The Other Day I Saw a Hummer with a License Plate Holder that Read "I Eat Organic"

I don't know Santa Barbara City Council Frank Hotchkiss from a hole in the ground (or anywhere else) but anyone who is a real estate agent and pissed about the Light Blue Line Project shouldn't make it past the bias meter even at the wreck-of-the-News-Press. That's particularly true when in an article entitled "Hotchkiss Vows Common Sense" in the Daily Sound, we get this line about global warming (that others have also offered as brilliant):

We can’t even predict the weather in three days and you are telling me this is accurate?

I assume with logic like that, Hotchkiss eschews modern medicine, too. After all, while medicine says he will die, his doctors can't predict when. So clearly all the rest of their knowledge must be worthless.

Seriously, the study of the weather is meteorology. The study of long-term changes in the world's "weather" is climatology. A person who can look good, can stand in front of a green screen while pointing to the right place, and can announce people's birthdays--that person can at least "play" a meteorologist on TV. A climatologist is someone like James Hansen who has a M.S. in Astronomy and a Ph.D. in Physics and then works for NASA. Of course, the White House tried to stifle Hansen from talking about global warming, but that's a different blog entry. Or just more proof people just don't want to hear the bad news and are more than willing to stick their hands in their ears and sing LA-LA-LA really loudly. (The good news for them is sound travels more poorly under water.)

Indeed, someone on Blogabarbara I think wrote in a comment something to the effect of "how can we explain this to children? Won't the Blue Line just frighten them?" To which I answer--"let's hope just enough." The whole point of the line was to say, "This is what might happen--if we don't act."

But now our problem is that we can't even commit the first act of recognizing there's a problem.