Shoveling Global Warming

I woke up this morning to find about 15 inches of "Global Warming" on my back porch. My first priority when a storm like this hits is to clear a path to the hot tub. Getting to the car, to the store, or to work are much further down the list. As long as I can get to the refrigerator, the bathroom, and the hot tub, I'm a happy man.

I, obviously, use the term "Global Warming" facetiously. This frozen precipitation on my deck is snow. Lots of it ... which I enjoy. The more, the merrier. But to think that "Global Warming" can somehow cause both higher and colder temperatures is like saying that boiling water will create ice cubes. Is the earth, perhaps, getting a tad warmer? The data would seem to indicate it is. But how much warmer? And warmer than when? Given that man has really only been carefully recording weather conditions for about 150 years, and only on a truly global scale for less than 100, it's really pretty difficult to draw a whole lot of conclusions based upon the most recent 150 years of a planet that is thought to be billions of years old. And to further hypothesize that man, and man alone, has been the cause of these weather changes is downright absurd.

Governments have the tendency to over-react to just about any issue. But maybe this can be attributed to the increasingly knee-jerk reaction of the average citizen that if something bad is happening, the government MUST do something about it ... regardless of the consequences. There are numerous environmental regulations - federal, state, and local - that forbid certain activities in certain areas because those activities might invade the habitat of some species of something or other. On this, the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday, one has to ask themselves ... "Won't the species just evolve and adapt to their new environment? Isn't this what evolution is all about?" And if the species perishes, well, isn't that fulfilling Darwin's thoughts on the "survival of the fittest?" Likewise, doesn't man have the ability to adapt to a 0.3 degree Celsius increase in average global temperature over the last 50 year period without governments enforcing potentially catastrophic impacts to our economy, our standard of living, or our way of life? For people who do things so poorly and inefficiently (i.e., government) to be telling individuals, who usually do things much more effectively, how to run their lives is absolutely ludicrous. And for government to actually give credence to groups that place their conclusions on computer models, which can only possibly consider an infinitesimally small amount of human experience, is equally ludicrous.

As for me, I'm firing up the hot tub.