Maybe the drought isn't so bad after all

Not yet, anyway.

According to the U.N. panel of scientists, whose latest report is a synthesis of three previous ones, enough carbon dioxide already has built up that it imperils islands, coastlines and a fifth to two-thirds of the world's species.

As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, according to the report.

Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, says the report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore this year.

The panel portrays the Earth hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace and warns of inevitable human suffering. It says emissions of carbon, mainly from fossil fuels, must stabilize by 2015 and go down after that.

Meanwhile, in Washington:

Despite the report’s added emphasis on a list of “reasons for concern” about the continuing growth of long-lived emissions that trap heat, senior White House officials said Friday and Saturday that it remained impossible to define a “dangerous” threshold in the concentration of greenhouse gases or resulting warming.

This has always been the response, despite President Bush’s repeated pledges to uphold commitments made by the United States when his father signed, and the country ratified, the first climate treaty, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change. One provision of that treaty is that countries pledge to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases at a level avoiding “dangerous” interference with the climate system.

We really need to send these clowns packing and get a team with a clue back in charge. It's not like we're going to have too many second chances to get this right.