Global Warming My Foot

200 Global Warming My Foot

Okay, my fellow tree huggers, it’s nice to know that in the short term we were wrong about global warming. It’s been so cold in the northeast lately that the polar bears are protesting. Carrying signs that say “Al Gore Come Home!”

It got to be eight degrees at mid morning and stayed there until early evening. And it was only through the efforts of the 50-thousand member Moote Pointe Farm Cooperative that it did.

Fifty thousand farmers got out into the cold and wind, cranked up their tractors, and their pickups and pumped thousands of cubic yards of greenhouse gases into the air. They were joined by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and Warehousemen who cranked up the semis and let ‘em run -- not just outside the Lowe’s loading doc as they do most mornings, and the supermarket receiving departments, but everywhere.

The Moote Pointe Construction Association ran some of THEIR pickups throughout the day, too. And even private motorists turned over the engines of their beemers and Corvettes and let ‘em run for hours.

This was not a light undertaking, not with gasoline and diesel prices still in the stratosphere. But it worked. Accu-Weather, which is based here at the Pointe estimates that had this massive community effort not been mounted, the temperature would have risen to a mere 7.876 degrees, F.

The local gasoline retailing and convenience store chain, which is named for an article of bed clothes, only misspelled (“Sheetz,”) would not reduce its gasoline prices for the Moote Pointe Warming event. But they did offer a free meatball hero sandwich (here called a “hoagie,” whatever that means,) with every fill-up of eight gallons or more.

At the high school, public spirited students went around asking for donations based on the amount of gasoline they burned (take that, Cancer Awareness Walk! And a tip of the Wessays hat to Ms. Amanda Glockenspiel of nearby Elephant Township who earned $450.00 by burning a total of 280 gallons of unleaded regular in her father’s fully restored 1928 Packard, ruining the engine, which can’t use unleaded fuel, but ruining it for a good cause. )

Twelve hundred local condo dwellers set their gas-powered barbeque grills to working and the local town council opened the windows to let the hot air from its meeting fill the atmosphere.

In the meantime, the wildlife is confused. There’s this poor schlep of a deer, made homeless by some of those gas-fired condo dwellers and he wanders around from small woods to small woods wondering where to settle next. It’s so cold that the fur on the poor guy’s legs turned white. The rest of him still is tan, however. One wag cracked that “his legs have always been white.” That’s the local jokers for you.

Professor Able M. Carborundum of the Pompous State U. Dept. of Climatology cautions us to “…take the long view. This cold snap is an aberration. The temperature of the Ionosphere is rising by .124 degrees per decade. If we had had that extra .124 today, we wouldn’t have had to burn all that fuel reaching eight degrees.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR