When Icebergs Attack

A Nielsen/Oxford University survey showed that thirty-seven percent of more than twenty-seven thousand Internet users in fifty-four countries said they were "very concerned" about climate change, down from forty-one percent in a similar poll two years ago. "Global concern for climate change cools off," the clever folks over at Nielsen suggested. In the United States, the number fell from thirty-four percent to twenty-five.

Who can blame them? Wars, the economy, health care, Team Edward or Team Jacob: There are so many things to be worried about right now, how can we expect Americans to be more interested in climate change than Gatorade discontinuing Tiger Woods' perhaps unfortunately named beverage?

Maybe it has something to do with the creative accounting being found in e-mails from scientists working to convince the world that it has something to fear. If you wanted to start a war based on trumped-up data about weapons of mass destruction, that would be terrible. But it didn't keep us out of the desert. If you wanted to assert that the votes of thousands upon thousands of concerned individuals were miscast or simply "lost," in Afghanistan or right here in the United States, that would be considered "fudging the numbers" too. But we still ended up putting the two pinheads in question into office.

Global warming is real. It's happening, and those of us Internet users who happen to look outside on any given day might soon be persuaded to reevaluate our level of concern. Check with your friends down in Sydney, Australia, where an island-size iceberg has broken away from the Antarctic ice shelf and is currently terrorizing local shipping lanes. Monstrous as it sounds, it will be gone in a couple weeks, just like our good pal Frosty. There is, however, no magic hat to bring it back to life. Maybe we're asking the wrong sample. Try polling the two hundred protesters who were arrested in Copenhagen Sunday.