Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

He really is that stupid.

The willow is too close to the house.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Battle won, war still ongoing.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

“woke” is the new caravan.

Republicans in disarray!

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

You are here: Home / Climate Change / Not Enough People Are Freaking Out About This

Not Enough People Are Freaking Out About This

by | 110 Comments

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This is god damn terrifying:

The sun won’t rise at the North Pole until March 20, and it’s normally close to the coldest time of year, but an extraordinary and possibly historic thaw swelled over the tip of the planet this weekend. Analyses show that the temperature warmed to the melting point as an enormous storm pumped an intense pulse of heat through the Greenland Sea.

Temperatures may have soared as high as 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) at the pole, according to the U.S. Global Forecast System model. While there are no direct measurements of temperature there, Zack Labe, a climate scientist working on his PhD at the University of California at Irvine, confirmed that several independent analyses showed “it was very close to freezing,” which is more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) above normal.

fucking hell.

Reader Interactions

110Comments

  6. 6.

    SFAW

    Ditto re: hoax, because James “I’m Not A Fucking Moron, But I Play One On TV. Oh, Wait, I Really AM A Fucking Moron” Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate Chamber.

    ETA: Shakes fist ineffectually at Villago

  7. 7.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Baud: They couldn’t even be bothered to turn out to vote for “Green” candidate Jill Stein.

    Pathetic.

  8. 8.

    Tom Levenson

    I have no snark left on this score. We’ve reengineered the planet so that we never have to think about that three hundred horsepower male member substitute with which we sit in traffic jams. My son will live in a strange, dangerous and unnecessarily disrupted world because we were too stupid to say, hey, maybe not fuck with the only available liveable rock.

  9. 9.

    Baud

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Do you know why?

    The honest answer is not only do we not know why, we will never know why.

    Any behavioral scientist can tell you it’s really hard to set up an experiment to figure out why someone doesn’t take an action, like voting.

    The best you can do is ask them, and what do you think happens when you ask environmentalists why they don’t vote? They lie. They lie their pants off

  11. 11.

    SFAW

    @schrodingers_cat:

    What is their reason for not voting?

    Because her e-mails, and because Shitgibbon was no worse on the environment than WarMonger Hitlary, and because the Greens something-something-something

  12. 12.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Okay, I’ll be serious. I’ve been watching the numbers on this from several people I follow on Twitter. The curve for Arctic temperatures is WAY above previous years. That suggests to me that we may have passed some sort of tipping point. For one thing, the ice is more reflective, and the water more absorptive, so the rate of ice melting will speed up.

    We’ve seen similar patterns the past two winters when we’ve had half the US in extraordinarily warm winter temps and the other half extraordinarily cold. The cold air from the pole has been slipping around more than usual, and now it’s just gone, it looks like.

    So the ice will melt and the polar bears will have a harder time hunting seals. The real problem will be when Greenland’s glaciers melt, because they will raise sea levels much more than just the melting Arctic ice. And the weather patterns are obviously going crazy.

    We need to stop using fossil fuels yesterday.

  15. 15.

    billcoop4

    A Greenland thaw will raise sea levels, and the fresh water input will also effect the Gulf Stream and the deep water southward-bound current. There’s the disaster.

    BC

  17. 17.

    magurakurin

    @schrodingers_cat:

    the article doesn’t give a reason and the term “environmentalist” is a bit misleading. The polling focused on “voters who say the environment is one of their top two most important issues.” Not quite the same as an environmentalist, which really implies activism in my mind. But still, fuck… people…. do better.

  19. 19.

    efgoldman

    @Tom Levenson:

    My son will live in a strange, dangerous and unnecessarily disrupted

    We will welcome a second grandchild in early September. But I wonder if “welcome” is the right verb for him/her and our existing granddaughter

  20. 20.

    Kayla Rudbek

    If there were a single rational government on Earth, I would have at least enough work for 10 people coming across my desk. As it is, patent filings in solar panels are down. I am sick and tired of having no hope for the future, and my only consolation is that at least in my personal nightmares, there is still a surviving human race, even if the rail stations are overgrown abandoned ruins, our descendants are back to riding horses, and there are skulls mounted on pikes alongside the ruins of the interstates.

  21. 21.

    NotMax

    @Cheryl Rofer

    There was an interesting study recently (can’t find the link just now) that the coupling of ice melt and the warming of ocean water is measurably lowering the sea floor in spots, adding additional pressure and stress to the underlying plates.

  23. 23.

    Fair Economist

    Ironically, global warming may make winters colder for much of North America, Europe, and Asia. The problem is that if the ocean warms up enough the Arctic doesn’t freeze over in winter and the air over the Arctic never gets all that cold because of heat from the ocean plus clouds above. This changes the pressures and wind flow all over the Northern Hemisphere, with the highest pressures – and bitterest cold – moving from the Arctic Ocean to the northern parts of Eurasia and North America.

    We are already partly there because the thick solid ice that once covered most of the Arctic year-round is completely gone apart from shelves along the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. The ice over almost all of the Arctic is now rarely more than 6 feet thick, and easily fractures and moves in response to wind and currents, exposing the ocean below and releasing heat and moisture into the Arctic air.

  25. 25.

    JPL

    It’s not just the coastline that is at risk, but the release of methane gases will only increase greenhouses gases. We are in uncharted territories with an orange asshole as president.

  28. 28.

    MomSense

    I’m definitely freaking out about this. I’m also freaking out about Adm. Mike Rogers’ testimony that he has not been given authorization to stop Russian election hacking.

  29. 29.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @NotMax: It’s that kind of thing that made me qualify my statement. The warming Arctic and other waters will increase the volume of the oceans somewhat, but there may be other effects as well. But the amounts of ice on Greenland and Antarctica will make big differences.

  31. 31.

    trollhattan

    Literal Crimes against humanityc Trump, Pruitt and Zinke should be hauled before the Hague for their actions.

  32. 32.

    WaterGirl

    @MomSense: The one encouraging thing is that we are hearing more about these things than we were, say, a month ago. It’s no coincidence that Mueller came out 2 weeks ago with the Russian indictment and now we are hearing that Trump has not given authorization to stop the Russian hacking.

    I think something about this process has sped up recently – I think we might be reaching a tipping point. Hoping so, for sure.

  33. 33.

    Mary G

    I saw that yesterday and I wanted to run down the street screaming. I got my entire high school out of class all day on the first Earth Day to listen to speakers I had found, and almost nothing has been done since.

    ETA: Democrats also flipped another state house seat in Connecticut today. Somewhat expected because Hillary took the district by 2%, but a Republican was in it and now they’re not!

  34. 34.

    Sab

    I am personally so happy that I failed in my life plan to have children. I have step children I love dearly, but I did not bring them into this world.

    In NE Ohio we used to have thunderstorms as a frequently normal part of summer. Instead for the last few years we have had droughts that last for months. In the last three years we have had fractional inches of rain in the summer. July used to be our wettest month. Now it is our dryest. This isn’t just summer grass burnout. This is hundred year old trees dying for lack of water.

    I could say this isn’t normal but apparently it is the new normal

  35. 35.

    trollhattan

    @Sab:
    Yesterday was our first February precipitation, Feb being one of three historical wet months the entire state relies on for water year-round. No, not normal whatever that means.

  38. 38.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Mary G: A lot has been done. We’d be hosed so much worse if it weren’t for the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the Montreal Protocol.

    One problem was that global warming was not a central concern of the environmental movement until later, as the science became more and more unambiguous (though people certainly talked about it in the 70s).

  39. 39.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Fair Economist: In case you didn’t see this downstairs:

    118
    Adam L Silverman
    says:
    February 27, 2018 at 8:51 pm (Edit)
    @Fair Economist: I want to apologize. My comment was overly harsh and you did not deserve to be on the receiving end of it.. I’m going to delete it.

    The history on why the 1929 law was passed and what it was intended to do is very well documented and we teach it in American politics during the sections on Congress, redistricting, and reapportionment. As I indicated in comment 110, the last time I saw numbers to model what would happen if the 1929 law had never been passed done by an actual American politics specialist, which was back in the early 00s, it was about 750 seats total. With almost 500 of those seats coming from metro areas: NY, LA, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, SF, Seattle, Denver, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durhan, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, etc, etc, etc.

    You are quite correct that where the representatives come from is the result of how the districts are drawn and where they’re located.

  41. 41.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Baka Amerikahito) ? ?

    I’m so sorry for acting like such a piece of shit in the thread below. I’m so embarrassed I don’t think I could ever show my face at a meet-up.

  42. 42.

    Sab

    @trollhattan: Our February was seriously fucking wet. Caused lots of flooding. Also no use whatever for plants: plants all dormant. I expect the Spring and Summer plants wil face their new dry normal and wilt.

  43. 43.

    Mike J

    @Villago Delenda Est: I’m an environmentalist and I vote. When the majority of Americans don’t vote I wouldn’t single out one interest group.

    2014 turnout was 36%. Figure 18% D and 18% R. That 21% enviro turnout went almost exclusively to Democrats (if they have any sense), So environmentalists outperformed the generic Dem voter.

  45. 45.

    JPL

    Since climate change is already causing severe weather patterns, did the asshole in chief cut funding for FEMA?

  46. 46.

    Aleta

    Climate scientists vote. The ones I know are quiet about the news of the last two years, but not because they don’t care.

  49. 49.

    Gin & Tonic

    In sort of weather-related news, my water heater has ceased to function. 22-23 years or so is, I guess, a good run. But it looks I’ll be showering at the gym for a little while – I’m way too old to voluntarily shower in cold water.

    The bright side is I get to stimulate the economy by buying a durable good and employing a local tradesman.

  50. 50.

    gene108

    What are we going to do about the Arctic ice disappearing?

    The USA’s primary contribution to global warming comes from people driving cars.

    Either we mandate everyone get an electric car and fund the infrastructure to support it or we just offer our thoughts and prayers.

    And the infrastructure to support electric vehicles is not just going to be public recharging stations, but adding charging stations to every parking spot in apartments across this country or on the side of the street, like parking meters, for people who live in cities or old parts of town, where there is only street parking.

  51. 51.

    Sab

    @? ?? Goku (aka Baka Amerikahito) ? ?: Straighten up and come back. Lots of us like you, but you are a bit excitable ( of course you are, you’re 22.)

    I am a big fan of voting and not any sort of fan of violence. I remember the riots in the nineteen-sixties. Teenagers destroyed their parents neighborhoods.

    Students rioted.

    MLK had already been assasinated, and Nixon was president.

    Voting works. Peaceful protests work. Violence doesn’t. It just creates blowback.

  52. 52.

    chris

    @TaMara (HFG):

    I’ve been freaking out and working to change it for decades. So far all I’ve gotten is old.

    I think a lot of people just burned out, I know I did.

  53. 53.

    WaterGirl

    @Gin & Tonic:

    The bright side is I get to stimulate the economy by buying a durable good and employing a local tradesman.

    Way to be positive!

    Oh, and don’t forget to check their Facebook page and make sure they aren’t crazy-eyed Republicans. No more money for them. (I do get a say in how you spend your money, don’t I?)

  54. 54.

    MomSense

    @? ?? Goku (aka Baka Amerikahito) ? ?:

    It’s ok. Thank you for offering an apology. Sometimes we all need to step away from the comments. These are trying times and we all cope differently. I’ve taken to yelling obscenities at my radio and sometimes I have sobbing fits.

    One of the Parkland heroes responded to someone horrible by telling him she hopes he steps on a lego. That might be a good one for you to use in those angry moments.

  55. 55.

    E

    Folks, the GOP is going to completely steal this issue from us, and it will kill life on earth. They are going to, *on a dime*, conclude that global warming is an existential threat and begin selling the rights to conduct insanely risky geo-engineering projects to their biggest donors . . . most likely Exxon.

    I say this not to make things worse but because we need to be ready. I have been working on this issue for decades. There is going to be a brief window between the time when the public will to act becomes very large, and the GOP begins pumping God-knows-what into our atmosphere to absorb solar rays. Once they do that there is no going back and we are so, so, so fucked.

  58. 58.

    Gin & Tonic

    @WaterGirl: He’s never mentioned politics to me. As he’s the kind of guy who’ll show up when a control on the furnace goes out at 10:30 pm on a Friday, I’m not going to interrogate his voting record.

  60. 60.

    E

    By the way, if anyone is interested in watching slow-moving trainwrecks, I check out the Arctic sea ice graph at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ every morning. If you are a real junky, click on the “Charctic” link where you can compare this year with last year (or 2012, currently the record holder for low minimum sea ice), also updated daily. There is also a great “Arctic Sea Ice Forum” at https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/ which is a discussion site with many professionals and climate-scientists contributing (and not too much noise). Finally, there is a terrific global sea-ice graph, updated daily, at https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/global-sea-ice.

    Right now we are in a horse race for the lowest maximum sea ice extent in the Arctic. The current record holder being, naturally, 2017. (Most of the pros believe winter is the time the arctic really takes a hit, but it isn’t as exciting to watch ice gradually increase in the winter as it is to watch it tumble off a cliff in June and July).

  64. 64.

    Jeffro

    CNN reporting that Mueller’s looking into Trumpov’s pre-2016 business dealings (no duh) especially w/ Russian interests (double no duh)

    Just waiting for the next OT…

  65. 65.

    Jeffro

    Twitter Richard Nixon on Jared:

    I don’t need the Post to tell me that in terms of debt and inexperience, Kushner is every big fat sitting duck le Carré ever wrote about.

    As our friend @redveale points out, however, le Carré would give him some kind of hobby, obsession, a stammer, something of interest.

  66. 66.

    JPL

    @Jeffro: They know that the Russians interfered in our election to help Trump, and now they are looking into the why. IMO it would be a derelict of office not to.

  70. 70.

    gene108

    @Mr Stagger Lee:

    I have been alive for 43 years and the idea we will run out of fossil fuels, because they are non-renewable, has been there for as long as I can remember.

    Yet we carry on like we can never run out.

    Not just from a reducing CO2 should we look to change our sources of power, but from the simple, long known fact, that fossil fuels are not an infinite source of energy.

  72. 72.

    Bobby Thomson

    So much for Florida, New Jersey, and the Delmarva Peninsula and Outer Banks of North Carolina.

  75. 75.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @gene108: fucking idiot Republicans are convinced that Gawd won’t let the fossil fuels run out before Jeezus comes back again

  77. 77.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @? ?? Goku (aka Baka Amerikahito) ? ?:

    If meetups were restricted to those who had never made an ill-judged or embarrassing comment, we’d still be waiting for the first get-together to occur. Good on you for apologizing–quite a few regulars here would have simply dug in. You’re cool.

    I know this isn’t an Open Thread, but at the next opportunity please tell us about the new job.

    Cheers.

  79. 79.

    Millard Filmore

    @E:

    the GOP begins pumping God-knows-what into our atmosphere to absorb solar rays

    Maybe we could bring back airplane con-trails to reflect solar rays ???

  80. 80.

    tobie

    @E: I think they’ll continue denying climate change and will encourage their fossil fuel friends to drill everywhere, while at the same time giving those friends lucrative contracts to spray sulfates into the atmosphere and create some kind of temporary global cooling. They’ll deny the dangers of the sulfates because from the GOP’s perspective having your cake (i.e., drilling) and eating it too (i.e., spraying sulfates) is great until you die of diabetes.

  81. 81.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @lgerard:

    From the linked article:

    Parscale has hired Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, a move that reflects his close relationship to the family and shields how much she is being paid from public disclosure because she works for a private company.

    Not even surprised, certainly not shocked, but increasingly disheartened with every such revelation.

  82. 82.

    Aleta

    My understanding (limited) is that the warm bubble of air that increased the temperature up at the pole is sort of the mirror opposite of the polar vortex that happened two years ago. The earth’s air is sloshing back and forth with more energy now, so the amplitude of the front lines (cold and warm) has increased, making for wilder swings and more storms.

    In the 70s there was theoretical discussion about what would happen if the Arctic melted — would it bring on another Ice Age. (The Soviets were diverting rivers to the south for irrigation, and they wondered about effect on the salinity of areas of the Arctic Ocean.) (It didn’t affect salinity though.)

    These days I think they’re saying that the Arctic will still ice over in the winter, but the thick, year round ice will disappear. No ice age, but because of the swings of the earth’s front lines, weather patterns as we know them now will change completely in perhaps the next 30 years.

    (Corrections welcome on this.)

  85. 85.

    Gin & Tonic

    @NotMax: Yeah, and removing my old oil tank was a lot more pressing priority a few years back when I had to replace that. Same folks, and they removed the old tank (which they had to cut in half to remove from the basement.) So I’m cool with them.

  87. 87.

    Mike in DC

    @gene108:
    Someone did a study/estimated that if the world absolutely had to and committed to it, we could switch to renewables entirely by 2030.
    That we instead have a way slower goal reflects just how much political power the fossil fuel industry has.

  88. 88.

    M. Bouffant

    I’m not freaking out. Anyone who lives longer than I do will get just what he or she deserves as a member of this idiotic species. My only regret is I won’t see you bastards getting exactly what you deserve from the planet. Nihilism, baby!!

    Go on and poison all the water, use up all the air
    Blow your stupid heads off, see if I could care

    https://youtu.be/JqO2is1tmO8

  89. 89.

    Jeffro

    Lots of Dem officials tweeting at Delta to leave crazy-a$$ Georgia and come to their states. LOVE. IT.

  90. 90.

    BC in Illinois

    @? ?? Goku (aka Baka Amerikahito) ? ?:

    I’m with all the others. Apology accepted. We move on together.

    And yeah, you’re right — so much of what is wrong in this country can be traced back to R Reagan, especially with his asinine contention that “We have made it so hard on the rich that they need our sympathy and relief, and we have made it so easy for the poor that everyone wants to settle into the hammock and be poor.”

    Paul Ryan is still following that line.

  92. 92.

    JimV

    gene108 says:
    February 27, 2018 at 9:17 pm:

    “The USA’s primary contribution to global warming comes from people driving cars.”

    That sounded wrong to me, so I checked. Nope, it’s still electricity (coal-fired power generation plants, mostly).

    https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

    I wish it were so – I’ve never owned a car (always walked to work and to stores, easy to do in Schenectady, plus there was a great bus service), but I worked for years in GE’s power-generation business. (Saw the early growth and then fast death of the nuclear power industry.) (Circa 1972, the Manager of GE Steam-Turbine Engineering told us in an all-hands meeting that we had orders for 25 huge nuclear-powered turbines and he didn’t know how we were going to fill them all. Most of them were cancelled in the next couple years.)

    But of course solar would have been the way to go. President Carter had solar panels installed in the White House. Reagan had them ripped out.

  94. 94.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @JimV: and the first patents on artificial photosynthesis (taking CO2 and water and making sugar, without any plants involved) go back to 1968. We really blew a hell of a lot of opportunities…

  95. 95.

    Matt McIrvin

    @gene108: Fossil fuels will destroy us long before they run out. The Peak Oil panic people were wrong. The finite supply actually isn’t the limiting constraint, it’s the environment.

  96. 96.

    Matt McIrvin

    @JimV: Keep in mind, as forward-thinking as Carter’s solar panels were, they were just simple water heaters. Photovoltaic panels literally cost 200 times as much then as they do today. They were not practical as a large-scale source of energy until the cost per watt went way, way down.

    Aggressive R&D probably could have sped that up, though–it looks to me like there was a big drop from about 1970-1990, then a sort of plateau for a while before prices started dropping again.

    And concentrated solar thermal power because practical earlier, though the cost hasn’t dropped as much as PV since.

  97. 97.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Mike in DC: I think their business is going to collapse faster than they know or believe. The bottleneck right now is grid-scale energy storage, but that’s coming, and the solar economy is going to hit them faster than most of us here would probably think possible. It won’t be fast enough to avoid major climate-related disasters, but it’ll mitigate the damage.

    Transportation will switch over more slowly than electricity generation. But carbon dioxide emission from energy generation in the US is already plummeting, and that’s actually not all the switch from coal to natural gas–most of it is a combination of increased efficiency and the switch to renewables. Demand is flat, and it’s worrying the electric utilities:

    https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/2/27/17052488/electricity-demand-utilities

    Methane emission is still a problem. I think improvement there is coming too.

  98. 98.

    PJ

    @Gin & Tonic: I don’t know what the problem with your tank is, but if it’s not the heating element, it may be the dip tube, which carries the cold water down from the top of the tank to the bottom. It is a $2 part (get a polysulfone tube, not polypropylene, which has a much shorter life, and if you get a new tank, make sure it has a polysulfone dip tube.)

  103. 103.

    Fair Economist

    @Radiumgirl:

    A new ice age?

    No, summers will still be hot and melt the snow. Ice ages are set off by cold summers. What we will get if this happens is an exacerbation of continental climates in the northern latitudes – colder than it used to be in winter, hotter in summer, along with some big shifts in rainfall location and timing.

  104. 104.

    otmar

    Just for the record: just as north America had a wave of cold weather earlier this winter, it is now Europe’s turn: right now we have a severe cold spell.

    So if you want to know where the cold air from the arctic is: it is on a sightseeing tour across Europe.

  105. 105.

    Cermet

    A few points: first, when you said “35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) ” You meant 20 Celsius.

    Next, the issue isn’t the Arctic ice loss (though that will, as a few have pointed out, cause significant weather changes) but that corporate induced global warming will make the equatorial regions uninhabitable in 40 years – that is billions of people forced to leave and go where? Eat what? Survive how? This is the elephant in the room all of you are still missing; not weather change (though, again, that is very significant), not the ice loss, nor even the higher temps in the northern latitudes, but that a huge belt around the globe becomes uninhabitable and for some regions – in the next 20 years – also become uninhabitable in the Northern latitudes for a few days/weeks a year – see lower Mississippi valley and southern China. These issues are beyond serious and border on global catastrophe.

  106. 106.

    DHD

    @JimV: The thing is, the only reason power generation is the #1 GHG emitter in the US is because your power grid is so dirty (beautiful, clean coal, one of your great natural resources). Because it’s getting better very quickly this probably won’t be the case for much longer and solving the problem of transportation is way, way harder. Electricity is currently 29% and transportation is 27% of US GHG emissions…

    This is the reason I spend basically every waking moment freaking out about stories like this one…

  107. 107.

    JimV

    From my point of view, transportation is totally solvable: don’t use cars (rented) more than a week or two a year. That’s what I’ve always done. Walked to school as a kid, and walked or rode a bicycle to visit my friends (in a small rural town in northern NY). Went to college at MSU by train from Montreal (45 miles from my home) to East Lansing. Lived and worked in Schenectady, got my Masters at RPI in Troy using the great Albany-Troy-Schenectady bus service (Capital District Transit Authority).

    There were still trolley tracks in the streets but no trolleys. An older draftsman who grew up in Schenectady told me that as a kid he could take the trolley on a Saturday all the way to Massachusetts (with transfers) for a quarter. (Yes, that would be something like $2 now with inflation – but still a heck of a lot cheaper than a car.)

    Every town I’ve lived in has a train station – usually long defunct – the one in Mount Vernon, Ohio is now a Bingo parlor. We had decent public transportation in a lot of the USA once. That plus walking would save us a lot of money and make us healthier. Plus it would help solve our climate problem.

    (No, it wouldn’t work well everywhere in the USA – just where most of the people and cars are.)

    The Earth does not have enough resources for everyone on it to own and use a car the way we do in the USA. Just that fact makes cars a luxury that should be avoided as much as possible, doesn’t it?

  108. 108.

    DHD

    @JimV: Of course, I’m totally in agreement with you… But outside of NYC, Montreal, and Toronto the vast majority of North Americans are basically living in an alternate reality, and all of the trends are pointing in the wrong direction.

  109. 109.

    Amir Khalid

    @Cermet:

    first, when you said “35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) ” You meant 20 Celsius

    Wrong. The conversion formula is (F-32) x 5/9 = C. Applying it to 35°F gives you 1.6666…°C, which rounds up to 2°C.

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