Environmental Talk

The evidence for the catastrophic effects of global warming is riiight here….

One of the really fascinating things about the global warming debate is the constant shell game that is played as people try to extrapolate long-range climate change from short-term weather patterns.

The problem is the weather keeps changing. It’s funny like that.

This leads to the popular evidence cited for global warming coming in and out of fashion faster than the latest specialty burger at McDonalds.

Al Gore took great pains to link global warming to shrinking ice shelves in Antarctica, dying polar bears in Canada and the retreat of glaciers on Kilimanjaro. In the wake of Katrina, much was made of how we were entering a new era of storm frequency and severity.

But that was soooo last year.

This year’s trendy, headline-grabbing, nature fact-of-the-day is the melting of Artic ice, opening up the potential for a navigable Northwest Passage.

You don’t hear too much these days about the ice in Antarctica. I’m just guessing here, but maybe that’s because sea ice area in that part of the globe just surpassed the previous record high-levels.

Polar bears are out of fashion now that research has shown their population has increased six-fold since the 1980s. An amazing species growth in the face of the rise in the very greenhouse gases that were supposed to be a threat to their existence.

Global warming as the cause of glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro has been thoroughly debunked, but there’s really no harm in remaining impressed with Gore’s knowledge of Hemingway.

And remember how we’ve been rocked the past couple of years by an increased number of severe hurricanes? Yeah, me neither.

Even disregarding forecasts by some of the preeminent hurricane scientists that global warming could actually decrease the number and severity of hurricanes, it’s hard to fill an evening news show with the whole picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words thing when all you have to show for your global warming cause-and-effect projections is a few downed tree limbs and three inches of water in someone’s basement.

If the current record of prediction holds up, it turns out the threat of a new Britney Spears single could cause more damage to your children’s future than climate change.

But that won’t really matter, if you’ll only keep your eye on the shell with the global warming pea under it.

It’s the one in the middle, right? ….

global warming, climate change, polar bears, hurricanes, ice area, Northwest Passage, Britney Spears