Global warming, what's that?

I was recently having coffee with a few friends of mine, we were sitting at an outside table, enjoying coffee and the heat of the day when we began discussing a show on global warming two of us had recently watched.

We were discussing the stories in the documentary about Glacier National Park where they said the glaciers were just about gone from existence and Greenland dumping twice as much ice into the Atlantic Ocean than it did ten years ago, land that had not seen sunlight for thousands of years now has flowers blooming. When another friend whose outlook on global warming goes as far as his own backyard, piped up and said, “What’s wrong with you two, the damned thing does not affect us!”

We were both in mid-stride of bringing our coffee cups to our mouth when we froze at the exact moment, our eyes met and we just shook our heads in amazement. There was really no point in arguing with him over it, but I did have to ask, “You do live on the earth don’t you?” He just looked at me and we all changed the subject to the new truck that just pulled in front of our view.

This has become a common occurrence in these days of war news, strife and destruction, we tend to loose sight of the fact that the earth is going through changes that is affecting us all and will have a harder effect on our children when they reach adulthood. To put it simply, the earth is becoming hotter than hell and is only getting worse.

CBS News just ran a story on a report released to Congress by the National Academy of Sciences where they concluded that it has been 2000 years or longer since the earth has been this hot. Yahoo also ran a piece on the same subject titled, Study says Earth temp at 400-year high, so whether it is 2000 or 400 years, the fact still remains it is getting hot, very hot.

I am no expert on this subject, but anyone who has been watching the temperatures can tell you that most cities have grown four degrees hotter each year for the last ten years. If this trend continues, we will all be wearing SPF 500 sun blocks very soon, or buying stock in skin cancer clinics.

I don’t have any informative links to pass on telling us what we can do to stop this and none of us wants to listen to the global warming rantings of Al Gore, (Yes, he has a web site, think he plans on running again?) if he had his way we would all be driving foot-powered Flintstone cars, but what can we expect from a man who once said he invented the internet?

I should point out a humorous point to the last paragraph, first, my word processor never even blinked over the word, “Flintstone” and second, if you Google the term, “did Al Gore invent the internet” you will find 1,030,000 hits on that topic. It proves that we could care less about global warming, but we sure know whom the Flintstones are and Al Gore has no idea what he ever did.