Doesn’t feel like globe is warming

I suppose I shouldn’t poke fun of the people who have turned “global warming” into their own religion, but I am sincerely waiting for some warmer weather. I understand that global warming zealots are in line for billions of dollars of grants and other contracts, and I am fully aware of the almost comical e-mail leaks of scientists who manipulated data about the earth’s temperature.

I am no scientist. All I know is I am weary of cold weather. As I write this, Bismarck is just emerging from a minus 52 wind chill, and many parts of North Dakota had minus 30 degree temperature readings and lower. Miami had 35 degrees last weekend, which broke a record that had stood since 1970. Weather forecasters predicted that the record low recorded in 1927 would be broken as I write this.

Last June I traveled to Canada on my annual fishing trip, an embarkation I have made for almost 50 years regardless of employment or financial standing. For the very first time I almost froze in the boat last June in temperatures that were in the 40s. Maybe the ice caps are melting but you couldn’t prove it by me!

We had a very warm September in Montana last year, but then in October the temperatures plummeted, it rained and snowed, and then snowed some more. I rescheduled my yearly pheasant/antelope hunt five times to southeastern Montana, and finally had to abandon the idea. (Last year was the first season since 1984 that I didn’t shoot a pheasant!)

The cold October was not a figment of my imagination. The weather station at Montana State University reported that October 2009 was the coldest October since 1969. Nine Montana counties that were hammered by October’s heavy freeze have been designated a “primary natural disaster area” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. During the second week of October, freezing temperatures covered much of the state, and prevented farmers, who still had crops in the ground, from harvesting. In the Gallatin Valley, potato farmers were hit particularly hard with up to one-third of their crops ruined by the freeze.

In November I went elk hunting in Nevada, and had several days of normal weather for the season — daytime temperatures in the 50s and 60s. Then temperatures dived and we had a couple days when it did not get above freezing. Meanwhile, on Nov. 12th, Bozeman had an all-time record 24 inches of snowfall. One of the liberal film guys along on the hunt said to me, “This is global warming.”

Huh?

In December Laurie and I loaded our two Labradors into the old Suburban and headed eastward to visit Jake in Jamestown. We spent the first night in Wibaux, Mont., in 10 degree below zero temperatures, then arrived in Jamestown the next day. It was cold the entire visit. We took advantage of a break in the weather (when it rose to the 20s) and headed back to southwestern Montana. Last week I again read the MSU weather report for the month: Bozeman had an average of NINE degrees lower than normal temperatures for the entire month of December!

A friend of mine rightly points out that releasing “raw elemental gasses into the air” certainly affects the world’s air quality. Maybe humans are indeed accelerating climate change. I simply don’t know. But I am smart enough to know that U.S. citizens paying extra taxes for a cap-and-trade bill will do nothing for averting any climate change. It simply will provide more money for politicians and bureaucrats to spend.

One more observation: In 1983 Laurie and I motored her Boston Whaler from Juneau to Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska. We stopped at Gustavus at the National Park visitor center, and I viewed a series of sketches and photographs of Glacier Bay from the time Captain Cook discovered it in the 1700s to the present. The glacier that makes up the bay had receded over time to where it now is a 65-mile-long fiord. It began long before the Industrial Revolution, and two centuries before Al Gore was born.

In any case, I’ve got more important things to worry about than global warming, and I sure am tired of the cold.

Tags: bernie kuntz, global warming, climate change, outdoors, climate, fishing