While we are in an admitted cold snap across much of the country, I have to take issue with the offhand comments of “Global warming, my ass” flippantly used by a lot of people.  Whether or not they truly mean it or it's simply a conversation starter, let's look at some general facts.  I'm not going to include links here, as you'd spend all your time flipping back and forth between articles.

FACT:  There is overwhelming evidence of global warming such as massive, state-sized chunks of ice breaking off from northen Canada, ski resorts not having snow and cancelling competitions worldwide, glaciers retreating at scary rates, and so on. 

FACT: Overall, the average temperatures have increased everywhere when using historical analysis from the last 100 years.

FACT: There will always be swings in temperature that seem to defy this notion – such as the 3 huge blizzards in Denver, snow in southern California and Arizona, super low temperatures in the Midwest and east coast this past month, and the 10+ feet of snow in upstate New York.

ANNOYING FACT: Naysayers always use these cold snaps to give the standard “I’m freezing my ass off, so there’s no such thing as global warming.” 

I want to scream to them that their Aryan children will have darker skin than Manute Bol by the time they’re of retiring age.  I point out to those people that, for those of them who were native Georgians, they used to have at least one or two large snowstorms every winter here in Atlanta.  Now we haven’t had snow in 4 years.  My daughter doesn’t know what a snow storm looks like, much less what snow feels like.  Yet somehow people still deny our earth is getting warmer and maybe we have something to do with it.

Yes, it might be 15 degrees where you live right now, but there’s a good chance that it would have been 13 or 14 degrees 100 years ago.  You don’t notice that difference in the freezing cold, but when you go from 99 degrees to 101 it does become noticeable.  I do concede the point that we don’t know if we simply are coming into one of our warmer cycles that this planet normally has or if it’s a man-made phenomena, but there is no doubt our carbon-producing footprint has had some adverse effect.

The sooner “warming deniers” such as Senator James Inhofe leave office, the better off our country will be.  Global warming isn’t liberal propaganda, people.  It’s ours and our children’s reality, regardless of what Michael Crichton contends.

On a lighter note, I hate to engage in “profiling”, but Punxsutawney Phil is full of shit.  What exactly is the date range for “spring is right around the corner”?  He gets a 6 week range for saying winter will be in full force, yet no specific time frame for spring to start.  After his latest prediction that spring is here, the Midwest and east coast were buried under mounds of snow and subzero temperatures.  When does the American public start looking at his record and see if he is still the right mammal to lead our country’s weather forecasting?

Of course the South wasn’t content to let a “yankee” groundhog make weather predictions for Dixieland.  Yes, here in the heart of the South they have their own furry forecaster - General Beauregard Lee.  He too predicted an early spring and yet here we are in an unusually-long-for-this-time-of-year-here cold snap.  I hope that furry bastard is shivering his little woodchuck balls off.