Some Like it Hot

     For the past month, rain showers in Southeast Alaska have been as infrequent as gubernatorial good ideas. The Sitka Salmon Derby had weaker fishing returns than in past years. The fire ban is entering its third or fourth straight week.

    “It’s the driest spring I can ever remember,” a forest ranger told a Raven Radio news reporter.

     Last summer, it was the hottest summer on record here. During a kayak trip, we paddled around for a day looking for a stream that wasn’t dried to the bone and, when we finally found the one identified by a blue ribbon on our map, little more than a trickle emerged from the parched forest.

     Salmon littered the black, gurgling stream, but more were crowded at its mouth, hundreds of salmon impatient to return to their pebbled nursery. As I suspected, we learned later from a state Fish and Game biologist that the hot weather did, in fact, cause depleted salmon returns by altering turbidity, stream level, and water temperature.

     Global warming is a theory, though, they say. Just like gravity and evolution. Our leaders are either ignorant or in denial.

     When U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair (whose advisors warn that global warming is a more serious global threat than terrorism) met with our boneheaded leader, Bush apparently gave no ground on U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol (the U.S., which produces a third of the world’s carbon emissions, is the only industrial nation not to sign on). When a reporter asked Bonehead whether human activity played a role in global warming, Bush didn’t answer.

     But decision-makers can get away with this when most people don’t know what global warming is, much less what danger it presents. Sure, some people may have seen the ridiculous Hollywood movie, “The Day after Tomorrow” that has the ultimate effect of minimizing the issue.

     When a conservation group asked Alaskans to rank issues that pose the biggest threats to the state’s environment, global warming fell nearly dead last. Many respondents said they would actually welcome warmer weather, as Alaska is too cold.

     We’ll get more hot summers. Since people began recording temperature with instruments, 1998 was the hottest year, 2002 and ’03 are tied for second, ’01 is third and ’04 is fourth.

     Most folks will only respond to the global burning effects that are more than irritating. Rising sea levels don’t scare anyone. Bugs and disease does, though. And both are likely to increase when it gets blistering hot. Alaska is being hardest by global melting and people who know better need to pull the fire alarm in as many creative ways we can find.

     For now, we need an activist-oriented group to take this issue dead on. Come up with a group name, email me your ideas and we’ll start campaign Wake-Up-Call.

     To learn more about global burning, check out these references:

http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/index.html

http://www.climatehotmap.org/

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/climate-change