Overtime I have developed a bit of a pet peeve. I get a little annoyed when people make lame jokes on a cold day about "Al Gore and Global Warming." It's cold, big deal, it neither proves nor disproves any theory and is, overall an amazingly lame over simplificaiton of a complex issue.
Global warming, for better or worse, is actually happening. We don't know if we can stop it. We do know there are a variety of contributing factors to the problem such as cows which supposedly generate more greenhouse gases than cars, planes, and all other forms of transport combined. Go read the linked article it's pretty insane how much bad stuff livestock, and the care of that commodity, generates.
Honestly, I don't care if you care about global warming. I don't care if you are being more environmentally conscious or if you reduce your family's carbon footprint at all. But please stop denying that global warming is happening. There is plenty of disagreement on the why (manmade) -vs- (other) bit it's still a fact that the global temps are gradually increasing so please just deal with it.
The impetus for this post was a minor twitter conversation I had after someone retweeted a lame "Its cold out, take that global warming" joke. I find it funny that these same people never make an equally lame joke on a warm winter day (or a warm month like this past November, 2009). After I made that observation it was suggested that November wasn't really that mild compared to normal so I looked and it's true - on average it wasn't "that mild" but it was 2.75 degrees warmer than the average of the past 12 years. Here's a little table showing the avg November temps for Bluefield WV for the past 12 years:
| Year | Temp |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 58 |
| 2008 | 50 |
| 2007 | 55 |
| 2006 | 58 |
| 2005 | 59 |
| 2004 | 58 |
| 2003 | 58 |
| 2002 | 47 |
| 2001 | 60 |
| 2000 | 48 |
| 1999 | 58 |
| 1998 | 54 |
| AVG: 55.25 | |
2000 looked awefully nasty but 2001 sure did look nice! My curiosity kept me plugging though so I grabbed a different 12 year window; 1968-1979.
| Year | Temp |
|---|---|
| 1979 | 50 |
| 1978 | 54 |
| 1977 | 55 |
| 1976 | 43 |
| 1975 | 56 |
| 1974 | 52 |
| 1973 | 54 |
| 1972 | 50 |
| 1971 | 50 |
| 1970 | 53 |
| 1969 | 47 |
| 1968 | 51 |
| AVG: 51.25 | |
Again, this is not sufficient data to do any real trending on but I thought it was interesting that the average temp was 4 degrees cooler in this sample and that the temp only got over the 98-09 average one time during this 12 year period. All data was extracted from weather underground