Willow Glen Resident

Letters & Opinions

Wacky weather: another sign of global warming?

By Moryt Milo

It's the dead of winter, but along the northern portions of the East Coast, people are suffering from springtime allergies, as vegetation blooms and temperatures reach into the 70s.

In Southern California, the legendary Santa Ana winds are gusting up to hurricane force at 80 mph, toppling trees, while dust storms whip through Barstow. There's been an unprecedented amount of snow dumped in Colorado, triggering avalanches, a deluge of rain in the Pacific Northwest and ice storms in Nebraska. Talk about wacky weather--we have it from coast to coast. Some scientists say the cause is El Niño, but the vast majority of scientists attribute the increasing extremes to global warming.

We don't need a climatologist to explain the weather changes around us. Anyone who has a garden, who grows vegetables, who bird-watches can tell you trees are blooming earlier, birds are returning sooner and vegetables are definitely confused, especially in the summer. I was still harvesting tomatoes in November.

We all know intuitively, whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not, that the weather is just not the same as when we were growing up. I'm not sure how it was in California, but back East, where I lived during my youth, there were four very distinct seasons and winter never pretended to be spring. We would have Indian summer in the late fall, but we all knew it was a last burst of heat. After that, it was cold, snowy and wet. No one was on the golf courses in New York during January, and no one was suffering from allergies in January. It was much more likely someone was coming down with the flu.

As all these weather happenings were enveloping us, a very timely film became available on DVD and On Demand, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

I never caught it in the movie theater so I watched it on cable. Whether you are a believer in the greenhouse effect--the increase of carbon dioxide that is causing temperatures to rise on our planet--or not, this movie is well-worth 1 ¹/2 hours of your time.

The evidence is overwhelmingly convincing. Gore goes through a slide show that shows how various locations throughout our planet have changed vastly in just decades. For example, the "snows of Kilimanjaro" have almost vanished. Glacier National Park in Montana, a place I recall visiting as a young child, may soon require a new name. Gore's before and after slides are startling. Large lakes have dried up, fertile lands have become barren and drought-ridden. The flow of ice from glaciers on Greenland has more than doubled in just a decade. Should you have doubts, it was just reported that a portion of the arctic shelf--25.5 square miles--broke free and has turned into a floating ice island. Scientists knew this a year ago and credit it to global warming.

It pretty darn scary to think that we are turning a blind eye to a problem that could become potentially unsolvable for our children and future generations.

I think it's because we view the world as so vast an orb, it is simply too difficult for us to fathom that all its riches and resources could be permanently marred.

The question is, what can we do? For starters, we can all become a lot greener in our homes by altering a few simple things, such as switching to energy efficient light bulbs or changing the filters in our cooling systems or lowering our thermostats. Many of us do that already.

On a national level, we can elect people who want to actively effect a positive change in our country and on the planet, who stand strong and pass laws that require greener vehicles and lifestyles. We know the technology is out there. We need to get beyond the corporate power and greed for the sake of humanity. The Freon ban is a great example of positive reforms to the ozone layer. The hole started closing.

I have little doubt, after viewing this film, that time is of the essence. It is also quite apparent that Gore is on a quest and sees our planet as a ticking bomb.

At the end of the documentary the credits include a number of afterthoughts. One, however, continues to stick with me.

"What were our parents thinking? Why didn't they wake up when they had a chance?" Let's hope our children never ask these questions.

If you want to learn more, go to www.climatecrisis.net; it will leave a lasting impression.

Look for us on Fridays

Beginning the week of Jan. 15, Silicon Valley Community Newspapers will begin a new production schedule that will result in a change of delivery date for the Willow Glen Resident. The paper will be delivered on Fridays, beginning Jan. 19.

Although the original impetus for the change was the need to accommodate a new printing schedule, we were excited when we realized that the change in our weekly news cycle will make it possible for us to make our news coverage more timely.

In the past, for instance, we had to run council news more than a week after the meeting, because the Willow Glen Resident was delivered the morning of the regular council meetings. With our old schedule, we finished our reporting and editing cycle one week and were well into the next week's cycle when our readers were opening up their papers on Tuesday morning.

We are excited that we will be able to serve you even better with our new schedule. But rest assured, that's all that will change. You can still look to us for the same lively coverage of news for and about the people of Willow Glen that you've come to expect.

--Dale Bryant, executive editor

Moryt Milo is the editor of the Willow Glen Resident. She can be reached at 408.200.1051 or via email at mmilo@community-newspapers.com.