Satire: A GLOBAL WARMING WARNING

Satire from 2006.

A GLOBAL WARMING WARNING:

What are the critters gnawing at?

by

Victor Volpe

            Strange things are going on these days.  This past fall when crude oil was up around $70 a barrel we were getting news stories that it was going to be a cold winter and we wouldn’t be able to afford our heating bill.  But winter has come to the US of A and much of the country is experiencing above average temperatures and now the news media is telling us to beware of global warming and icebergs melting and the ocean level rising.

            I was going to sit down and write about the poor old folks like myself who were sitting in their homes with the thermostat turned down and freezing so that they could avoid those big utility bills and save a little something for food.  But that’s awfully hard to do when you’re sitting at the table in your T-shirt and shorts staring out the big window in the dining room onto a sunny yard with the windows wide open and the patio screen door letting in the fresh air from outside and its only ten o’clock in the morning.  And what should I see this first week in February as I stare out my dual-paned, argon gas filled, low-e energy efficient insulated glass window but our neighborhood squirrel come darting by.  This is my first siting of him in quite a while.  Why he must have just come out of hibernation for the new season.  The temperature has been in the seventies and eighties this past week and I guess the little fellow has found it to be uncomfortable for anymore prolonged sleeping.  I can’t say that I blame him.  So he is out and about, running all over the yard up and down trees while the cats are away, and as frisky as ever.

            I tell you it’s getting so that you don’t know who to believe anymore.  The other morning I was listening to the radio and I heard a supposed expert on the climate warning us about global warming.  The program was Tom Ashbrook’s On Point on WBUR out of Boston.  His guest that day was James Hansen, NASA’s number one climate watcher.  Dr. Hansen has been going around the country giving speeches and writing articles of research and studies that he has done to show that we should be concerned about what we (and not some heavenly intelligent designer) are doing to our climate.  He claims that we still have time to avoid the dangerous anthropogenic interference with our global climate.  Those are a bunch of big words that I had to look up and if you just barely got by in your high school science classes like I did I can save you some time at your local library and keep you from doing a Google search by telling you that that is just an educated way of telling us that we humans are having an impact on our environment.  With respect to global warming, Dr. Hansen has looked at CO₂ data going back the past thirty years and has compared that with the past ten thousand years and let me tell you it don’t look good.

But the radio program was not just about Dr. Hansen and his data but how his boss, the Bush Administration, was trying to put the kibosh on his efforts to inform the public

[I guess that is us.] because this information he wanted to give was not in conformance to what the Administration wanted us to know.  [Does that sound familiar?]  It did not sound like the boss was very pleased with Dr. Hansen and I know what that feels like.

            I don’t know much about this subject [That’s why I follow the news.] but I know the Bush Administration thinks a lot about Lee Raymond of the Exxon Mobil Corporation.  I heard Mr. Raymond say on several occasions that he’s not ready to buy off on these opinions that global warming is occurring.  He says these temperature variations we are getting just may be random events and not due to any anthropogenic interference.  Actually I don’t think Mr. Raymond used any of those big words that the learned Dr. Hansen used but I do know that Mr. Raymond has a few degrees of his own and that he is supposed to be a very successful person in his own right.  He must be because he just retired as CEO of ExxonMobil with an executive compensation package that is supposed to be in the tens of millions of dollars and I do not think that Dr. Hansen, as wise as he is with all his degrees and such, is going to be pulling in that kind of dough as a Government pensioner.  And if you are asking where that kind of money comes from I can tell you that just this past week ExxonMobil reported the largest quarterly profit of any business in the history of humankind – over $10 billion for the last quarter of 2005 and over $36 billion for the entire year.  Mr. Raymond says that ExxonMobil will need all of that money and more just to do more exploring for energy in the hard to find places, not to mention pay his executive pension.

            So now we have two supposed experts, Dr. Hansen and Mr. Raymond, with different conclusions on the same problem.  But the differences do not end there.  Remember I told you that my neighborhood squirrel came out early.  Maybe he is siding with Dr. Hansen?  He may have been reading some of Dr. Hansen’s literature while he was packed up in his hole?  Lord knows he packed away enough peanuts to get by with for the winter.  I am continually finding peanuts (in their shell) hid all over the yard and garden and even in my raised planters.  But the squirrel came out today, February 3^rd and yesterday was the 2^nd.  And if you’re from Pennsylvania like I am (now residing in Sunny Southern California) you know yesterday that Punxsutawney Phil came out of his hole, said six more weeks of winter, and went back into his hole.  He obviously is not being influenced by the above average temperatures going on around us this year.  Apparently my neighborhood squirrel was still hibernating in his hole on the 2^nd and didn’t catch Phil’s admonition.  So!…. I don’t know whose advice to follow, Mr. Raymond and Phil the Groundhog or Dr. Hansen and the Squirrel.

 

              The Squirrel

  

                 Punxsutawney Phil

                 (The Prognosticator)

         And to make matters even more confusing, don’t forget the alarmists – like my father.  They have been warning us for several decades what was going to happen to us all.  Who knows?  They may be right ….some day.  Now when my father was making all

of these comments some thirty years ago, crude oil was going for $30 a barrel.  And when my father passed on in the next decade to a better climate (perhaps, or maybe it was a rather warm one at that) crude oil was going for less than $10 a barrel.  The alarmist however can be found on both sides of the issue.  After all there are those who tell us we need oil and the energy we use for our way of life – to stifle this would wreck the economic growth engine that propels our wealthy economy.

An Alarmist (from the 1970’s)

         Now I can’t see any further than my nose; but, I do have a big nose [You may notice the resemblance from the photo.] which may give me an advantage over my short protuberant friends.  And I certainly don’t want to be an alarmist, in any camp, regardless

of my father’s influence; but, something needs to be done.  This is not just an academic question.  If we could only get the current Administration to acknowledge what the Squirrel has already figured out.  I would hate to be an alarmist like my father.  I suppose it is in my DNA but then again it may just seem to run in the family.

            You see thirty years ago I was working and getting pay raises and could afford to  be indifferent to the doubling and tripling of gas prices at the pump, utility bills on the rise, runaway inflation and such.  But now I’m a pensioner like my father was back then.  And let me tell you with gas at $2.50 a gallon and on the rise, utility bills with at least a forty percent increase this winter, and Alan Greenspan be damned I say there is inflation at the grocery market – this pensioner is minding his financial p’s and q’s.  So I need to get the lettuce and other vegetables into the garden to save a little dough throughout the year.

What does this have to do with global warming???  Well….I can tell you that now that I’m on a pension I have been made acutely aware of the climate so that I know when to get the seeds in the ground.  And when I see the Squirrel running around the yard six weeks before his time I get to wondering what he knows that I don’t know?

You wouldn’t think this was a big problem out here in Southern California which is usually like Paradise.  I moved out here from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania – a very cold climate if you don’t know – there are usually at least six weeks in the winter when the temperature never gets into the thirties if you live on a mountain top like I did.  So when you planted your spring crop in late June, if the seeds didn’t take, that was it.  You done lost your crop that year and had to wait until next year to try your luck again.  But out here in Southern California any idiot, and believe me I know, can grow something and look like a green thumb instead of the black hand.  The weather is usually so favorable that if the seeds don’t take the first time you can just try again and again – move the planting spots around – something is bound to work.  People tell me, “Vic, what a wonderful garden you have.”  After twenty-five years of doing this I still can’t figure out why it is working.

But then we have one of those years.  Like we had about twenty years ago.  We were having a normal winter right through December; but, then after the New Year the temperatures started to get into the seventies one day after the next and then we had occasional days in the eighties.  I worked in those days so I didn’t have time to study the squirrels like I do today.  I didn’t pay too much attention to the warm days.  I figured we’ll start getting cooler weather eventually.  But one warm day led into another.  January turned into February and we started getting even warmer days – well into the eighties, almost ninety degrees.  It was so hot on some days you couldn’t keep up with the weeding.  Usually I try to get the spring crop in the ground by the first of April, but now the weather has me wondering – “Do I really want to put those seeds in the ground in early February?”  So I wait a couple of weeks figuring the weather has to cool down.  Finally by the end of the month, I give in and plant the seeds.  The weather is still going great.  The seeds come up just fine and the young plants are taking it all in.  But then the weather shoots into the high eighties for about a week and the plants bolt and go right to seed.  That was it for the year.  It looked as if the Black Hand had returned.

So now I’m watching this squirrel running around the first week in February and I’m wondering if it’s going to be one of those years again.  We’re talking dollars and cents here.  I haven’t got Mr. Raymond’s pension plan.  And let me tell you my ear is real attuned to the news and my big nose to the weather and I’m keeping a close watch on the critters for any sign of strange behavior that may tip things off.  If my spring crop is going to go to seed that means I have to go to the market for produce.  And in all likelihood produce prices will be on a sharp rise this year.  The farmers in the Southwest are having a hard time getting enough illegal immigrants to pick crops and Lou Dobbs of CNN and the “Big O” at Fox News ain’t helping the situation any.  So poor old Vic may be in for hard times this year and may have to find out where Mr. Squirrel will be hiding the peanuts this year.

I’m still on the lookout for the first robin this spring.  We’ll see if Mr. Robin has been listening to Punxsutawney Phil’s six more weeks of winter or if he is going to follow Mr. Squirrel.  Oh well!  In this age of uncertainty, hope springs eternal.

©  Copyright/Victor Volpe/2006/All rights reserved.