The Horrors of Global Warming!!!
So, a few weeks ago my buddy Scott was over and we were talking about life, the universe, and everything. I brought up the Kyoto Accord and how even the Senate defeated it unanimously during the Clinton Administration. He brought up global warming as if it was something reasonable people should believe in, in the near term. He mentioned remembering snowy winters of his youth…and I stopped him. I have looked at the projections on global warming, and the progress rate is in degrees Centigrade per Century. At current rates in the year 2303, Fargo may have the balmy winters of Kansas City, but it won't be Miami.
Let me make one thing clear, though. My friend Scott is smart…okay, really gosh darn smart. As long as I have known him, I have greatly respected his intelligence, generosity, kindness, humor, and integrity. He cares deeply about his friends and he has raised a wonderful family. He has a quick and facile wit, and a tremendous sense of playfulness. That he has been presented what appears to him to be compelling evidence to believe that global warming is approaching at a rate where the differences of only thirty or so years could be readily discernable by an amateur through memory is disturbing to me.
Global warming is happening, and if you have a really good supercomputer and massive numbers of accurate observations over a few centuries, you can detect the change in a meaningful way. That reputable scientists are shaking down grant money through scare tactics that Scott can't see right through, concerns me. The reality about global warming is this; the world's oceans absolutely have the whip hand on weather, and they are incredibly vast and consequently slow to change. I personally have taken several thousand observations of ocean temperature at depth and made analyses on the basis of those observations. The
US Navy invested several billion dollars over the last hundred and fifty years analyzing the ocean. In the last sixty years, they have gathered more data than any civilian organization has access to, probably by more than an order of magnitude.
In anthropomorphic terms, global warming is a sunburn, unpleasant, but not life threatening. The deep body temperature of the ecosphere is not the same as the surface temperature of the atmosphere. I have yet to see any strong indication that the planet is "running a fever" in the depths of the ocean, where weather is made. I also see behavior among advocates of the threat of global warming that is indistinguishable from fraud.
For right now, I'm going to stop worrying about the catastrophe of global warming and go outside and make a snowman. My wife Abigail can't get into work today because the snow is coming down so bad, and she's going to help as soon as she can find her gloves. I can't convince her to wear Bermuda shorts, though, so perhaps I don't have a future in the global warming shakedown industry.
