An inconvenient summer

Global warming is back on the agenda -- thanks not only to Al Gore's successful documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," but also as people welter under punishing, record-breaking heat. To get a sense of the local economic impact, here's a report from Rome, Georgia:

This summer's record-breaking temperatures and arid conditions have area farmers and many business owners looking for some relief.

Even with this weekend's rainfall, it's been a brutal summer for area agriculture. Since May, Floyd County has experienced 17 record-tying or record-breaking high temperatures.

Keith Mickler, agricultural agent at the Floyd County Extension Office, said the lack of rain is affecting local crops much more than the high temperatures.

"The drought is what's got most of the farmers concerned," he said. "Plants can take the heat, but they just don't take the dry weather well."

Water wars are even a bigger issue downstream in Florida, where towns depending on Atlanta runoff face dry rivers and threaten the area's sharing agreements:

Lately, there hasn't been much water to give. The entire region is withering under a drought. Rivers and streams in Georgia, Alabama and north Florida are running low. Northeast of Atlanta, Lake Lanier --- the main reservoir between Atlanta and the Gulf of Mexico --- is more than 6 feet below full and dropping.

This is exactly the situation at the center of the 16-year legal battle over Lanier and the Chattahoochee River known as the tri-state water wars: How do the three states share water when there isn't enough?

The issue isn't whether any given drought or heat spike is directly related to global warming -- it's that there's a scientific consensus (current administration apologetics aside) that global warming is real, and will surely make such problems more common and more severe in the future.

Public fears about global warming are clearly hitting a nerve. Leaders in Washington seem content to dither with study commissions and foot-dragging, but defenders of the status quo are being more aggressive on other fronts.

For example, clearly alarmed by the declaration by 86 evangelical Christian leaders earlier this year that "millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors," a group of "what problem?" Christians -- with the Orwellian name, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance -- will be holding a press conference in D.C. tomorrow to present "scientific, economic, ethical, and theological evidence" that cutting carbon emissions is a bad idea, and that global warming "may on balance be more beneficial than harmful to humankind."

Tell that to the people of Rome, Georgia and further south. Or to the 59% of the U.S. public who think that global warming demands "immediate or some action" (as opposed to a paltry 28% who want "more research").