President Bush turned a cold shoulder to the latest report on global warming.
This one wasn't the work of wild-eyed dirt-worshippers. It came from a group of agencies in Bush's own government. Still, the president put his fingers in his ears, and the usual conservative groups chanted a chorus of "junk science."
Who said liberals have a lock on the knee-jerk reaction?
OK, here are simple facts from the recent headlines.
The sea level at Atlantic City rose 16 inches during the last century. The rate of increase now stands at 24 inches per 100 years. The latest measurements show the rate is speeding up.
Results of 47 years of research in England found the first spring flowering of 385 plant species has advanced by an average of 15 days. Some plants are moving north with warmer summers. Orchids have been sighted on the north coast of the English Channel.
Italy has signed on to a $2.6 billion system of floodgates to try to save the city of Venice from the rising seas, but the latest data suggest that within a century even this may not be enough.
The world's weather is not fixed into permanent, balanced zones. Just as the local weather changes during the day, and through the seasons, Earth's climate changes over time. Not long ago, in geological terms, there were glaciers in what is now Erie, Pa., and Hartford, Ct.
Tree rings and fossil pollen prove the climate was shifting before humans began to add their smog to the mix.
The planet's last warm spell was in the Middle Ages, long before coal-burning power plants and the internal combustion engine. Then, vineyards prospered in southern England, more than 300 miles further north than grapes now grow, and the Vikings raised corn in Greenland.
But the modern warming trend is different. Most researchers lay much of the blame for it on carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" from cars and industry.
The people who don't want to accept that say this warming trend is the work of the same natural forces that caused the last one, forces which are still poorly understood.
Humankind is part of nature. To separate man into one category and the rest of nature into another is a false dichotomy.
It is getting hotter. And we are at least partially responsible.
The stakes are high. Even the Middle Ages' heat wave brought famines, floods and social dislocation. And our world is more crowded, more fragile than theirs.
The wind and the weather, the grapes and the orchids cannot reason, cannot change what the laws of nature and physics tell them to do.
We can. We can learn and we can change.
The new report, drawing from a variety of recent studies, projected average temperatures to rise from 4.5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century. We won't be around to see whether the 100-year projections come true. That does not absolve us.
The report comes at a moment when the U.S. is absorbed in post-Sept. 11 anguishing. We brood over what we knew, but did nothing about, and what cost we paid for the willful ignorance of men in power.