Another great ski season in Colorado! While Alaska warms, I'm making turns in the powder every week at Copper Mountain, Colorado. Colorado has the highest developed ski areas in the world, with area summits up to 12,300', unlike the lower elevations in Europe and other parts of the world. I am still skiing in October and quitting in April on the roof of America. Global warming has mostly spared Colorado, so far. The future may be different, but I live in the present, and enjoy it while it lasts. Climate is the most misunderstood phenomena - thousands of variables, some known, many more unknown, affect it. The current obsession over one of these variables is carbon emissions - CO2 in the atmosphere. The assumption is that these emissions, caused by human activity, are the only drivers of a rapidly warming global climate. This is a faulty assumption. 10,000 years ago, what is now New York City was covered by a glacier, a thousand feet of ice. Then it warmed, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Wooly Mammoths became extinct, and just 4,000 years later, civilization began in the Middle East. Why did the Ice Age end? Coal fired power plants and automobiles driven by Neanderthals? Massive forest fires in icy forests? Spewing volcanoes heating the atmosphere? Not much in the way of CO2 emissions, so what made those glaciers melt? Other variables. The sun, the tilt of the earth's axis, and other unknowns. Scientists were not around to take measurements and hypothesize. Human activity, such as it was, was not a factor. The melting of the glaciers 10,000 years ago was a much more drastic event than what we are seeing now in a fit of hysteria. The assumption that we can slow the rate of global warming by reducing our carbon emissions - just one of the variables affecting climate - is a fool's errand. We could conduct an experiment - tell China to go back to the Stone Age, reducing its carbon emissions 99%, and see what happens. I would guess that it would make almost no difference, the warming would continue from the effects of solar radiation, changes in the earth's axis, and many other unknown variables. Human effort to slow change in the climate is like pushing an elephant with a finger tip. We are in an Interglacial Period, warming like before in the geological past. The dinosaurs adapted, so will we.
