The Future of Winter
May 20th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
This has been a good news- bad news few days for those of us who love winter. Yesterday, an American President finally stepped up and told the car makers they had to improve gas mileage averages for their car and truck fleets ( meaning-less importing of foreign oil, less pollution, few dollars spent at the gas pump and less carbon going into the atmosphere and heating us all up– good news for winter). And even Congress is working on a cap and trade bill (Waxman-Markey) to further force reductions in carbon emissions, albeit a very imperfect bill, but one that would make progress where none has been made before.
Today comes the bad news for skiers and winter lovers.
Revised Global Warming Projections
The brainy folks at MIT published their latest global warming study in the Journal of Climate and it looks like we’re coming to a boil faster than even the pessimistic earlier reports predicted. Check out Kevin Drum’s blog and get a better look at the scary chart plus a link to a summary of the technical explanation.
So skiers, how apathetic are you? Are you berating your elected politicians to stop obfuscating while the Earth heads toward a very bad future for skiing for our grandchildren? Actually skiing might be the least of our grandchildren’s worries by then, I suppose. All the greening of the ski industry really may prove to be just the proverbial rearranging of the Titanic’s deck chairs if our public servants in Washington and their counterparts in New Delhi and Beijing don’t get serious- and smarter- real fast.
Kevin’s been a go-to guy on the cap and trade front for quiet awhile. A couple of days ago he posted about the really childish nature of the current Republican opposition to the proposed cap and trade legislation and yesterday he found some very cool maps which graphically show who’s causing the carbon problem and who will suffer most from the consequences.
If you’re serious about winter sports, check out Kevin’s postings and contact your congressman and senator and tell them to get real. This is not about left-right, red-blue, republican or democrat games, this, as even the US military now admits and plans for, is a potentially catastrophic problem that can’t be wished away or denied.
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