Are we Frying our Future?

NWF   |   July 25, 2006

Liberals and conservatives in Los Angeles have been burning under intense record-setting heat as triple-digit temperatures covered much of the Southwest for several days. (Woodland Hills had a record-setting 119 degrees last Saturday.) LA is not alone, nine of eleven San Francisco Bay Area cities broke heat records last week.  Nationwide, the first six months of 2006 were the warmest in the US since records were first kept in 1895.

Even the  conservatives are now wondering if former Vice President AL Gore could possibly be right, are we frying our future? 

One LA conservative blogger who operates under the name "citizen conservative," posted this about recent weather, "2006 is different. We have already been through more than a week of hot, humid weather. And it does not cool off at night. Our natural ‘air conditioning’—-that famous San Francisco fog—is missing.  Which would be OK if the heat zapped only liberals.  Unfortunately, conservatives suffer as much as liberals."

People of all political persuasion need to get ready for the heat.  Global warming respects no political orientation.  It’s not a liberal nor conservative matter even though conservatives have become tone deaf as a result of a lot of Exxon/Mobile funded spin doctors and becasue they have misplaced trust in right-wing critics like Senator Inhof and James Dobson.  Global warming is not about left or right, its about right or wrong.  It’s morally wrong to wreck a planet and harm billions of people.

To the conservative blogger, the loss of fog is just the beginning.  You are watching a non-linear change on the planet.  Much like a branch that bends so far and then snaps, unchecked global warming will to break out big time. So expect much more heat and more intense coastal storms with landslides. Forest fires have already increased fourfold in the dry regions and droughts are just beginning in many agricultural regions.  Stay tuned, much much more will come unless our political leaders on both sides of the isle hear the inconvenient truth.  They will not speak until they hear from voters who have largely ignored the science to date.

If you look at what’s going on around the world, the Russians are fighting a fire that has already burned an area as large as Pennsylvania.  Twenty-eight million acres have burned up this summer because of drought and heat caused in large part by global warming.  The forest was once an important carbon sink now it’s a carbon source.

The Amazon jungle is about to turn into the Amazon desert.  Suffering its second year of extreme drought, scientists are predicting an enormous ecosystem collapse and a mega-fires unless the drought breaks.  If the Amazon goes, all bets are off for stopping global warming.

I hope our children are not watching our stupidity because they surely will pay the price.  As the fog has lifted in LA, I hope the fog lifts in America.

Published: July 25, 2006