An American Lion

If you live in a common sense world, free of the crazed ideology of others and mindful that science is right about as often as it is wrong, then you can sort of see why the debate over global climate change has turned into a rather disagreeable subject to write about or even think about. Why should I avoid it? And, for that matter, why not make it the centerpiece of my blog? Or leave it aside?

I don’t even have a tag or category for it. And yet, it’s everywhere in the media, everywhere in the consciousness of the entire world. They’re talking about it everywhere, from Brazil to China, to Norway to Australia, and there and back again.

I firmly believe we have some sort of climate change underway, and humans can certainly contribute to the changing of their environment. Humans have been making changes to this world in so many different ways—from species extinction to re-routing rivers to knocking down mountains.Global climate change is a big picture event—simply citing a few statistics and facts does not knock down the mountain of other evidence. And since all humans want to do is find small slices of data to back up the ideas that they hold, you get precious little in the way of honest advocacy, for or against, on this topic. I do know one thing, and that is, global climate change has NOTHING to do with the weather:

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

My brain sort of turns off when it becomes a discussion about the ironies of cold weather during a global warming conference—so what? The weather is the weather. The climate is what is changing, and the climate can’t be measured by what today’s weather looks like.

I remember studying geography books when I was younger. As many people already know, we travelled a great deal as a family. I don’t even think I attended the third grade. Father was supplying riot control vehicles to some far-flung dictatorship and I got stuck in Italy because my mother refused to learn Italian and go to the airport. Now, you might think that, for a frisky boy like myself, Italy would have been heaven. It was. You could go around pinching women on the fanny, by the way. In Italy, that’s what you could do all day long. You could just walk up to some lady and pinch her butt. You might get swatted, but, more often than not, you’d get a marriage proposal.

So, when I wasn’t going around giving fanny pinches, my head was buried in what few books I could find in English. Mother gave me the task of keeping track of Father, so I had to learn to use maps at an early age. No Internet for me! I look at Google Maps now and slap my forehead. All I had were outdated pre-World War II geography books (anyone remember what East Prussia was?) and I suppose the level of scientific knowledge from that time was pretty skeevy. The books themselves were always good for a read, however. I remember the endless world map charts, in beautiful, muted colors, that went into things like average annual rainfall, types of vegetation in a region, and where desertification was spreading.

The world was colored in ribbons of activity, thereby eliminating the need to understand the world as having an Iron Curtain through it. Really, the world is more than just political maps. The climate we live in varies greatly throughout these bands across the Earth. These things are measured by annual events, not today’s weather. I really don’t understand how it is that people cannot grasp that. Should I lend them some of the old geography books I used to look at? Are we that poorly educated that we can’t grasp what a climate really is?