But, I gotta hit this first
I'll do the evil children thing tonight. I've got to get this one off my chest.
I've got an issue with "global warming." Not just the term, but the whole way the term is used and thought about. I mean, really, it illustrates the failings of school, mass media and the political discourse all at once.
And it wasn't Republican Senator James Inhofe exclaiming, in a Senate committee, that global warming was obviously bunk because they had just had some of their coldest winter days on record in Oklahoma City. Inhofe's got his agenda and I get that - I expect no less from him.
It wasn't even the Hi & Lois punchline this weekend that said essentially the same thing - cold winter days just mean you can worry less about global warming.
It was this dipshit I heard on NPR this weekend claiming that the reason so many NE municipalities are coming up short on road salt is that the ordered road salt at lower quantities because of global warming changing the expected need.
For the love of all that is good and holy, is the whole world fucking retarded? Is it that schools don't teach complex thinking, or that the media rewards simplistic thinking, or that the political discourse devalues thinking at all?
Listen carefully. Global warming is not a misnomer, but it is almost operating as one. When we talk about global warming, the warming we are talking about is a couple degrees of average global temperature. See, the "globe" is literally "warming."
But here comes the disconnect for the mouth-breathers. Global is big and our experience of it is small. Global warming doesn't mean it just gets warmer everywhere. When the average global temp rises two degrees, it doesn't correlate to the temperature in Oklahoma City rising two degrees. It can even, *gasp*, make it colder, on average, for the dumbass Okies that keep electing Inhofe.
While the phenomenon is correctly called global warming, the effects we experience from it can best be referred to as climate change. Yeah, doesn't have quite the pop or sizzle as global warming, does it? It's also harder to willfully misunderstand and misrepresent, so you'll rarely if ever here it from environmental opponents.
What might climate change look like? Not sweating polar bears and ocean views in Iowa. The best narrative description I've ever come across is in TC Boyle's A Friend of the Earth - at the extreme, scorching drought for six months and monsoons for six months.
Not just "warmer."
The idea that you could judge the state of global climate by looking out your fucking window has just got me fed up. Get some perspective, people, and some goddamn common sense.
I just wish, in vain, that people would learn to think, despite their teacher's failure to show them, despite the media's complicity in discouraging them, despite the politicians efforts to undermine them.
I've got an issue with "global warming." Not just the term, but the whole way the term is used and thought about. I mean, really, it illustrates the failings of school, mass media and the political discourse all at once.
And it wasn't Republican Senator James Inhofe exclaiming, in a Senate committee, that global warming was obviously bunk because they had just had some of their coldest winter days on record in Oklahoma City. Inhofe's got his agenda and I get that - I expect no less from him.
It wasn't even the Hi & Lois punchline this weekend that said essentially the same thing - cold winter days just mean you can worry less about global warming.
It was this dipshit I heard on NPR this weekend claiming that the reason so many NE municipalities are coming up short on road salt is that the ordered road salt at lower quantities because of global warming changing the expected need.
For the love of all that is good and holy, is the whole world fucking retarded? Is it that schools don't teach complex thinking, or that the media rewards simplistic thinking, or that the political discourse devalues thinking at all?
Listen carefully. Global warming is not a misnomer, but it is almost operating as one. When we talk about global warming, the warming we are talking about is a couple degrees of average global temperature. See, the "globe" is literally "warming."
But here comes the disconnect for the mouth-breathers. Global is big and our experience of it is small. Global warming doesn't mean it just gets warmer everywhere. When the average global temp rises two degrees, it doesn't correlate to the temperature in Oklahoma City rising two degrees. It can even, *gasp*, make it colder, on average, for the dumbass Okies that keep electing Inhofe.
While the phenomenon is correctly called global warming, the effects we experience from it can best be referred to as climate change. Yeah, doesn't have quite the pop or sizzle as global warming, does it? It's also harder to willfully misunderstand and misrepresent, so you'll rarely if ever here it from environmental opponents.
What might climate change look like? Not sweating polar bears and ocean views in Iowa. The best narrative description I've ever come across is in TC Boyle's A Friend of the Earth - at the extreme, scorching drought for six months and monsoons for six months.
Not just "warmer."
The idea that you could judge the state of global climate by looking out your fucking window has just got me fed up. Get some perspective, people, and some goddamn common sense.
I just wish, in vain, that people would learn to think, despite their teacher's failure to show them, despite the media's complicity in discouraging them, despite the politicians efforts to undermine them.
posted by JJisafool at 10:55 AM
