Following our morning run Thursday, my friend Bob and I took what we’re now calling our last swim of the season (not counting a traditional New Year’s Day run and plunge into Long Island Sound, which I and a band of crazed celebrants have been doing for decades). The new record for last swim replaces one from an unseasonably mild day a week or so earlier.
“Mark it down, Dec. 3,” I said, moments after diving into the lake, thrashing around for about 10 seconds and scrambling back out.
The air temperature was 60 and the water about 20 degrees colder – too chilly to backstroke to the opposite shore, but way warmer than usual with winter less than three weeks away. In past years I’ve already been ice-skating and cross-country skiing by Dec. 3.
Records show that November 2009 was one of the warmest on record in Connecticut and much of the rest of New England, but only an idiot or a delusional Al Gore acolyte would use data from just one month in only one tiny part of the planet to make any point about climate change.
Dedicated readers of this forum know, however, that those qualities have never stopped me before from holding forth on any given topic, so I say it’s time to adopt a new attitude. No, I’m not advocating joining the Sarah Palin-Glenn Beck-Rush Limbaugh cadre of global-warming deniers; I’m saying we should embrace the coming heat wave.
We here in southern Connecticut are positioned perfectly to survive another 10 or 20 degrees. Too bad for the poor wretches who live near the equator – you think it’s hot now? Just wait.
But for us Nutmeggers, imagine strolling around in Bermuda shorts in December, of never having to shovel your driveway, of thumbing your nose at the heating oil companies.
On a personal note, as an added bonus my home is less than 10 miles from the coast and about 100 feet above sea level. When global warming causes the polar ice caps to melt and the oceans to rise I could wind up with waterfront property. How much easier it would be to launch my kayak from my front door rather than to have to drive 20 minutes to the beach, as I do now. Of course, come August I may be singing a different tune, but I can always spend summers in a more comfortable location, such as northern Labrador.
Seriously, I’m sure some people are thinking this way as they prepare for next week’s
international conference on global climate in Copenhagen, Denmark.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, is accomplished during the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference Dec. 7-18, when some 15,000 participants from 192 countries try to come up with a plan to deal with the growing environmental crisis.
If history repeats itself, as it so often does, the conference will include the usual doomsday warnings from scientists and the usual rebuttals from skeptics. The naysayers will either cite their own “studies” that show the earth is actually getting colder, or will refer to the “Climategate” scandal involving e-mails that indicate tree-huggers have been suppressing evidence and doctoring data to cook the books on greenhouse emissions. All this debate will generate enough hot air to drive up the earth’s temperature a few more degrees.
Remember the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, when the greenhouse gas warming alarm was first sounded on a global scale, or the Kyoto conference in 1997 that led to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change?
A total of 187 nations ratified that international environmental treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Guess which nation – the one, incidentally, that leads the league by producing about a third of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions – never got around to signing the agreement? (Hint: its leader, Barrack Obama, is now saying he won’t show up in Copenhagen until the end of the conference.)
With debt spiraling into the trillions and unemployment still hovering at 10 percent we are more worried now about the economic climate than global climate, so any talk about cap and trade is being drowned out by cries for fewer restrictions on business and industry.
I’d like to feel optimistic about initiatives encouraging so-called green technology, but given our track record cynically expect our reverence for green currency will prevail.
I guess that “last swim of the season” date will continue to grow later and later.