Dec 23 2009

Top 10 Earth Stories of the Decade Oddly Political

Caring about the environment is something that I always thought of as apolitical. I was raised to believe in recycling, saving trees and whales, and that being Earth-friendly was a good thing. I think my kids are learning the same values in school that I did.

Of course, I was raised in a less partisan era. When I was a kid, there were folks who thought that Greenpeace was just a bunch of filthy hippies who should be ignored or even thrown in jail. Today, however, there are politicians and conservative commentators that spend an incredible amount of time saying that global warming is nothing but a hoax perpetuated by evil people like Al Gore.

Discovery.com has a list of the Top 10 Earth Stories of the Decade, and (spoiler alert!) number one is Glaciers Melt Down.

When the 21st century began, scientists studying Earth’s climate thought the gigantic ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica would melt slowly around the edges and lag behind the overall global warming of climate.

But this past decade, the warmest on record, proved the climate modelers wrong.
Glaciers have been melting much faster than ever expected and researchers have been playing a hard game of catch up trying to understand why.

Try reading that without thinking of the partisan debate currently raging over the environment.

Here’s my prediction — the children of commie pinko lefties will grow up wanting us to do something to save the planet from becoming uninhabitable, while the children of fascist right-wingers will grow up saying that it’s all a pack of lies. Somewhere in the middle will be… I don’t know if there will be a middle ground, actually.

This is assuming that the Earth isn’t a wasteland by the time those children are old enough to have a say in what we do or don’t do about global warming. Hopefully there will be enough of a middle position to keep things from falling apart for at least a few hundred more years.

Top 10 Earth Stories of the Decade : Discovery News.