I’m loving this climate change

It was a couple years ago when former U.S. vice president Al Gore released his film “An Inconvenient Truth” which was all about the impending and undeniable risk of climate change, that there were a couple David Suzuki followers in Canada – Olympic athletes – who declared that global warming was indeed real because when they were young they use to be able to have a skating rink in the back yard in winter, and now it was so warm that they couldn’t. And these were seasoned 25 year olds, testifying to the reality of global warming.

 Well I am sitting here in Calgary, as a seasoned 57-year-old, almost on May 1, 2009, with snow in the front yard, watching the forecast for more snow, wet snow, and flurries and day-time high temperatures of two degrees, and I’m thinking “I’m supposed to go fishing tomorrow, I better let my truck run for a while because obviously we’re not getting enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over Alberta to contribute to this whole warming trend”. 

 Yes, call me a skeptic. But as my learned colleague Camrose-area farmer Gerald Pilger pointed out the other day how can we be sure the current weather we are experiencing isn’t a factor of weather variation as opposed to climate change?

I know you can find any type of research on the internet to support you’re view on any subject, so I locked on to this one that said “Global warming is changing the world we know and love. But in fact, the Earth's climate has changed many times - especially in the last two million years, when a series of ice ages has wreaked havoc worldwide.” And that wasn’t even written by by Canadian climatologist and global-warming contrarian Tim Ball.

Friend Doug Burnard, of London, Ontario emailed me yesterday to say he was sorry to hear about the snow in Alberta, but he didn’t have time to talk further because he had to clean up after playing a game of golf in 25 C weather. Another friend Andrew Douglas in Guleph, sent me a gruesome photo of his face, supposedly with a sunburn suffered after sitting on his deck having lunch. These are not well-intentioned people.

So over the next few days, if it doesn’t snow too much I might be fishing. I also plan to help my brother-in-law process calves this weekend at Fort Steele, B.C. and my wife is urging me to pack my long underwear. At the same time we also will take our golf clubs just in case a warm day strikes.

Yes, I am all over this global warming thing. I would just like to talk to a couple people who lived through the last two million years to find out what sort of trends they observed before and after the “series of ice ages”. You can read all you want, but it is listening to that first hand experience that really counts.

-30-