All this global warming…
All this global warming is pissing me off. I want a return to the good old days of May's gone by—-when I wasn't wearing a fleece into work two weeks before June.
As ridiculous as it sounds to say that a cold month (Winter? Year? Decade?) is proof that there's no global warming, it never ceases to surprise me that the media is happy to do the opposite.
My Philadelphia suburb's newspaper recently ran a story about a local global warming conference. (Yes, I'm aware the words local and global are next to each other in that sentence. Maybe we should focus a little more on things we can handle. Potholes, perhaps.)
The story, besides incorrectly identifying the U.S. as the top emitter of CO2 (it's China, but it's only been two years since that happened, so I can see how that was missed) used as its focal point a quote from a concerned mother/citizen. She held up pictures of her kids playing in feet of snow, and claiming something to the effect of 'look! When my kids were young, they used to play in snow all the time! We had almost no snow this winter! Global warming! Global warming!' (Excuse the non-quote quote-I'm too lazy to find the story.)
There are so many problems with this logic it's almost never ending…but two main ones:
1) It's warmed 0.7 degrees in 100 years across the globe. That doesn't make the difference between several feet of snow and no snow.
2) In the U.S., the warmest year on record was in the 1930s. Maybe her kids are over 80 and she's remembering those frigid days of the 1920's, but I doubt it.
As I sat there lounging and feeling myself getting annoyed at reading this, I realized that it was May-midday—and I was reading it in sweatpants and a hoodie because I was freezing. Should I hold up pictures of myself in shorts from those toasty days of my youth, when May used to be warm? And if I do so, will it justify everyone doing their part to warm the climate by buying bigger SUV's? Maybe I'll try it at next year's local global conference.
