The gunfight aboard the Titanic

Look, how can I say this politely? George W. Bush has been reduced to saying "Boo!" as a means of rallying the American people to his Great War on Terror. He's made the comparisons of al-Qaeda to Hitler, to Lenin, and by a parity of reasoning, of himself to Churchill. The rhetorical bag is now officially empty.

Meanwhile, this from the British Antarctic Survey, a research group based in Cambridge, that same university where Stephen Hawking occupies the Lucasian Chair in Mathematics. That same Mr. Hawking who recently advised us to colonize Mars as a way of dealing with global warming:

"The core [from Antarctic drilling] shows that carbon dioxide was always between 180 parts per million (ppm) and 300 ppm during the 800,000 years. However, now it is 380 ppm. Methane was never higher than 750 parts per billion (ppb) in this timescale, but now it stands at 1,780 ppb.

"But the rate of change is even more dramatic, with increases in carbon dioxide never exceeding 30 ppm in 1,000 years -- and yet now carbon dioxide has risen by 30 ppm in the last 17 years.

"The rate of change is probably the most scary thing because it means that the Earth systems can't cope with it," Dr Wolff told the British Association meeting at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

"On such a crowded planet, we have little capacity to adapt to changes that are much faster than anything in human experience."

"The most scary thing" indeed. More scary even than dynamite-laden Muslims, in my way of thinking. Scarier than bird flu. Scarier than the "obesity pandemic." Scarier than just about anything. I wonder if we have become too jaded, too inured to the perilous state of the modern world, to comprehend fully what Dr. Wolff is saying. He is looking back 800,000 years for comparison, and he is saying that CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere are off the chart. He is also saying that CO2 concentrations are rising at a rate that is completely unprecedented during that same time period, 58 times faster than any previous increase of 30 parts per million.

We are in very deep trouble. We're obsessed with episodic events in which crazy people occasionally explode stuff and kill people, and we're paying virtually no attention on a national level to a certainty guaranteed by the physical universe, by atmospheric science, to destroy us all in Hawking's apocalyptic nightmare vision of the runaway greenhouse. On the maiden cruise of modern civilization we're drifting through a dark sea on a white ship, while gunfire rings out on the grand staircase, and bombs explode in the ball room, as we struggle insanely to "survive" aboard the vessel. While we sail, in blind ignorance, toward our fate.