Tuesday, December 27, 2011

PS TO LAST POST

And just to make the point that this warm Winter weather is not an anomaly, as I wrote in a post a few years ago, when I was a kid living not far from where I live now, the two little shacks next to the pond in the park in my town and next to a sunken field in the park in the town where I live now, were used every winter for iceskaters.

The shacks had fires in their fireplaces or little wood burning or oil stove type heat, for skaters to take a break and get warm. Sometimes they sold hot chocolate. As a teenager I worked either on the frozen pond in our town or on the big sleighriding hill nearby, looking out for people who got hurt etc. I worked every Christmas until I left home, because kids would bring their new skates or sleighs to try out on Christmas day.

When I moved back to this area in 1999, they were still flooding the sunken field in the town I live in now and it froze a few times and people came out to skate. But it didn't last more than a few days a winter, the rest of the time the field was just a big manmade pond with geese and ducks floating in it because they no longer went South for the Winter.

Now they don't bother to flood it anymore, and the pond in the town where I grew up doesn't freeze very often and not for long and not solid enough to warrant allowing sanctioned ice skating, though on the few days it freezes some kids try it anyway.

But the shacks haven't been used in a decade now because it's a waste of money since there isn't any ice skating anymore. This breaks my heart. The idea, as this latest scientific report suggests, that in the future kids growing up in this part of the world, my part of the world, will no longer have white Christmases unless there's a freak storm once a decade or century (which the pre-Halloween one was) and the rest of their winter will be just cool and rainy, sucks.

And the blame is clear, as it has so often been throughout history. Those greedheads who ignore the warnings of scientists and humanists who track and predict the impact of verifiable global warming and instead promote the notion that there is no such thing so that their corporate masters can make even more obscene amounts of money. They suck too.

2 comments:

AlamedaTom said...

Right on my human brother, but understand that it is far more serious for me and my species.

Signed: A polar bear

Lally said...

Nothing more heartbreaking than watching them clustered on shoe looking off to where they're used to seeing ice as far as they can see and nothing but water keeping them from not just their stomping grounds but their food source. Anyone who works in Nothernmost climes (like a nephew of mine) knows the impact of global warming firsthand even better than we do.