What’s it going to take to get our government to wake up to the crisis of global warming?

We’ve had Hurricane Katrina, now Burma’s got Cyclone Nargis and there’s a big earthquake in China.

Now maybe not every single one of these events can be attributed to global warming, but scientists have been warning us for years that these are precisely the events that would become more pronounced as a result of climate change.

As Democracy Now reported, “a top Indian group that monitors climate change in South Asia has warned that Cyclone Nargis is a sign of things to come.”

“The victims of these cyclones are climate change victims,” said Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and Environment. “And their plight should remind the rich world that it is doing too little to contain its greenhouse gases.”

Too little—and soon too late, unless we act now.

Bill McKibben, writing in the LA Times on Sunday, warned, “It’s dusk on planet Earth.”

He quoted NASA’s preeminent global warming scientist, Jim Hansen, who listed six tipping points. And we’re already past at least one of them, McKibben noted.

If we don’t act quickly, we won’t be ale to “preserve a planet similar to than on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,” Hansen said.

This will take not only action by green consumers at the individual level. It’s going to require a change in policy.

As McKibben said, “You just can’t do this one lightbulb at a time.”

We need to pressure whoever our next President is to lead the world on a new post-Kyoto treaty that will rapidly decrease CO2 emissions—not to abandon the world, as George Bush literally has done.

We’ve got to make this issue a priority in the November elections.