Hot Air

      “The Hot Zone: U.S. Corner Pockets” is the title of an article in the Thursday, June 5, 2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune reprinted from the Associated Press. It is under the Star tribune’s science heading. The Associated Press analyzed National Climatic Data Center temperature trends in the lower 48 states The article profers that all but one state in the union has warmed since 1984. I find it amusing that the only state that they claim has actually cooled in that time frame is North Dakota. The  state that has  most dramatically  expanded its extraction/energy industry.

     The article goes on to quote a ‘climate scientist’ at Texas Tech University in Lubbock as saying, “heat and drought are a vicious cycle that has been hitting the Southwest hard in recent years.” The southwest didn’t have heat and drought and even deserts before that? The ‘Desert Southwest’? No Death Valley? I remember watching westerns… also Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. Cactus and sand. Cactus and sand.

     But the last paragraph of the article takes the chutzpah cake. Makes my job easy. Could just copy and paste direct from the newspaper, but for copyright restrictions. More and more of those all the time.

     The Southeast was one of the regions that warmed the least according to the study.

     According to this article,  Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University Professor said, by way of explanation, that in the Southeast and mid-Atlantic, “industrial sulfur particle pollutants from coal burning may be reflecting sunlight, thus countering heating caused by coal’s carbon dioxide emissions”.

     So what he said is that pollutants from burning coal are counteracting the affects of…pollutants from burning coal!

     Yet we still must spend ourselves into oblivion to stop global warming or stop using coal as an energy source altogether.

     This is what it’s come to? These are our top scientists and educators?