The Harmony of Discord

For the first time in many years, we are having a normal winter here in the mid-west-north. That makes it an unusual normal winter. We get snow every few days, the temperature ranges in the crisp zone between just above zero Fahrenheit to just below freezing. Red cheeks prevail and people shuffle quickly between their cars and houses, but the snowmobilers and skiers and fisherman are out without complaint.

A normal winter has become an oddity in this time of heightened concern about global warming. The issue won’t leave us, but instead will become part of our lives. We have affected the climate: that’s a fact. No longer something to fear, or at least a fear we have grown used to. Instead it will be an economic event coupled with a series of “natural” disasters such as Katrina, droughts, and flooding. Global warming has already become a political football – not longer an issue of science, but an issue of political advantage.

They seem to be on the run, but don’t look for things to get better for a while. With 9/10ths of the human beings on the planet living in something close to abject poverty or worse, it isn’t clear that the people like us, who have access to the internet, wealth enough to buy coffee at Starbucks, and mostly drive cars, are really going to catch on to how high the stakes really are.

But what the hell. Al Gore is admitting that America is wrong on global warming. China is the great hope in leaping from coal to renewable in their search for latte, Bush looks fairly irrelevant, and the horrid reincarnation of NCLB is languishing, awaiting impetus from the new President. Unfortunately, the slate of candiates on both sides seem to be doing more to obfuscate that clarify, and the establishment is waiting patiently for the field to sort itself out. Everything seems to be in the balance, as indeed it always is. We just know it this time.