Seventeen people died in a suicide car bomb in Iraq over the past day as a part of the continuing violence waged for the protection of American access to oil.

Meanwhile, 65 have died in the US as winter storms continue to grip the so called Sun Belt states. To date, the cold snap has featured snows in the Malibu resort area of California and 33 deaths in the unlikely states of Texas and Oklahoma.

In northern Europe, 10 people have died and hundreds of air flights have been cancelled due to violent storms and hurricane force winds slamming into Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and France. The storms have also forced the cancellation of hundreds of air flights, including 123 at London's Heathrow, in addition to shutting down ferries, closing schools and roads, and causing the abandonment of a container ship listing in the English Channel. Germany currently has 40,000 volunteers on standby in anticipation of damage and flood.

So where is the greatest risk? In the savage unpredictability of unstable climate? or in the irrational fear of a decimated Muslim nation whose 95th ranked GDP could scarcely buy a plane ticket across the Atlantic, let alone pose a genuine threat to the US? The Bush administration has its own answer, and they continue to spend $300 million dollars per day to ensure the growing impacts of global warming by subsidizing the United States ongoing oil addiction through their war in Iraq.

Fair comparison? You decide. But the fact remains that top analysts estimate the total cost of the war will be $1.2 to $2 trillion dollars. A fraction of that total could make the United States the global leader in solving climate change while simultaneously offering all citizens the security of our survival - as a civilization and a species.