Consider the news from the real world, the one where change is measured with satellites and thermometers, not focus groups: Arctic ice is melting on an unbelievable scale -- an area the size of Britain disappeared each week in late summer as the record for minimum ice cover, set in 2005, was shattered by more than 400,000 square miles, meaning about a 27 percent loss. Forget the Petraeus report -- what historians will note about September 2007 is that the Northwest Passage was free of ice for the first time since humans started keeping track.

Shaken scientists see every prediction about the future surpassed by events. As Martin Parry, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told reporters this month, "We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it's us."

The panel's chair, Rajendra Pachauri, offered the planet an absolute deadline: We need to be producing less carbon dioxide -- which is to say burning less coal, gas and oil -- by 2015 at the latest, and after that we would need "very sharp reductions" or else there is no hope of avoiding an eventual temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius and the accompanying prospect of catastrophe.

Such news has finally begun to penetrate the bubble of denial that has surrounded Washington for two decades. President Bush, after ignoring the issue for six years, has convened a conference of the major carbon-emitting nations to begin considering . . . something. Bush said in a speech yesterday that "we acknowledge there is a problem," but few expect the process to amount to much; cynics see it as a way to derail ongoing U.N.-sponsored talks for a firm agreement on reducing emissions.