Hurricanes whose names begin with the last letters of the alphabet. Floods that come in waves. Tornados after the season is over. Perennial droughts and sweeping fires. Killer heat waves. Below-freezing temperatures that won't quit. Are we reaching critical threshold, the point at which it's too late to turn back from global warming? "Sure," says journalist and environmental activist Bob Reiss. "Every five years the International Panel on Climate Change predictions always get more dire. When they start using the line 'there might be surprises,' which they have, then that's when things get scary."

On November 3, Reiss, author of The Coming Storm: Extreme Weather and Our Terrifying Future (Hyperion 2001), visited Dutchess Community College to discuss the phenomenon of extreme weather and its implications. Ironically, it was 70 degrees outside.

Some states, some cities are embracing the idea of global warming, but [the Bush] administration isn't touching it," Reiss said. "Why? The answer is five words that I hate to hear: 'It's a very complicated situation.' Whenever anyone says that, it really means, 'I want you to shut up.' This administration isn't smart. They haven't learned enough. They just want to get their own way. And global warming is the mother of all complicated situations.

"In his first debate with Al Gore, George W. Bush said, 'I don't believe in global warming.' That's the greatest hoax ever concocted. But it's natural for a person who's a head of industry to find it hard to accept that their industry is damaging, and easy for someone who's far away from the damage to be in denial."

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was the first to call for an international treaty against and studies of global warming, said Reiss. "Why? Because she was a scientist. [Thatcher had a background in chemistry.] The first George Bush actually gave the study [begun during his and Thatcher's respective administrations] his blessing. We're now 20 years into it, so the next time you hear the White House say we need to start studying global warming, we've already been studying global warming for two decades. They just don't like the results."

The Bush administration, says Reiss, like New Hampshire Republican Senator John Sununu, doesn't "believe" in global warming. "He asked, 'How does a computer know what weather is going to be like in the future? Do we really want to change commerce and everything because a computer says in 200 years there will be a climate change?'" Reiss said. "To a computer, there's no difference between 2300 and 2005. We have records of 1500 years of weather, ice cores from Antarctica, and tree rings, to compare past weather with the present and we can predict what it will be like in 2050. If the computer keeps getting it right, we'll be able to predict the climate in 2300."

The concept of global warming developed in the late 1970s, following the 20 percent rise in carbon dioxide emissions between 1958 and 1975, said Reiss. "In 1979 the National Research Council, comprised of scientists from the University of Stockholm, the University of California, Harvard, and others, issued a statement saying that it appears that the warming of the globe will eventually occur. These were the top scientists talking, and when they say something might well be happening, it's time to listen."

NASA scientist Jim Hansen listened, and in 1988 announced the arrival of the Greenhouse Effect to Congress. "Jim Hansen predicted that we would know the effects of global warming were occurring if average people had a feeling that something was odd about the weather," he said. "Now they do, and they're right."

In the late 1990s, Reiss began testing Hansen's prediction by collecting the stories of scientists as well as survivors of extreme weather. The Coming Storm is a riveting explication of global warming for the average person, and includes interviews conducted worldwide with scientists and politicians, including Maumoon Gayoom, the tsunami-fearing president of the Maldives, insurance agents, law enforcers, first responders, airplane pilots and ship captains, and the survivors of events that, literally, took the media by storm: hurricanes like Floyd, Bonnie, and Daria, the 1998 Memphis tornado, the Missouri floods, and Europe's winter storm, Herta.

In 1999 Reiss went to talk to Hansen at NASA's New York office by Columbia University. "I was thinking, 'How can I ask about global warming in a way that makes sense to the average person?'" he recalled. "We were looking out the window of his office. I said, 'If all the predictions you're making are right, then is there anything that's going to look different out this window in 20 years?'

"Nobody had ever asked him that question before. He said, 'Well, there'll be more traffic.' I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Well, the West Side Highway will be underwater.' Then he said, 'The trees down there will be dead. There'll be tape on the windows across the street, because of the wind. There might be dikes dug, like in Holland, to keep from further flooding. The birds you see flying will be extinct, and there will be more police cars.' I said, 'What do police have to do with global warming, are you kidding?' He said, 'There's always more crime when it's hot.'"

Although there are "still some scientists who believe global warming is hooey," said Reiss, they are fewer than ever. "The head of the National Climactic Center in North Carolina was a doubter," he recalled. "I asked him, 'If I write about global warming causing a tornado in Tennessee, am I being irresponsible? Because there are always tornadoes.' And he said, 'No weather occurs now on earth that's not affected by global warning.' So I asked him, 'If it's real, what will we see?' He said, 'We'll have more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes.' And that's just what we're seeing now."

Opponents of global warming argue that "if the earth is hot now, it's possible it could have been hot in past climates, and the warming could be part of a natural variation of the climate, not caused by the people," Reiss explained. But several recent and ongoing studies prove that rising temperatures are not part of a natural pattern.

Reiss believes the strongest evidence of global warming is a University of Massachusetts watershed study using ice cores and other records taken from over 1,000 years. "This study involves a graph paper map of natural variation," he explained. "The map looks like two banks of a river flowing through time. The top shows how hot the earth gets, and the bottom of the graph shows how cold; the space in between shows any temperature within the natural variation. The scientists want to know, did the temperature ever go outside of the natural variation? Well, the temperature stayed inside the natural variation until 1990. Then the graph suddenly makes a shape like a hockey stick. We've had the hottest years on earth since the 1990s, including three years out of the past four."

Although the White House resists "cataloging how much carbon dioxide is emitted by the US into the atmosphere" and giving tax breaks for using alternative energy, Reiss sees hopeful signs of an end to the "failure of imagination" preventing the government from working to stop global warming. BP and Shell Oil are doing research on alternative energy, and scientists at Princeton are currently working on removing carbon dioxide from coal.

"But a prudent government takes out insurance on something like global warming, whether it believes in it or not," Reiss said. "We could change mileage rules for big cars and SUVs; change building codes, like Germany did, and institute new laws that make the codes compelling for tax payers to use; push for use of coal plants, a process which the White House wants to eliminate in 20 years. We can turn off our computers when we're not using them, cut down on our own energy use. Even taking a plastic bag at the supermarket makes a difference. We can keep modeling for other people, especially children. But more than anything we must keep politicians' feet to the fire."