Don't Like the Landscape? Wait five minutes
I just returned from a 10 day trip to Hawaii. We visited the garden island: Kauai. Kauai's weather is really fast changing. It rained quite often, but usually for only 2-3 minute bursts. Immediately after the rain stopped, the sun was usually right back out and shining bright. I went to college in Burlington, VT, where locals like to say if you don't like the weather, wait a few minutes. True, northern VT weather is pretty fleeting, but can't compare to Kauai in terms of change frequency. Plus, Kauai is so incredible beautiful that the rain bursts only add to the charm. Whereas the Burlington shift from freezing rain to ice pellets does not warm the heart nearly as much.
Anyway, I've recently read a bunch of articles on the global warming situation like this one that has nuggets like the following:
Entire hillsides, sometimes more than a kilometre long, simply let go and slid like a vast green carpet into valleys and rivers on Melville Island in Canada's northwest Arctic region of Nunavut this summer, says Scott Lamoureux of Queens University in Canada and leader of one the of International Polar Year projects."The entire landscape is on the move, it was very difficult to find any slopes that were unaltered," said Lamoureux, who led a scientific expedition to the remote and uninhabited island.
The topography and ecology of Melville Island is rapidly being rearranged by climate change.
"Every day it looked different," he told IPS. "This is a permanent change."
How fitting that global warming is progressing much more rapidly than scientific models have suggested. This fits hand in glove with our American culture, where we have the collective attention span of the common gnat. Thank goodness you can actually see global warming as it happens! If not, we'd probably ignore the whole issue and quickly forget about it. Phew! And to think I was worried? My guess is some enterprising game development company will have a global warming-inspired "Save the Polar Bears" type product out very soon for the kids to play at home.
Global warming, a product fit for the times.
