What's real, and what's a big poofer?

There was quite a discrepancy in the Free Press this morning regarding Global Warming (or that inconvenient little "trend" that seems to be happening). Just as Dr. Gordon McBean, chair of policy in the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at Western Ontario University, reported an am anticipated study to be released out of Paris highlighting "how human activity is heating up the planet much faster than experts had previously expected" there was Tom Oleson's editorial in the same A section.

Oleson, while admitting that it's pretty odd that he's been wearing his rain coat well into January, and that even the Bush administration is considering upping Polar Beards on its endangered species list, writes:

But put a pause on that pause before you sign on to the crusade against greenhouse gas emissions and most other kinds of useful human activity. Because there is nothing exact about all this, not much real science in it, mostly just a lot of by-guess-and-by-golly and said-to-be-so in the so-called science of climate change.

He then goes on to say that we can't know if there are less polar bears because they're hard to count since they eat people, and that it's kind of weird how the giant chunk of ice fell off of Ellesmere island but who knows and stuff. But! Here's where I laughed so hard that a lil'bit of pee came out:

We all have our idiosyncrasies, and the environmentalists' obsession is greenhouse gases - the poison spit out by the evil automobile. We probably should watch our greenhouse gas out-put, however, and one way to cut back is to eat more meat. Cows and pigs and such animals contribute more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than all the automobiles in the world because - not to put too fine a point on it - their mostly vegetarian diet causes them to poofer like crazy, releasing methane gas. Every hamburger you eat, every pork chop, perhaps even every drumstick ... every mouthful of meat you eat is a blow against global warming. Who would have thought that the Sals or KFC could save the world? Thanks to them, we can even use emission transfers, trading the gas we use in the McDonald's drive-thru against the methane we save my munching a Big Mac. That's a crusade I could join, one based on solid, scientific fact.

Kind of makes me want to poofer, take a giant dump, and then use Mr. Oleson's article to clean-up the mess. Good lord, when will humanity be able to stop joking around about how this "warming trend" is kind of nice (golfing in January? Sweet!) and actually step up to the plate?

I need to end this post with a quote that should ACTUALLY be taken SERIOUSLY:

Climate scientists have predicted the Earth could heat up by anywhere between two to six degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the 21st century because of the greenhouse gases that trap heat from sunlight in the earth's atmosphere.

"Just to put that in quick context, the difference between now and an ice age, when there was several kilometres of ice over this part of Canada is about five degrees globally," McBean said. "So we're talking about a temperature change in the net 100 years that is of the same order, perhaps larger, perhaps a little bit smaller than what we had going in and out of an ice age. That's a big difference, and it's happening in 100 years, not in tens of thousands of years."

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Mel's must reads for December/January: Habitat by Judith Thompson and Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland.