Unseasonable Warm, Unquestionably Nino

Well, the winter started out snowy enough. Big fluffy mound of snow had covered everything and then *BAM* (as they say in the cooking world), Mother Nature kicked it up a bit and it has been unseasonably warm here in Cleveland for the past few weeks.

Not only did we not have a white Christmas, we barely had a cold one.

Now, I could do the stereotypical thing and run around in circles like a chicken little lunatic screaming “The planet is warming! The planet is warming!”, but I am not going to do that. Mainly because this unusually warm winter is not surprising. I just wanted to remind everyone of the whole El Nino effect. I said there would be less snow, warmer weather for Cleveland. Boy, can I call them.

As far as the whole global warming thing goes, well, it is not to say that I don’t believe in it. I do, just not in the same way that it is often touted in the media.

I won’t deny that the planet is getting warmer. I won’t deny that ice caps will melt, break or otherwise find themselves indisposed. I am fairly certain that the face of the planet will shift and change due to temp changes and cause every which way inconveniences for New York city dwellers.

I just don’t think that this is as much of a man made issue as the media touts it to be. I mean let’s face it, these are the same people who brought us such imminent catastrophic disasters such as killer bees, Richter scale defying, city crushing earthquakes and giant meteors.

The real catastrophic disasters have caught the news media off guard every time. I never heard a word breathed about a tsunami until one actually happened. Planes flying into buildings lived only in Hollywood until a terribly fateful day. Prior to one awful hurricane, cities were never potentially reduced to rubble by floods. The news media’s prediction batting average isn’t all that great.

As shocking as some people may find this, this big planet earth has been warming and cooling dramatically and some times rapidly for, oh, the past few million millennia. Since man has only been around for few million years (including the time when we looked closer to chimps than modern man), it is hard to believe that we alone could have this effect on this planet. Or at least in any fashion greater than any creatures that came before us.

It is just slightly egotistical, if you ask me. I often wonder if civilization had developed during the ice age, what would mankind have said about when it ended. Would we have claimed that we were ending that as well? Beyond that, modern man was just a potential during the ice age. Was there some other life form alive that caused that massive change in weather?

It is not to say that I don’t think that we need to clean up our act. At a most basic level, dirty air is not healthy to breath. Add to that the fact the the new mall near my home was built on a massive mountain of a reclaimed landfill which just screams really wrong. These and many other health related issue makes me concerned about the environment, not the specters of climate change past, present and future.

I have been a gardener long enough to know that while I can influence Mother Nature, in the end she is just going to what she wants anyway. So I think it goes with global warming. We can take credit if we would like, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this would have happened in spite of us.