Global Warming..or.. Is It Hot Out Here?

I admit it. I’m a global warming skeptic. I think Al Gore is, pardon the pun, full of hot air. It’s not that I think that climates don’t change, I just doubt my car has had that much to do with it. I think some really big parts of it are man-induced. I just don’t think we’re blaming the right people.

I blame FDR, his New Deal, and his socialist agenda with its make work projects. I think liberalism caused climate change. Before you think I’ve gone off the deep end a little further than usual, let me explain.

I started talking to old people. People who have lived in one place long enough to notice a change, if one exists. It’s not scientific, but strangely it seems to be a new approach. “Do you think the climate is different from when you were a child? When did it change?” Most of the people I’ve spoken with are relatives in Oklahoma and Texas, but from both our families, so they don’t know each other at all.

Yes, things have changes since they were children in the early parts of the 20th century. It doesn’t snow as much in the winter, and the summers last longer but aren’t as dry. There are more droughts in Texas, but when it rains it floods more. Those drying dustbowl winds don’t sweep across the land, and the tumbleweeds and the horny toads have disappeared. Different plants grow in Oklahoma, and the growing seasons are longer. The climate has changed.

It started in 1934/1935 when the Army Corps of Engineers and the WPA got here, or so I’m told. They showed up and started digging lakes in our Oklahoma prairie, a land that previously had no lakes, and planting trees in a state where trees were a rarity. The landscape changed and so did the climate. Okies began discovering what humidity was for the first time.

My husband’s sweet grandmother lived through the dustbowl days and the Great Depression. She scoffs at the idea of a modern cause for the changes we see. She says they all started when FDR began looking for things for people to do and decided that Oklahoma needed more water to help with irrigation and more trees to help keep the soil in place. Perhaps he was right and we did need those things, but they have begun a chain reaction of environmental consequences that people are still watching today.

Th earth doesn’t usually experience such quick changes to a landscape without cataclysmic reasons. In the case of the 1930’s, the catastrophe was an economic one, not just in our state but in our whole country. The response of the government was to build lakes, dam rivers, plant forests where no trees had previously grown, change the course of rivers, and mow down trees where they were inconvenient.

The tree huggers haven’t look back far enough to see what changes the New Deal brought about in our physical world. They see change now and figure that the reason must be happening now, but I don’t think so. I think it was a little engineering on the part of a president who was looking for things for people to do. To combat the resulting environmental changes, we can either fill in the lakes and chop down the “new” forests, or we can accept that the definition of normal has changes and get on with it.