Stake My Future on a Hell of a Past
I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain
You give something up for everything you gain
Since every pleasure’s got an edge of pain
Pay for your ticket and don’t complain
The U.S. and Australia remain the major countries that have not signed on to the Kyoto Protocol. The accord, drafted by the United Nations, looks to set greenhouse gas emissions back to pre-1990 levels.
Before we get all jacked up about going back to 1990 on anything, we should take a look at what was going on at that time.
Up until 1990 Germany was still divided into East and West Germany and the World Health Organization still listed homosexuality as a disease.
In 1990, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Alan Hale, Jr. (Skipper from Gilligan’s Island) died. Milli Vanilli had their Grammy revoked for lip-syncing; Cop Rock, a musical cop show, premiered and was canceled almost immediately; Iraq invaded Kuwait; and Buster Douglas knocked out a seemingly invincible Mike Tyson for the heavyweight championship.
There were natural disasters and extreme weather events back then, too - contrary to much of what we hear today about how much worse current weather conditions are. There was a 7.7 Richter earthquake in the Philippines that killed 1600 people and in Phoenix, Arizona the temperature reached a record high of 122 degrees.
As is the case through most of human history, there were bright spots. The first World Wide Web page was written. It’s a good bet that less than a week later, the first porn site was up and taking credit card numbers.
One event stands out, however, in its correlation with global warming.
The 1990 acceleration in global temperature coincides exactly with the debut and subsequent rising popularity of The Simpsons. Doh!
global warming, climate change, Gilligan’s Island, Skipper, Stevie Ray Vaughn, porn, www, world wide web, The Simpsons, WHO, AIDS, Milli Vanilli,
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