Where's the warmth in global warming?

Interminable winter. Season of searing flesh, frozen feet and unending layers. Winter – cold and dark in the morning, cold and dark at night. Winter – when the cold seeps through any opening in your clothing or your house. Winter, when you’d just as soon crawl into the furnace as wait for it to blow air to warm a room. Winter. . . .

Whoops. Scratch that. It’s only Dec. 19, which means it’s still officially fall. And yet … and yet, it feels like winter. It has for weeks. Chicago, and much of the nation east of the Rockies, has been in the deep freeze since November. So far this December, only three days have managed to make it to freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Snow covers the ground outside the Indignant Citizen’s home to a depth of around five inches, adding a special kind of evil chill close to the ground, where feet live.

When it gets cold like this, the kind of cold that numbs your entire body after just a few minutes’ exposure – fully dressed, of course – we must always hear from the sanctimonious anti-global warming crowd. They crow that the cold is sure proof that global warming is a myth, a ruse perpetrated on slow-thinking citizens by the overzealous, doomsaying environmental movement.

They write letters to newspapers, mostly. Occasionally one of these kooks will end up on an editorial page someplace. These outlets don’t even take into account the multitude of blogs that populate the Internet and that serve as a pulpit for all manner of uninformed opinion. There’s just one problem: The fact that it’s really, really cold so early in the season, both in the eastern U.S. and in Western Europe isn’t proof that global warming is a myth. There are some signs that the opposite is true, that the presence of cold air so early is actually proof that global warming is melting the Antarctic ice sheet into the Atlantic. That cool fresh water is being pumped along the oceanic conveyor belt that runs north-south between the Americas and Africa-Europe, weakening the current and over time changing the atmospheric setup.

While there is little doubt among reputable and thoughtful scientists that the earth’s temperature is rising, there is plenty of debate about exactly how fast the temperature is rising in an historical context and whether the rise is a sign that man is fucking up the planet or merely a cyclical occurrence – another of Earth’s periodic mood swings.

But really, what difference does it make? Say half the scientists think it’s cyclical and half think it’s man’s fault. Who’s to know? We may not learn anything conclusive for hundreds of years, and by then it’ll be too late if the scientists who blame civilization turn out to be right. So why not start treating the planet with a little more respect today? Use a little less energy, recycle a little bit more.

On the way to work this morning, the Indignant Citizen saw a CBS2 TV truck parked on a side street near the Dirksen Federal Building, engine running and the driver asleep inside with his feet up on the dashboard and the heat on. This is an especially ridiculous kind of consumption, and the IC briefly considered removing the truck’s valve stems as a kind of punishment. He thought better of it, though, because no doubt whatever tow truck or repair vehicle that showed up would have left its engine running, too.

In a way, it’s disappointing global warming doesn’t really mean “warming.” It might be easier to stomach if it did. Now all we seem to have to look forward to is the return of the glaciers.