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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Strange lights over the Midwest: are they meteors, UFO’s or the glow of global warming? Strange lights over the Midwest: are they meteors, UFO’s or the glow of global warming? Dan Brawner February 6, 2007 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comprised of more than 2,500 of the world’s top environmental scientists from 130 nations, meeting in Paris announced that there is a “90 percent” chance that the earth is getting warmer. Oh, really. I wish I had known that heart-warming bit of news earlier this week as I was wriggling across the dirt-floor crawl space under the house with a heat gun to THAW OUT MY FROZEN WATER PIPES! Okay, okay. I’m calm now. But all this talk about how the Midwest could turn into some kind of steamy, equatorial paradise doesn’t quite square with wind chill readings of 25 degrees below zero and an arctic cold front that is squatting firmly on the nation’s midsection like a triumphant Sumo wrestler. Although 46 nations have signed on to the United Nations environmental initiative to address global warming, the United States has, once again, rejected the whole idea. And this is why we are so blasted cold! It’s not fair. The U.S. produces more than one fourth of all greenhouse gases for the entire planet and yet we don’t get the benefit. This winter, Russians in Moscow who ought to be shivering over their samovars, are instead, frolicking in Red Square with temperatures in the 40's while residents of Des Moines have to bundle up like Nanook of the North just to check the mail. There ought to be some advantages to being American. Don’t we drive enough cars? Don’t our factories belch out enough soot? Aren’t we entitled to a little global warming of our own? On Sunday, as temperatures plunged well below zero, orange, red and blue lights flashed in the Midwestern sky. Alarmed citizens frantically phoned law enforcement officials all across Missouri, Wisconsin and several states that begin with the letter “I”. They were assured it was not a Super Bowl stunt, but probably just a meteor or something. Stories of the Nov. 7 sighting of a strange flying disc over O’Hare Airport are still fresh in our minds. “The truth is out there” as they used to say on the “X-Files”. A leading UFO blogger recently interviewed former “Saturday Night Live” star and UFO enthusiast, Dan Aykroyd, who claims to have the “real” O’Hare, UFO footage. But that’s another story. It is more likely that those cozy orange and red glows were the distant hearth fires of global warming in which the 46 cooperative nations are now basking. First, the U.S. declined to sign the Kyoto Treaty because we didn’t believe in global warming. Now Washington says that if there is any such thing, it’s not for us because it might cut into Exxon’s profit margin. I just got my heating bill for the month and if I don’t get some global warming pretty darned quick, my profit margin won’t have a snowball’s chance in...well, you get the idea. So I’m scraping the frost off my windows and watching the night sky. If those lights really are UFO’s, maybe they’ll beam me up to the mother ship and I’ll be warm at last.
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#1. To: Tauzero (#0)
You get to be blissfully ignorant. Richard W.
You get to be blissfully ignorant. Richard W. Post of the week award winner.
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