The weather (and other stuff).

Today I was thinking about how awful the weather is in Chicago (colder than a witches tit in the winter, sauna-like in the summer, and dangerously unpredictable the rest of the time) and decided I should blog this. However many of my friends (and my wife) are only too quick to tell me how boring my meteorological diatribes are, so I canned that idea. Then it crossed my mind that I could just segue into a piece about global warming, but I decided I don't know enough about the subject to really make a reasonable argument either way. And that's exactly the problem.

Climate change and its apparent causes has been persistently debated throughout all forms of mass media and in more countries than any other global issue, even with all the current hysteria about rising food and oil prices (and it doesn't take a PhD to see that these are all part of the same problem). Yet the real problem with the global warming debate is that pretty much 99% of the public (and that includes the media and politicians) don't have a frigging clue what they are talking about, myself included.

Every newspaper letters page, online message board, chat room, and water cooler resounds to the noise of people tossing around ill-understood, half-baked concepts to try and prove that they are right; either that we're all going to drown under rising oceans, if the hurricanes don't get us first; or that the entire thing is some concoction of liberal-fascist-eco-pornographers who want our tax dollars (and I have read those exact words used by a supposedly educated person). So the next time someone leans across the table in a bar and drunkenly opines that "actually we're just in a warm spell of what is really another ice age", tell them to stop spouting what they heard on the radio and to fuck off and read a real book instead.