Posted on 01/04/2003 6:14:36 AM PST by SJackson
Ravaged by guilt, I was about to cancel my order for a new, three-ton, fly yellow, 300-jillion horsepower, gas-swilling Hummer H2 and spec out a Chinese-built, 20-speed Mountain Bike. But Whoa! Wait a minute! Hold on I'm keeping the Hummer in play and while I'm at it, ordering a set of Bridgestone Blizzak snow tires, with studs, and an Everest-level parka from Eddie Bauer.
Just as I was completing my conversion to a full-Green, politically-correct, anti-global warming fanatic, comes word that the world is about to get colder, not warmer. Club Med is canceling resort plans for Spitzbergen and Steve Wynn is re-thinking his Laurentians Mirage as a new claque of Chicken Littles, led by one Raymond Schmitt, Jr., a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, sound the tocsin.
According to Schmitt, he and his buddies have discovered a mass of rogue fresh water in the salty North Atlantic that has been expanding for the last seven years. Fifteen million square miles of invading H20 that if it continues, could slow down, dilute or divert the Gulf Stream and all its cozy warm water that tempers the climate on our east coast and in Northern Europe. A nose-dive in Fahrenheit from five to 10 degrees is possible, meaning that the recent ice storm that made Charlotte, North Carolina look like the ice palace in the current James Bond thriller, will repeat itself every Fourth of July.
The United Nations resists backing off its current hysteria associated with global warming and makes assurances that any such freeze-up in the climate is unlikely before 2100. But John Gagosian, the head man at Woods Hole is still fretting. In a recent paper on the subject he warned, "In just the past year, we have seen ominous signs that we may be headed toward a potentially dangerous threshold. If we cross it, the Earth's gears could shift very rapidly, not gradually - into a completely different mode of operation."
But wait a minute. Ozone Al Gore had been telling us for the past ten years that we'll all be living in microwave ovens perhaps even before his approval ratings begin to rival Al Sharpton's. Every environmental nut between Marin County and the Club of Rome has been screaming about being crushed under a woolly blanket of CO2.
But now we're back in the seventies, when other meteorological visionaries like Carl Sagan were baying at the moon over the prospects of a Nuclear Winter and a new Ice Age. Talk about "a shift into a completely different mode of operation."
So I'm bagging the bike and planning to plow the Hummer through the twelve foot snowbanks that are expected to block Interstate 95 as I chug southward toward the new artificial ski sloped planned at Disney World.
So what do we do about all this? Says one expert, any "human effort to control this trend would be like standing on a track trying to stop a train."
But wait a minute, weren't we supposed to be able to head off global warming simply by excising the earth of hated sport utility vehicles, those rolling blast furnaces spewing overheated, filthy gases into the atmosphere? Wouldn't destroying the internal combustion engine solve the whole thing, at least according to Ozone Al and his fellow Savaranolas?
If on the reverse side of every problem lies a solution, why not step in front of the train? Surely we can stop this impending deep freeze with the same device that appeared, just last week, to be causing the planet's meltdown.
I call forth the SUV as our savior. We want to warm things up? Easy. If fossil fuels are the culprit, perhaps burning more of them will keep Old Man Winter at bay. Therefore, maybe we should drop the CAFE standards for motor vehicles to five-miles-to-the gallon and subsidize the purchase through tax credits of Suburban/Hummer/Excursion-sized sport utilities.
Better yet, if we begin to suck up more gasoline, it will relieve the Bush administration from having to justify whacking Saddam simply for his alleged human rights abuses and his fiddling with weapons of mass destruction. To hell with the Security Council, we want his oil!
We face a national emergency, according to the guys at Woods Hole. Drive or die. Freeways or freeze. Heat that air. Drive those road crushers! Save the Earth!
Gentlemen, start your engines.
It's clear to me that over the next several decades it will be getting warmer, or perhaps cooler, if it doesn't stay the same. In anticipation of these trends Americans should IMMEDIATELY go shopping for suitable attire.
Ok, I'm going out on a limb and saying it will do all three things, but at various times.
My prediction for what the curent anti-global warming soldiers would advocate as the method to combat 'cooling': burning less fossil fuels, reduce industrial CO2 emissions, more fuel-efficient cars, solar/wind power, etc., etc.
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