Snow lie: Global warming is for real

Published 11:25 am Monday, March 3, 2008

Timing is everything and regardless of the veracity of his movie, the unusual November cold snap probably won’t help sales in this area of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary on the issue of global warming.

Not that I doubt the reality of global warming. I have a scientist sister who keeps telling me she can literally feel it descending on her Fairbanks, Alaska home. Minus-18 degrees there this week and the promise of numbers much lower as winter deepens is no insulation against damage done as more and more permafrost becomes perma-thawed.

To my chagrin, I discovered on Thanksgiving (between dinner and pie) that I don’t need history books or years of careful scientific tabulation to know that global warming is beyond theory. I found that my own history is now plenty long enough to chronicle receding glaciers as well as hairlines.

My daughters hate it when dinner table talk turns to, “I remember when …” especially when the story is going to be about snow. While taking some comfort in living in the convergence zone, they still feel shortchanged by Mother Nature, who clearly has mellowed in her old age.

I remember ice skating on Haller Lake in north Seattle, sledding at Jackson Park Golf Course, actually using my sled every year and my friend’s car completely buried in front of our house.

My father in-law remembers the winter of 1930 when a truly serious snap froze Green Lake so hard they drove cars out on the surface.

My kids have to get excited over frost. Even that comes so seldom these years that I couldn’t find the Styrofoam cup for the outside faucet and got to fashion my own anti-freeze device.

It isn’t just the lack of cold. The wettest November ever may have washed clean the short-term memory banks of the warmest, sunniest, most glorious summer ever.

Now, I’ve never actually been to San Diego, but I do know it has Three Bears weather: not too cold, not too hot, it’s just right. Which is how I kept describing the monotony of a perfect summer to my sister, who due to the yin yang of weather patterns, was suffering through the wettest Fairbanks summer on record: “It’s just like San Diego, except I didn’t have to fly anywhere.”

Jim Hills is publisher of The Enterprise Newspapers.