Saturday, March 31, 2007
Stupid about the weather
Quote of the day:
Public consciousness of global warming is not strong. Thanks to the Bush/Cheney Junta, the alliance between the House of Saud & the House of Bush, the political power of the religious right, & the unending media portrayals of Al Gore as a buffoon & a loser.
The American public is still at a naive, short-view stage of understanding global warming. One year there's an unusual number of strong hurricanes, two of them ruinous to the Gulf Coast, & that's global warming. The next year there's few hurricanes so the meteorologists are hysterical & the previous year & Katrina must have been coincidental. July is brutally hot, must be global warming. But then August is normal. Springlike temperatures well into January - global warming. Then February is a deep freeze & there's ice storms in March - not global warming. It's either El Niño or La Niña, they come & go. Huge sections of the polar ice sheets break off, float out to sea & melt. Hard to imagine icebergs the size of Rhode Island. But hey, what about those dancing penguins? We think in terms of seasonal anomalies; weather is commonly peculiar, even dangerous; it's why there's a Weather Channel. The weather was gentle this week, but next week Jersey could get tornadoes. Weather is often headline local news, unlike projections of temperatures & ocean levels & the consequences ten or fifty years hence. If Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2000, we'd know about global warming by now. We lost 8 years. We could lose another 8 just like that.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
"The worst stuff is not going to happen because we can't be that stupid."Oh yes, we're that stupid. Our own NOAA scientists are prohibited from discussing global warming in public unless their statements are approved by the Republican equivalent of Communist political commissars. We can't even be bothered to remove the tax breaks for new SUV purchases. Instead, the oil & auto companies throw up a smoke screen about ethanol & hybrids eventually saving the world.
Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy on the "highway to extinction" global warming projections of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Public consciousness of global warming is not strong. Thanks to the Bush/Cheney Junta, the alliance between the House of Saud & the House of Bush, the political power of the religious right, & the unending media portrayals of Al Gore as a buffoon & a loser.
The American public is still at a naive, short-view stage of understanding global warming. One year there's an unusual number of strong hurricanes, two of them ruinous to the Gulf Coast, & that's global warming. The next year there's few hurricanes so the meteorologists are hysterical & the previous year & Katrina must have been coincidental. July is brutally hot, must be global warming. But then August is normal. Springlike temperatures well into January - global warming. Then February is a deep freeze & there's ice storms in March - not global warming. It's either El Niño or La Niña, they come & go. Huge sections of the polar ice sheets break off, float out to sea & melt. Hard to imagine icebergs the size of Rhode Island. But hey, what about those dancing penguins? We think in terms of seasonal anomalies; weather is commonly peculiar, even dangerous; it's why there's a Weather Channel. The weather was gentle this week, but next week Jersey could get tornadoes. Weather is often headline local news, unlike projections of temperatures & ocean levels & the consequences ten or fifty years hence. If Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2000, we'd know about global warming by now. We lost 8 years. We could lose another 8 just like that.
Labels: weather
