Global Warming

As my regular readers know, I’m skeptical about anthropogenic (i.e., caused by human activity) global warming. But here’s someone who apparently believes the link between human activity and global warming is much more direct than you might have imagined. This is a letter to the editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, published on April 16, 2007:

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two.

This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that the members of Congress would have considered the effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?

Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.

Connie M. Meskimen

Hot Springs

This is so sad on so many levels…

Of course, there’s a good joke line or two in here. Something in the water in Hot Springs, perhaps. Or something about the hicks in Arkansas. A friend suggested that perhaps the author was also a member of the Flat Earth Society, and another responded that perhaps she’d already fallen off!

But what sticks in my head about this is my own personal experiences with scientific illiteracy, and the frequent polls done showing that only small percentages of our adult population realize that the moon is a satellite of the earth, that sound doesn’t travel in space, that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and so on ad nauseum.

The icing on the cake, of course, is how the basic science misunderstanding leads straight into a cuckoo conspiracy theory. Too rich!