As I lay across the couch at home in Boston this past Saturday, exhausted due to sweltering heat and thanking God that the next day I would be flying back to a place where eating a meal doesn’t always result in profuse perspiration, I turned on the TV to see Madonna performing to a hysterical crowd in London.

I was intrigued, and yet worried — not only by Madonna’s aging, but also by the fact that there was a concert on cable television, meaning that I had apparently missed out on some event that was so extraordinarily important that Madonna had to perform because of it. Before I could even consider what might have taken place, Madonna herself answered the question.

“OK, there’s a been a lot of talk about conserving energy tonight, but right now I don’t want anybody saving up their energy, I want you all to give it up!If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump it up and down — c’mon mother f–—s!”

I sat there, aghast. I wasn’t stunned that Madonna had just addressed a crowd as “mother f–—s” in front of millions around the world, but that I had been duped into watching an awareness concert about global warming, of all things.

I mean, I’m more than glad that they’re doing something to raise awareness, although I’m unsure how jumping up and down is helping to save the ecosystem. However, how horrifying is it to think that this was actually a wake-up call for some people?

Can you imagine someone sitting at home on a summer night, also drenched in sweat and having it finally dawn on him or her, because of this televised concert, that the planet is heating up? Were there naysayers looking into the glow of the television and thinking, “Well, Madonna would never lie to us, so this must be real?”

It didn’t surprise me in the least bit, however, that Al Gore was behind this. As though An Inconvenient Truth wasn’t reason enough to romanticize all the tree huggers of the world, he now had to one-up himself with a concert that would prove one rock-hard fact: The Foo Fighters are awesome to watch live.

I want to think that everyone who went to these concerts attended to become more aware of global warming, but that would be like saying that everyone who watched the State of the Union address did so to marvel at Bush’s foreign policy decisions.

Unfortunately, the truth is that everyone probably watched for the entertainment value. Let’s face it, how often are you going to see The Police and Kanye West on the same stage? They could be singing to stop the fight against Twinkie production,and we’d probably still watch by the millions.

Which brings up a key question: was it effective? Considering that here in the States the concert drew about 3 million viewers — making it the least-viewed program that evening — and didn’t do that much better in other parts of the world, it’s safe to say that it won’t be leading to a decrease in Hummer sales anytime soon.

Heck, the tribute concert for Princess Diana in the United Kingdom scored more viewers than Live Earth. That means the English found the slow destruction of our planet much less important than the death of a woman who married into royalty. Not that we’re any better. More of us were watching a bunch of cops chase idiots through backyards while the world continued to melt.

Where did this concert go wrong? How did it fail where Live Aid, which happened two decades ago, succeeded? Have we stopped caring about global issues? When Live Aid aired, more than 1.6 billion people around the world watched. It was considered one of the biggest broadcasts ever and raised millions of dollars. Not to mention the fact that the Internet, the source of most of Live Earth’s viewers, didn’t even exist yet.

Two decades later public appreciation for mass action seems to be declining. Unfortunately, the world’s problems continue to increase. And we don’t even bother watching celebrities talk about them, let alone change our habits.