Upon returning from Hawaii, I discover that it was mostly around 60 degrees every day here in Boston during my absence. People were walking around in T-shirts in January in Boston. The newspaper carries stories of violent Islamic groups winning elections over in the Middle East (no surprise to the author of http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/, but apparently a shock to other folks) and stories about our continued failure to keep Iraq under control.
George W. Bush has spent a lot of time talking about Iraq (earlier in this Weblog, I had suggested that he should never have spoken about it, but delegated the entire procedure of removing Saddam to a subordinate) and how Arabs, given the chance to vote, would put aside their hatred of the West. His administration has also gone out on a limb saying that burning so much “dinosaur blood” into CO2 hasn’t warmed up the Earth. A Bostonian who spent January in a T-shirt reading the newspaper is going to have some trouble believing our Great Leader.
So… the question is, what are some safe, yet significant, topics for George W. to be talking about?
I think the last election emphatically demonstrated that Bush need not lose sleep over the newspaper-reading, t-shirt-wearing, Bostonians when it comes to election day mathematics. My guess is that he will talk about fear and money and hope we all bow down before that least erected spirit that fell From heaven.
Come on, Phil. One warm spell provides essentially no support for global warming, any more than Moscow’s recent extremely cold weather undermines it. I know you left yourself wiggle room by saying, “A Bostonian who spent… is going to have some trouble believing…”, but that Bostonian clearly doesn’t have much of a grasp of science, so why wiggle?
The Bostonian may be on thin ice (so to speak), but an Inupiat in Barrow, AK, has been watching the thick ice disappear with increasing rapidity for decades, threatening his traditional subsistence culture. And his grasp of the science is probably pretty good.
As most of you know, the top likes to stay on top. All policies and decisions fall in line from there. Unfortunately for the top, this time, the world needs to change from an oil-based economy to one based upon a more balanced use of alternate fuels. Maintaining the status quo depends on the fact that there has been no global warming. Although the top has unsuccessfully tried to pressure Dr. James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies into not reporting his climate model results, their denial of sound science doesn’t make the research go away. Athough the top tries to keep keep our attention elsewhere (Iraq), it doesn’t keep 2005 from being the hottest year on record. It also doesn’t keep the glaciers and polar icecaps from melting.