Ski It While You Can

It is hard to imagine that anyone will seriously listen to a bunch of recreationalists complain about losing a couple of weeks off of each end of their ski season, when the impact of droughts, fires etc., etc. will be a much more serious consequence.<br><br>Note also that it will be decades before it likely will be plainly obvious of the slow creep in the climate change. The bottom line in our culture is to spend it all now and pay later (or die and leave the mess to your kids), so it is not likely that enough people will complain about this issue. In general we can't even manage something as straight forward as a credit card, how we gonna change this in such a selfish society. Very unlike the total outcry that would happen if the change were sudden.<br><br>

At Crystal Mountain on Saturday I saw a banner for Keep Winter Cool, which is "a partnership between NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) and the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) to raise visibility and public understanding of global warming and spotlight opportunities that exist right now to start fixing the problem."<br><br> www.keepwintercool.org/

Speaking of defense it looks like this global warming is hot issue with the pentagon.<br><br>Editorial: Global warming/Dire warnings from Pentagon<br>(Star tribune) <br> <br>Published February 8, 2004 ED0208A <br><br>Discussions of global warming's probable impacts tend to have a good news/bad news tenor, and often a tone of plucky optimism -- sure, we may be growing cotton instead of corn in Minnesota someday, but we can adapt to that.<br><br>Part of this complacency derives from large uncertainties about what those impacts will be, and how gradually they may be felt. Though the warming trend is clear, and the role of human contributions well understood, forecasting the effects remains an exercise in conjecture.<br><br>Unfortunate attitudes contribute as well: our impatience with questions that can't be answered clearly and quickly, our indifference to faraway suffering. So does our confidence that we can avoid, manipulate or accommodate all downsides of environmental mismanagement.<br><br>Such conceits are threatened by growing evidence suggesting that the global climate could change quite quickly and unevenly -- and by a recent Pentagon assessment of what this might mean for U.S. security. Its findings are described in depth in a recent article in Fortune.<br><br>As a starting point, the strategic planners took a mainstream explanation for several sudden ice ages that have occurred in the last 13,000 years. It concerns the "great conveyor" current of warm water that flows from the tropics to the U.S. eastern seaboard and then across the Atlantic to northern Europe, creating far milder winter regimes than would otherwise prevail.<br><br>Scientists believe that spells of rapid warming weakened this current, diluting it with increased rainfall and meltwater from Arctic ice. This caused the flow to shut down in as little as 10 years, and led to ice ages that persisted as long as a thousand.<br><br>The last long one, selected by the Pentagon planners for their models, began 8,200 years ago and was over in about 100 years. What would a recurrence in the next few decades do? A sampling from their scenario:<br><br>• Droughts, famine and freezing weather produce huge streams of refugees -- from Mexico, South America and the Caribbean into the United States; from Africa into southern Europe; from Scandinavia into western Europe -- forcing the destination countries to become fortresses.<br><br>• Small wars break out as invaders seek the resources needed for survival. Armies from Eastern Europe invade Russia, or border conflicts escalate between India and Pakistan. Perhaps Japan seizes Russia's eastern oil fields, or Spain and Portugal battle over fisheries.<br><br>• Ballooning demand for heat outruns the capabilities of fossil-fuel technologies, and many governments build nuclear power plants. A byproduct is weapons-grade fissile material, enabling a half-dozen countries to acquire their first nuclear weapons.<br><br>All speculation, of course. But behind it lies respectable data and reasonable assumptions -- not to mention history. We need not go back many centuries to find periods when starvation or other forms of scarcity stimulated all-out war.<br><br>Another interesting feature of this report, of course, is its preparation in a presidential administration that officially regards global warming as a problem of dubious weight and no particular urgency. What a remarkable disconnect: While the White House pursues policies that accelerate production of globe-warming gases, the Pentagon is war-gaming what will happen when the climate reaches a tipping point.<br><br>