In the disaster-flick genre, there are always two crucial moments when characters must commit acts of breathtaking stupidity, or else there would be no imminent danger and thus no movie. One, of course, is when somebody we're meant to care about decides to run toward the erupting volcano, rather than away from it. The other comes earlier in the movie, when some Benighted Authority Figure (B.A.F.) looks out the window at the columns of smoke and brimstone belching from nearby Mount Sinister and snaps, "Problem? I don't see any problem, and I'll tell you one thing: There's not gonna be any evacuation, not on my watch. Now everybody back to work."

Bush is playing the B.A.F. in a movie titled "Heat Wave," and Irwin Allen -- long ago gone to that Lost World in the sky -- would be proud.

Humankind is changing, or at least helping change, Earth's climate by pumping carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases into the atmosphere, mostly by burning fossil fuels. The United States is doing more of this than any other nation. The consequences aren't coming; they're already here: Some scientists believe thousands have already died because of man-made atmospheric warming.

And how many words of his State of the Union speech did Bush devote to global climate change? How many to the steps he's taking to reverse it? How many to dealing with the all-but-irreversible warming that's already taken place? The answer, by my count, would be zero, zero and zero.

Not on my watch. Everybody back to work.

"The rest of the world is going forward on global warming," said David Doniger, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who now serves as climate center policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group with offices in Washington. "Even some of the states are going forward on their own -- Schwarzenegger in California, Pataki in New York. The black hole on global warming is here inside the Beltway."

This is one of those issues that cause a lot of eyes to glaze over, understandably. For one thing, if you follow press reports, scientists can't seem to agree on just what we should be so worried about. Eminent British researchers, writing in December in the science journal Nature, demonstrated to peer-reviewed satisfaction that the 2003 heat wave in Europe, which killed around 15,000 people, was probably caused by human-induced global warming. At the same time, some equally eminent oceanologists are worried that warming will shut down the Gulf Stream ocean current in the Atlantic, eventually turning green and temperate Europe into another Siberia.

We're told that the ice cap is melting in the Arctic and the ice shelf is crumbling in the Antarctic; that extreme weather events such as hurricanes will become more frequent and unpredictable, or already have; that the tropics-loving mosquitoes that carry malaria are already buzzing their way north.

Yes, it's confusing. It's also true that a few qualified scientists don't believe global warming is real and that a few-and-a-half believe that even if it is getting warm in here, humanity isn't to blame. But those are minority views. The consensus is that global warming is real, that it's happening and that we humans -- with our cars, and especially our power plants, burning coal, oil and gas, and releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- are partly or mostly or entirely responsible.

In 12 days the Kyoto Protocol -- the international treaty designed to cap and reduce carbon emissions -- goes into effect. Other developed nations have spent most of the past decade preparing for Kyoto; British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's staunchest ally in the Iraq war, is one of Kyoto's biggest supporters. The United States declines to have anything to do with the Kyoto agreement, which means the biggest single source of the emissions that apparently are heating up the planet will not participate in the negotiated solution.

Developing industrial powers (and coal-burners) such as China and India are not bound by the treaty, which is one of the reasons the United States has shunned it. Few believe that Kyoto is a panacea. Many other world leaders believe it's a necessary beginning.

Which brings me to those beaches in Rio, where in 1992 I covered the Earth Summit -- the first truly global environmental conference. That meeting, attended by dozens of heads of state, including then-President George H.W. Bush, started the process that led to the Kyoto agreement. The United States wasn't exactly leading the charge, but at least we were there.

And now? Our B.A.F. in chief asks "What volcano?" and tells everybody to get back to work.

Eugene Robinson is an Assistant managing editor at the Washington Post.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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