What’s your New Year’s resolution?
I took this in Vermont over the holidays. Obviously, those aren’t real flowers. There was even a dusting of snow on the ground. But this is a place where I’m used to inches of snow at this time of year, if not feet of it, or at least enough ice to skate on. This year, mud was more of a problem than snow, and the local ski mountain only had about half its trails open.
Can we attribute it to global warming? In the specifics, no. We can’t blame any specific weather event, or even a whole year’s worth of weather on human-caused climate change. But in general, there’s something going on. When I was a kid, I lived in upstate Connecticut. In New England, the climate moves north about 25 miles a decade. So the weather experience in mid-Vermont in 2007 is pretty similar to what I used to have as a kid in Connecticut in the 1960s.
But it’s a tough sale to get people to appreciate it. I had conversations over the holidays where people said things like “isn’t all of this just natural cycles?” and “in 1905 they had a warm Christmas — how can you say that this is any different?”
It’s hard, in the context of a casual conversation, to reply to such questions. You can go all technical on ‘em. Maybe I should carry an image of this chart around with me:
See the way that red line goes up at the end? That’s what we’ve done to CO2 in the last few decades. There’s every reason to believe that the temperature will follow it. But if you go all climate geek on people, many people tend to get put off.
So rather than annoying my personal friends and acquaintances, I’m going to focus on changing lots of minds with the game. (”Sell ‘em in bunches like bananas,” as the sales guys say.)
My New Year’s Resolution is to finish the global warming game. The world needs it.