at Work
1/13: Johnny Mobil Appleseed
1/12: Superbowl, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Future of Al Gore
1/9: Goodbye, Delaware
1/8: Leaf Blowers, Old Cars, Class Conflict
1/7: The Great Improvement That Didn't
1/6: Proactive, Shmoactive
1/5: Mediocre Landscapes and Hope for the Planet
1/2: The Greatest Environmental Cause of the Year
12/31/97: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.