What a Life!

If you look out our windows right now, you won’t see anything but whiteness. No, we don’t have twelve feet of snow or anything. I think when the whole thing started after we went to bed last night, it began with rain which turned to little beads of ice on the windows. Then the snow stuck to that, and the snow is still falling, and no one has gone anywhere so you can’t see any tracks or anything. It’s just all white.

I can still see the tires of Steve’s truck, though, if I look really hard. If they were half buried, then I’d say we’d gotten a lot of snow. Last night, the prediction was 1″ to 4″. As we speak, Steve is listening to one of the local news stations and they just changed the prediction for Lincoln to 6″ to 12″. Even UNL is closed (according to Steve, that doesn’t happen very often).

And you know what this means, don’t you? All this crazy weather we’re having? Global warming, my friends. People keep talking about it, and storms like this just reinforce it. Last night on the news, they said the ice caps were melting and all the polar bears were going to die by 2030 because they’re having to swim more than they’re accustomed to. Yup, it’s happening. The polar ice cap is going to melt and we’re all going to drown.

Then again…perhaps not. Last weekend Steve told me the average annual snowfall for this area is 28 inches, and as of our last storm (last weekend), we’d gotten 24 inches so far this year. That means snow is normal, folks. It’s not some crazy global warming phenomenon. Just because it’s not 70 degrees and sunny doesn’t mean the weather is crazy and global warming is going to kill us all. Seriously.

If we have summer and winter every year where the animals have to hibernate and all the bugs get killed off (this is why Steve says winter is good…because in places like Florida the bugs never die, they just grow and grow and grow…and I will admit that bugs in Florida tend to be huge…), couldn’t there be larger trends of warming and cooling as well? Nature has adapted to feezing cold every winter – birds fly south, bugs disappear, bears hibernate. Who’s to say that polar bears don’t know how to swim just for periods of warming like this? If we weren’t accustomed to four seasons every year, I can only imagine the hullabaloo gloabal warming scientists would be creating every winter when so many things disappear. Will the bugs be back? Yes, they will. Where they are right now, I do not know. I can only tell you that they reappear each spring when the weather gets warm.

Who are all these global warming people anyway? They’re scientists that predict weather. Okay, last night, less than twelve hours ago, they were predicting 1 to 4 inches of snow. This morning, they changed it to 6 to 12 inches. They can’t even predict accurately twelve hours out, so what makes you think they actually know what is going to happen in 2030 when all the polar bears are supposedly going to die? How often is the weather forecast really that accurate? Yeah, they knew it was going to snow, but it’s winter time, y’all – I could have predicted that too. If they could get a better grip on what’s happening in the short term, I’d be more inclined to believe their long-term predictions to. Just saying is all.

Now that’s not to say I don’t think we should be worrying about our “carbon footprint.” I’m all for taking care of the earth. We do use lawn fertilizer, but in moderation (nothing like our neighbors next door who have some guy from the grass chemical company out there every other week, I swear). We keep the thermostat low in the winter and high in the summer. We curb our driving habits and drive gas-efficient vehicles, though they’re not hybrids or anything. I’d be happy to drive a hybrid if it cost the same as a regular gas car. We only buy what we use – our house is not filled with junk we do not need, and we use things until they are completely worn out, so we’re not filling the landfills with our gluttony. We regularly take things to the recycling centers around town. But we don’t do this because we fear global warming – we do this because we believe God made us stewards of the environment, and it’s important to be responsible stewards and not just trash what we’ve been given. (See? Republicans care about the environment too.)

Personally, I think we need to be as careful about caring for our environment as we are about making predictions about stuff like global warming. It’s politically incorrect for a scientist to say that global warming isn’t a proven theory. I think the dissenting scientists should be able to voice their viewpoint as freely as the ones claiming that we’re all going to die from global warming. I’m a Republican, but I think it’s important for Democrats to be able to voice their opinion as well. Why shouldn’t we be able to hear both sides of the global warming debate? Based on their track record at predicting weather twelve hours in advance, I wouldn’t consider global warming an air-tight theory. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with being allowed to debate something – if it really is true, debating it will only further prove it to be so. Only allowing one side to speak is a sign of weakness, a sign that they’re afraid their theory might be thrown to the dogs if people looked too closely at it.

But what do I know? I’m not a scientist. I just have my own version of an inconvenient truth – that scientists don’t know everything, and we need to be a little less quick to draw conclusions from people who don’t necessarily have a proven track record. Just saying is all…