Climate Change London: "What does a warm hat mean?"

Last Friday, within a 10-minute time span, I spotted three warm hats atop heads - human and non-human. To me the hats were a good sign. Winter is coming. Needed cold weather is coming ("It kills the bugs," my dad used to say.) And Santagoyle is coming to town.

Two hats I spotted atop pedestrians crossing the Thames River. The last was atop the hard round head of a quiet, stone-faced man, who can be seen daily crouching on a neighbour's porch in Old South, using both hands to (apparently) keep other small bits of stone-work warm.

Some people in the cold, conservative circle will take these hats to mean that global warming is over, that a natural cycle of earthly cooling is now well under way and the human population should continue to drive the economy as we have since the end of WW2. Business as usual. No need to worry about environmental concerns expressed by a growing number of others.

As we know, there have been cooling trends in the past, even a few short ones in the last 100 years. For example, average global temperatures were cooler in 1991 and 1992. After that, however, the warming trend grew ever steeper. The change in global temperatures have evened off on occasion too in the last century, but to say a significant cooling trend is now underway - as do many inside a cold conservative circle - is dangerously foolhardy and ignores the evidence related to averaging global land and ocean temperatures since 1880.

Please link to NASA records for more detailed information.

Photos by GH

***

Please click here for more Climate Change Concerns