It's Snowing! Global Warming, Global Weirding, Whatever! by Gia Machlin, March 02 2010, 1 Comment

Last Friday I had started to wake up my kids for school, when I looked out the window and thought better of it. I checked my text messages and there was a notification from the NYC Board of Education that all NYC schools were closed - SNOW DAY! Since my son Noah has a particularly violent reaction to being woken up, I was happy to let him go back to sleep and save myself from some berating and screaming (my husband usually is the butt of this behavior, but he was stuck in California since his flight was canceled due to the snow storm). So I happily crawled back into bed for a little more sleep and reminisced about the snow days of my youth. This is the second Snow Day NYC has had in a month - woo hoo! I started thinking about how people have actually been using the snow to support their "where has global warming gone?" jokes.

Have you seen the Jon Stewart clip making fun of the global warming deniers? I posted it on our Facebook page a few weeks ago, but in case you missed it, here it is, let's call it Exhibit 1:

Facebook page a few weeks ago, but in case you missed it, here it is, let's call it Exhibit 1:

Pretty hilarious, in a sad sort of way. But you may say - he's just a comedian - what does he know? I then turn to the respected Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, for Exhibit 2: at a speech to the Columbia Business School Alumni Club last week, Sachs talked about climate change in an alarming way. He said things like: "we can't go back" and "we are acting ignorantly, indignantly" and "we are diverging from a sustainable trajectory" and my favorite: "if we all had our own CO2 clouds over our heads, we'd be OK."

That's not enough for you? Well, for Exhibit 3 I give you NY Times Columnist Thomas Friedman when he writes about "Global Weirding" in this recent Op-Ed: "Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill."

So what can we do? Well this week, Repower America has launched the largest call-in campaign for climate ever to urge the Senate to support a strong clean energy and climate bill. Please join me in calling the senate! And don't put away those snow shovels yet, I hear more snow is to come!