February 09, Another Hot Month
March 16th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
After last night’s National Weather Service’s prediction of lots of snow turned into rain here in the Tetons, I thought, what the heck, why not get further depressed and look at NASA’s global temperature map for February 2009.
NASA's February 2009 Global temperature map
As you can see, only Western Canada and Siberia were below normal while much of the Arctic and Central Asia were well above normal. And yes, pretty much the whole of the continental U.S. was above normal, the lower Great Plains, especially. Sad news for us skiers.
As a skier, if you’d like to contribute your thoughts about “what we can do to ensure the future of skiing”, stop by Skiing the Backcountry’s post by that title and read the thought provoking post by Dark Star- then contribute a good idea, or two.
It is a huge problem and we’re all part of the solution in the way we live our lives everyday. I don’t want to diminish the impact we have as indiviuals when we consciously minimize our carbon emissions, but the reality is the magnitude of the problem and its urgency demand aggressive action by our elected leaders to create aggressive policies (both carrots and sticks) to accelerate the world’s energy revolution from carbon power to electric power from non-carbon sources (sun, wind, tides, geothermal). This truly should be a bi-partisan issue, so we all need to rip into any politician of either party (nicely, of course) if he or she isn’t supporting progressive policies and legislation to speed the needed change-over to carbon free energy. Those of us living in gas and coal rich states need to be especially vocal and persistant in hounding our senators and congressmen, because we know who is filling their re-election coffers.
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