Global Warming
I was in a bar last Friday, starting the evening binge a shade early--around 4 PM--and chatting up this guy. Well, he was chatting up my friend, asking her for money for a football pool. Neat. Apparently she won $108 from this cat two years back in the same pool after picking the games more-or-less at random, so who am I to intervene.
So the subject of Florida's crazy weather came up. I lightly suggested global warming was at fault. He jumped on me. Literally. Then he said, "no one who's spent a winter in Chicago can believe in global warming."
Listen up. This is not something you can discount, like the existence of extra-terrestrials or Jerry Springer. A bunch of really good scientists have established with as near certainty possible that the planet is getting warmer at an extremely fast rate. And that humans are a significant cause of that warming trend. And that it will in all likelihood have a bunch of bad effects. Including an increase in hurricane frequency.
Yes, there are some areas where the data is not certain. For example, they don't yet know how much humans are responsible. Are we 90% responsible, or only 70% responsible? They don't know yet how much worse it is going to get, in terms of speed and in terms of temperature change. They don't know how fast we can reverse the trend. Some even doubt we can reverse the trend.
Let me analogize. Say we have a serial killer roaming around New York City. Say the serial killer is a bit of a strange duck, and instead of dismembering his victims on every encounter, sometimes he hands them $100. You can argue about whether the serial killer killed this particular murder victim. You can argue about how many people he's killed in total. You can argue about how to stop him. But you sound like an idiot when you 1) discount his existence by suggesting all his victims died of natural causes, or 2) claim that because he hands out $100 bills sometimes, perhaps he's not such a bad thing for the city.
So to that football pool guy that thinks that because Chicago is still cold (although, to be honest, I'm not sure it is as cold as it once was; better ask someone with records than trying to rack your brain), global warming is a hoax: shut the fuck up...you never even been to Chicago.
So the subject of Florida's crazy weather came up. I lightly suggested global warming was at fault. He jumped on me. Literally. Then he said, "no one who's spent a winter in Chicago can believe in global warming."
Listen up. This is not something you can discount, like the existence of extra-terrestrials or Jerry Springer. A bunch of really good scientists have established with as near certainty possible that the planet is getting warmer at an extremely fast rate. And that humans are a significant cause of that warming trend. And that it will in all likelihood have a bunch of bad effects. Including an increase in hurricane frequency.
Yes, there are some areas where the data is not certain. For example, they don't yet know how much humans are responsible. Are we 90% responsible, or only 70% responsible? They don't know yet how much worse it is going to get, in terms of speed and in terms of temperature change. They don't know how fast we can reverse the trend. Some even doubt we can reverse the trend.
Let me analogize. Say we have a serial killer roaming around New York City. Say the serial killer is a bit of a strange duck, and instead of dismembering his victims on every encounter, sometimes he hands them $100. You can argue about whether the serial killer killed this particular murder victim. You can argue about how many people he's killed in total. You can argue about how to stop him. But you sound like an idiot when you 1) discount his existence by suggesting all his victims died of natural causes, or 2) claim that because he hands out $100 bills sometimes, perhaps he's not such a bad thing for the city.
So to that football pool guy that thinks that because Chicago is still cold (although, to be honest, I'm not sure it is as cold as it once was; better ask someone with records than trying to rack your brain), global warming is a hoax: shut the fuck up...you never even been to Chicago.
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