The first time, of course, was in the aftermath of Katrina and I’m not referring to the criminally negligent response by FEMA and the Bush administration (that’s a whole other story). What I’m referring to is the lack of regulation of the levies, decades of disregard despite warnings that the dikes would not stand up to a Category 3 storm.

Now, government regulations fail New Orleans again, the Deepwater Horizon spill not only set to become the second worst oil spill in history (as of May 27) but responsible for the loss of 11 lives. And all because federal regulations on offshore drilling had been relaxed and blatantly ignored.

It should be more and more evident that we ignore the warning signs to the peril of our planet — and so, our own peril — but we seem to be a nation that would prefer to whistle in the dark than confront the roots of our fears.

Two incidents this year make my last statement painfully apparent. The first, hacked emails from a British University server, became a huge non-controversy (CNN led with the story for days) — and which amounted to a fundamental misreading of scientific jargon by lay persons, a revelation to the general public that climate scientists (and the scientific community at large) don’t always agree on certain points and that, if anything, those scientists could be a little more transparent.

However, the hacked e-mails did nothing to disprove global warming — quite the contrary, the emails (when put into proper context) showed no less a consensus among scientists that global warming is real and man-made. By March, an independent commission affirmed that, while the scientists could be a little less obtuse, they had not comprised their research or data to any stretch of the imagination.

By that time, the saner climate change deniers had kind of shuffled off with an, “Oops, guess we got that one wrong, too,” and crawled back into their hidey holes to hatch another specious argument.

However, it’s sad to see some of the more unhinged climate change deniers still glomming onto the hacked e-mails as “proof” that climate change is a hoax. Even though the case was closed long ago on the hacked email kerfluffle, the truly stupid continue to hold that incident up as some sort of holy grail of truth, no doubt while they await the arrival of Big Foot to entertain the trailer park with Gas Music from Jupiter.

The second incident involved several record snowstorms on the east coast. Never mind that most global warming models predict that, as the planet heats up, summers will grow longer, dryer and warmer while winters will become shorter and more severe. Ignoring that (or, more likely, ignorant of that) Fox News commentators went into their obnoxious frat boy act, hooting and guffawing, while pointing to the storms as evidence that global warming was just some big, nasty left-wing lie meant to rain on their pointy-headed party.

However, the frat boy antics seemed to get shelved after NASA reported January 2010 to be the warmest on record in their dataset. Then, a month later, the warmest February on record and again, a month later, the warmest March. And, earlier this week — a report that we experienced the warmest April on record within the NASA dataset. It should go without saying that NASA also reported that it was the warmest Jan-Feb-Mar-April period on record.

In fact, a record for warmest 12-month average was set in March (beating out the previous record set in 2007), a record that was easily broken with last month’s temperatures. Interestingly enough, NASA predicted back in January of 2009 that either last year or this year would be the warmest on record.

Despite some specious claims making the rounds that the earth is in a trend of global cooling, the facts contradict the spin. In an independent analysis commissioned by the Associate Press late last year, statisticians examined the data and declared that this past decade has been the warmest in modern records and, extrapolating from tree-ring records, the warmest in thousands of years.

An inconvenient truth, indeed.

Of course, the global warming deniers allege that the scientists claiming the validity of global warming are pushing a left-wing, anticapitalist agenda, a contention as silly as it is sad and a conspiracy ranking up there with fluoride in the water as a means of communist mind-control, the U.N. as the next step to a one-world government, the most absurd LaRouchian and John Birchist conspiracies ever devised.

Yet, those same deniers fail to mention that almost all the funding for anti-global warming research (and think tanks) comes from the oil and coal industries — the very industries implicated in the production of greenhouse gases (and who stand to lose the most through the restriction of greenhouse gases).

Rather than throw my lot in with partisan pundits, tin foil hat theorists and the one percent of one percent of scientists who claim “proof” that global warming is a hoax, I’d prefer to listen to the 99.9 percent of scientists warning that, hey, this thing is real and we need to do something about it now, if not yesterday.

I’d rather acknowledge the signs and try and avoid the peril.