Nature’s destructive power, when unleashed, is so immense it ought to frighten us all into becoming committed members of the environmental movement.

Consider Krakatoa.

A volcanic island off the coast of Java in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, Krakatoa blew itself to bits in 1883. The explosion, which was heard almost 3,000 miles away and detected by instruments on the other side of the globe, all but obliterated the island.

Shock waves from Krakatoa created oceanic waves more than 100 feet high, which hurtled into the coastline of the Indonesian archipelago, killing over 35,000 people. The sky filled with volcanic ash and dust that swirled around the upper atmosphere, deflecting enough incoming sunlight to lower world temperatures.

When Krakatoa erupted, Indonesia’s population was about 35 million. On Dec. 26, 2005, after Indonesia’s population had increased to about 250 million, mostly packed into coastal lowlands, a powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean off Sumatra caused a tsunami, with results more apocalyptic than Krakatoa. It left over 250,000 dead and millions homeless.

Though human activity did not lead to these natural disasters in 1883 and 2005 – Indonesia lies along an unstable geological belt prone to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tidal waves – nature’s fearful wrath has been compounded by mankind’s increasing vulnerability to natural disasters, our “willful blindness” toward environmental problems and our propensity for creating our own cataclysms.

This fact hasn’t yet registered on the radar screens of the White House, or a substantial portion of Capitol Hill, where national leaders have lacked the will to enact environmental restrictions – decried as costing businesses money and threatening jobs – to enhance our chances of long-term survival as a species.

Turning the tide

Political battles are currently raging over the imposition of mandatory measures to counteract global warming.

“You’re not just off a little, you’re totally wrong,” said powerful Texas Congressman Joe Barton, the leading Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in scolding Al Gore, during the former vice president’s testimony about the threat of global warming at Congressional hearings in March.

Barton was disputing the existence of the “greenhouse effect,” the term for climate change used by scientists to describe the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Gore’s Academy-award winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” has helped focus public attention on this phenomenon.

There is broad scientific consensus that high atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, and other combustion gases, are trapping solar energy in the earth’s atmosphere, warming the air and oceans. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued two reports this year which unequivocally support this conclusion and predict a bleak future, unless prompt measures are taken to address global warming.

Climate shift threatens to melt polar and mountain glaciers (which are already receding), raise ocean levels, and inundate coastal plains, where about 70 percent of the world’s population lives. It is also believed global warming increases the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and other violent weather, expands desert regions and extends the geographic reach of tropical microbial diseases like malaria.

The world’s response to climate change, the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, has been steadfastly rejected by the U.S. Since taking office, President Bush has refused to commit to Kyoto, which aims to decrease greenhouse emissions by 2012. The president has argued that the Kyoto restrictions would prove too costly to our economy and, by excluding developing countries like China and India, be unfair to U.S. industry.

Since the U.S. is responsible for almost a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, its abstention from Kyoto has been a significant blow to the treaty’s effectiveness.

The tide could be turning, however. China, this week, announced its willingness to participate in carbon dioxide regulation once Kyoto expires in 2012, which could lead to additional pressure on the U.S. to act.

The Supreme Court, in a landmark 5-4 decision earlier this month, rejected the Bush administration claim that the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, a judgment hailed by environmentalists as signaling the overdue entree of federal rulemaking into the fight against global warming.

Dose of doom

Given our vulnerability as a species to nature’s menace, should we provoke it unnecessarily by ignoring scientific conclusions on climate change? Humans, after all, are just one of thousands of animal species on this planet, and as susceptible to extinction as any other.

There are ticking environmental time bombs, in addition to global warming, which could lead to our extinction. The world’s population has doubled to nearly 7 billion within the past 40 years, putting immense strain on the planet’s resources. Coral reefs, rain forests, wetlands and other habitats serving to sustain nature’s delicate balance have been degraded. Our air, water and earth have been polluted with toxins.

Reducing greenhouse gases, painful though it may be, is one of the more realizable environmental goals. Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources has become economically feasible and desirable, due to improving technology, dwindling petroleum reserves, higher energy prices and the political instability of many oil-producing countries.

Other environmental ailments, such as overpopulation, will be harder to cure, but we need to begin somewhere, and global warming seems as good a starting point as any. However, the reluctance of political leaders, as well as the public, to embrace policies to combat this trend indicate it will probably take a mega-dose of impending doom to motivate the nation to action.

There’s nothing like the prospect of human extinction to scare the Krakatoa out of us.