Saturday, January 13, 2007

I'm shocked that The Post would run a prominent front-page story on the freakish 73-degree January heat and relegate the real news -- that it may or may not be connected to global warming -- to the 23rd paragraph, choosing to focus instead on jolly sun worshipers out in their cars, cramming area parking lots ["Seldom Heard in January: Hot Enough for Ya?" Jan. 7].

The facetious "end of the world" story in Style the same day ["March in January! Or Is It Mayday?"] hardly made up for the omission. Whether Jan. 6's weather blip was the direct result of El Niño or a larger warming trend, it still serves as a visceral reminder of what we're doing to our planet with our careless, do-nothing approach to global warming. It would be so refreshing to read that locals chose to spend this balmy day planting carbon-trapping trees or running errands on foot, rather than firing up their convertibles, golf carts and gas grills and contributing further to this depressing phenomenon.

With 2006 the warmest year on record in the United States and 2007 shaping up to be even warmer, it won't be long before sitting by the pool in January no longer qualifies as news.

-- Rebecca Frank

Oakton

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In the past three weeks alone, The Post has run no fewer than six articles about global warming, five of them on the front page [Dec. 20, 23 and 27 and Jan. 7 and 10] and a news story on Dec. 19, as well as an editorial [Jan. 7] and three Tom Toles editorial cartoons [Dec. 18 and 24 and Jan. 8].

I'm still waiting, however, for The Post to run just one article explaining why, despite all of this alarmism, we had no hurricanes above Category 3 during the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season and why none of any size hit the United States. If we are to believe Al Gore's claim in "An Inconvenient Truth" that hurricanes Rita and Katrina in 2005 were the products of global warming, how does he explain away the 2006 hurricane season?

I'm pretty sure that residents of Denver, having been hit by three blizzards in as many weeks, would welcome some global warming right about now.

The bigger issue, though, is this: Many of the same global-warming doomsayers of today were warning 30 years ago of forthcoming cataclysmic global cooling. Were they wrong then, or are they wrong now? And if they were wrong then, why should we believe them now?

-- Joseph Parisi

Annandale