Less smoke, more heat?
The hugely successful campaigns to cut tobacco smoking have unfortunately led us, and our do-good inclinations, to think maybe we can also stop global warming.
Being a born skeptic on lots of things, I was absolutely wrong in doubting that Americans would ever snuff out their cigarettes. They have.
I did quit before the campaigns began. After having smoked cigarettes steadily and heavily for over 15 years, I went cold turkey a few years before the Surgeon General’s findings condemned smoking.
I had become so disgusted with myself and my addiction, feeling it was affecting my breathing and making me cough, that I stopped and never lit up again. Sure enough I soon began feeling better.
Most former smokers have similar tales to tell. Even so, I was surprised later, and chagrined, when local officials began banning smoking in public places, and now even in restaurants and bars. But it seems to be working.
Such measures seemed too extreme, abridging liberty and freedom and all that. Yet I must confess that, since I have quit, nearby smokers in restaurants have bothered me. And, although my adult children have mostly kept smoking, they know not to when visiting my wife and me in our home.
I would never have dreamed things would have come to that, but they did and I’m glad. I can see and feel the changes have been for the better.
Then why not, for the sake of a better world in the future for us and ours, also stop global warming? To hear many folks chiming in nowadays, that would seem to be a dandy idea.
Baloney. Skepticism, thy name is Ben. With smoking, I knew I should quit and understood that everyone would be healthier if we all did. Besides, today’s cigarette prices are far more outrageous than gasoline prices.
But suppose we really were able to stop global warming. Would I be healthier, happier or both?
Al Gore and his faithful flock have been unpersuasive despite all their PR offensives.
But here in Virginia suppose they could reverse Stafford County’s milder winter temperatures of recent years. We might return to the kind of winters here that seemed not unusually harsh at the time, but were. Remember the frigid winter blasts of early 1996, plus some earlier ones in the 1960-90 period? I do. Milder winters have prevailed ever since, at least in my recollection.
Also, our summers have mostly not been as hot as in some years of the 1980s and 1990s. Further, in the Washington-Baltimore region, it’s claimed that more than half of the days with temps at or above 100 degrees occurred between 1874 and 1934.
In other words, whatever global climate changes have occurred in recent years have been okay with me, as far as my mild and mellow sojourn in Stafford is concerned.
Further, some of the scary scenarios painted by Al Gore’s fanatics don’t seem so dire when refuted by what seem to be rational findings.
One is that most of the winter warming in our part of the world has occurred with nighttime temperatures, with little or no effect. Another concern is the fear that global warming will melt the glaciers and swamp coastal areas.
However: “Thickening ice in the Antarctic…is just about offsetting the meltwater being released from the edges of the Greenland ice sheet—which has also been thickening in its center. This leaves us with a global warming sea-level rise of about 1.8 millimeters per year—or 4 inches per century. ”—Dennis Avery, Director of Center for Global Food Issues, Hudson Institute.
Maybe more of us everyday folks would listen to what Al Gore preaches if he hadn’t already turned us off with some of his claims. As Clinton’s VP, for instance, he once proclaimed, “It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
It would have been better also had he not tackled such a monumental problem like global warming, whose main determinant, the sun, seems beyond anyone’s control to date. Do I hear an Amen?
Far more productive, one would think—and doable in the same sense that smoking has demonstrated—would be an attack on booze.
Is there anyone who doubts that booze causes all sorts of troubles, from spousal abuse and divorce to the carnage on our highways?
On the other hand, one might argue that a greater attempt at alcohol control might be about as effective as drug control--or Mexican border control--has been.
Nevertheless, both would surely be more productive and cheaper to tackle than changes in climate. Speaking of which, since blaming global warming for so many other maladies recently has been so much in vogue, why not claim it has caused an absence of hurricanes in the United States so far this year?
Folks on the Weather Channel are just moping around lately, recalling fondly those 15 hurricanes last year they had such a great time scaring us about.
Poor them. Lucky us.
Being a born skeptic on lots of things, I was absolutely wrong in doubting that Americans would ever snuff out their cigarettes. They have.
I did quit before the campaigns began. After having smoked cigarettes steadily and heavily for over 15 years, I went cold turkey a few years before the Surgeon General’s findings condemned smoking.
I had become so disgusted with myself and my addiction, feeling it was affecting my breathing and making me cough, that I stopped and never lit up again. Sure enough I soon began feeling better.
Most former smokers have similar tales to tell. Even so, I was surprised later, and chagrined, when local officials began banning smoking in public places, and now even in restaurants and bars. But it seems to be working.
Such measures seemed too extreme, abridging liberty and freedom and all that. Yet I must confess that, since I have quit, nearby smokers in restaurants have bothered me. And, although my adult children have mostly kept smoking, they know not to when visiting my wife and me in our home.
I would never have dreamed things would have come to that, but they did and I’m glad. I can see and feel the changes have been for the better.
Then why not, for the sake of a better world in the future for us and ours, also stop global warming? To hear many folks chiming in nowadays, that would seem to be a dandy idea.
Baloney. Skepticism, thy name is Ben. With smoking, I knew I should quit and understood that everyone would be healthier if we all did. Besides, today’s cigarette prices are far more outrageous than gasoline prices.
But suppose we really were able to stop global warming. Would I be healthier, happier or both?
Al Gore and his faithful flock have been unpersuasive despite all their PR offensives.
But here in Virginia suppose they could reverse Stafford County’s milder winter temperatures of recent years. We might return to the kind of winters here that seemed not unusually harsh at the time, but were. Remember the frigid winter blasts of early 1996, plus some earlier ones in the 1960-90 period? I do. Milder winters have prevailed ever since, at least in my recollection.
Also, our summers have mostly not been as hot as in some years of the 1980s and 1990s. Further, in the Washington-Baltimore region, it’s claimed that more than half of the days with temps at or above 100 degrees occurred between 1874 and 1934.
In other words, whatever global climate changes have occurred in recent years have been okay with me, as far as my mild and mellow sojourn in Stafford is concerned.
Further, some of the scary scenarios painted by Al Gore’s fanatics don’t seem so dire when refuted by what seem to be rational findings.
One is that most of the winter warming in our part of the world has occurred with nighttime temperatures, with little or no effect. Another concern is the fear that global warming will melt the glaciers and swamp coastal areas.
However: “Thickening ice in the Antarctic…is just about offsetting the meltwater being released from the edges of the Greenland ice sheet—which has also been thickening in its center. This leaves us with a global warming sea-level rise of about 1.8 millimeters per year—or 4 inches per century. ”—Dennis Avery, Director of Center for Global Food Issues, Hudson Institute.
Maybe more of us everyday folks would listen to what Al Gore preaches if he hadn’t already turned us off with some of his claims. As Clinton’s VP, for instance, he once proclaimed, “It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
It would have been better also had he not tackled such a monumental problem like global warming, whose main determinant, the sun, seems beyond anyone’s control to date. Do I hear an Amen?
Far more productive, one would think—and doable in the same sense that smoking has demonstrated—would be an attack on booze.
Is there anyone who doubts that booze causes all sorts of troubles, from spousal abuse and divorce to the carnage on our highways?
On the other hand, one might argue that a greater attempt at alcohol control might be about as effective as drug control--or Mexican border control--has been.
Nevertheless, both would surely be more productive and cheaper to tackle than changes in climate. Speaking of which, since blaming global warming for so many other maladies recently has been so much in vogue, why not claim it has caused an absence of hurricanes in the United States so far this year?
Folks on the Weather Channel are just moping around lately, recalling fondly those 15 hurricanes last year they had such a great time scaring us about.
Poor them. Lucky us.
posted by Ben Blankenship at
9:58 AM
