Al? Are ya' there? We need you to lead us through this...

[FourScore]

"It wasn't Katrina, not even close, but Seattle's storm of the century was no picnic. It gave me one more a taste of a future where the weather can suddenly turn--and destroy the habitability of our world. The storm hit Seattle mid-December with pounding rain and 70 mile-an-hour winds, reaching 110 miles per hour, 35 miles to the east, on the slopes of the Cascade Mountains. The ground was already soggy from the wettest November in Seattle history, and as the wind and rain uprooted trees, many fell on houses and cars, blocked roads and took down local power lines, cutting off heat and light to over a million residents in the city and surrounding areas. Thirteen people died. Sanitation systems overflowed, dumping tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Puget Sound. A week later, nearly a hundred thousand people were still living in the cold and the dark. Although my own lights stayed on, the next street was dark, and I could drive ten minutes and pass block after block of blackened houses. Those affected joked at first about sleeping with mittens and down parkas, then grew increasingly testy as gas stations couldn't pump gas, supermarkets were closed and what seemed at first a brief interruption turned into days without the basics of modern human existence...."

SNIP

"...America's major media haven't been entirely silent on global warming. You could even say 2006 brought a sea change in their public acknowledgment of its gravity. If you really read the superb Time or Parade magazine cover stories, or even the coverage in Business Week and Fortune, you couldn't fail to be concerned. Newspapers and TV networks have featured pictures of melting glaciers, drought-parched Australian farms, crumbling Arctic ice shelves, the October-November floods that affected almost two million people in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, and the submersion of the Indian island of Lohachara, which once had 10,000 inhabitants, by a combination of erosion and rising sea levels. Even Fox occasionally acknowledged that the weather seemed different, though the network continued to dismiss any notion that this constituted a crisis as "media hype."

Except in the case of Katrina, however, major media outlets treated most of America's extreme weather events as if wholly separate from the broader global shifts. They did nothing to help people connect any particular event with any other, or to understand the broader patterns. This fragmentation has extended to our political leaders, even many who care about the issue..."

http://www.alaskareport.com/opinion10025.htm