![]() ![]() is now producing 13.3 million barrels of oil a day, a world record. Exxon made a record $9 billion in profit in the third quarter last year. You know we’re entering frightening new territory when usually staid scientists use that vocabulary. One climate scientist, Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading in England, had this to say about record-setting temperatures brought by record-setting CO2 and methane emissions: “Surprising. The graph of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere looks like a hockey stick, horizontal from the 1880s through to the last decades of the 20th century, when whoops, it bends nearly straight vertical. The increased heating occurred because of the El Nino phenomenon, the hot house of warmer waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and because of record-breaking greenhouse gas pollution. NASA says the average surface temperature on Earth rose 1.4 degrees Centigrade (or 2.5 Fahrenheit). Last year was the hottest year on record (150 years of record-keeping), and the margin of record-breaking caught scientists by surprise. I’m concerned about the world my children and grandchildren will inherit. If you’re a person who is comfortable with facts, these trends don’t look good. Weather is the day-to-day variations, but climate is the long-range weather trends. Go home!”įorty-five years later, I smelled just a whiff of that winter of ’78/79, but I might caution folks from thinking a few cold days in 2024 proves our climate is not warming. “What the hell are you doing out here? It’s 25-below. I was losing my man-against-nature battle when the foreman’s voice broke through. It was an epic struggle with the branches, the cold, the snowdrifts, and a powerful-as-lightening chainsaw in my stone-cold fingers. They snapped off and gravity took them straight downhill. One morning every single tree I cut was frozen to the core. Everyone I knew was dealing with frozen pipes or cars that wouldn’t start. You think this winter was bad! That December and January only 12 days remained above freezing. We’d climb into company crew-cabs, and our driver, a guy named Rocky who wore a coon-skin cap, would battle ground-blizzards on I-90 and race other drivers to the job site in McGinty Gulch near Superior. ![]() And I was up for adventure, not to mention a paycheck.Įach morning hours before dawn, I’d ride to Missoula with two other Bitterrooters, Steve and Delbert, to the company’s shop on Russell Street in Missoula where 40 loggers would yawn at each other until Smokey, our supervisor, gave assignments. I was in my mid-20s and relatively new to Montana. ![]() I couldn’t help but remember 1978 when I took a job as a timber feller for Champion International. I was sitting next to the woodstove last week as the temperature plunged and the sideways snow squalled outside my window. ![]()
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