Mercury Rising

Mark Twain said, " Everyone grumbles about the weather but no one does nothing about it.” And I’m about to share my two pennies on the most blown up environmental issue of all times-global warming. Global warming is not opinion. It’s a scientific reality. And science tells us that human activity has made huge impacts to our planet that affect our well-being and even our survival as a species. The world’s leading science journals report that glaciers are melting ten times faster than previously thought, that greenhouse gases have reached levels not seen for millions of years and that species are vanishing as a result of climate change. They show photos taken from space of shorlines retreating, extreme weather events, severe dry spells and of rising sea levels.

“Those who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right...weathermen have long warned that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.” Before you think that this is just another line from Vice President Gore’s movie, you need to know that the quote I just read you from Time Magazine was not a recent quote; it was from January 2, 1939. Yes, in 1939. Nine years before Vice President Gore was born and over three decades before Time Magazine began hyping a coming ice age and almost five decades before they returned to hyping global warming. Time Magazine in 1951 pointed to receding permafrost in Russia as proof that the planet was warming in 1952, the New York Times noted that the bone of contention for global warming “has always been the melting glaciers”.

There are three sides to this story. Yours, mine and the cold hard truth. Over the last century, the media has flip-flopped between global cooling and warming scares. At the turn of the 20th century, the media sold an upcoming ice age - and they said the world was coming to an end. Then in the 1930s, the alarm was raised about disaster from global warming - and they said the world was coming to an end. Then in the 70’s, an alarm for another ice age was raised - and they said the world was coming to an end. And now, we are back to fears of catastrophic global warming -and again they are saying the world is coming to an end. Sadly today, this media overkill of ‘climate porn’ fails to seduce people.

Global warming is real. By burning fossil fuels, the carbon dump has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century. “Earth is approaching the warmest temperatures in 12,000 years - a short blip in time to your average geologist. If we do nothing, in about 10 years the planet may reach a "tipping point" and begin a irrevocable wipeout of our civilization and most of the other species on this planet. After that period, it would be too late for any action.” These facts are stated by Al Gore in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Forget he ever ran for office. He’s no John the Baptist either, crying out in the wilderness. Just consider him a concerned man speaking out on the approaching catastrophe. Only a rapid transition to energy efficiency and renewable energy sources will counter global warming, protect human health, create new jobs, protect habitat and wildlife and ensure a secure, affordable energy future. Energy poverty can lead to a life of back-breaking poverty and slow death. You owe it to yourself to understand this. If you do not and you have kids, you have explain to them why you decided not to.

Hindsight is most uncommon of brain functions: You can have anything you want in this world if you just help enough other people get what they want. There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed. So better to be the fool who predicts wrong than a wise man who predicts none. But like the inability of the dinosaur to adapt to that very situation made them extinct, climate skeptics defy this conventional wisdom. They debunk hysteria surrounding global warming by arguing, “History is witness to predictions of doom that never came true. We all heard dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, food scarcity, mass starvation and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers from predicting a dire environmental future.” They see global warming as a religion, not science. What they can't see, is they have only themselves to argue with, they can’t argue with melting glaciers. That, good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion...