{"id":128,"date":"2013-09-12T06:38:23","date_gmt":"2013-09-12T13:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jocularious.com\/?p=128"},"modified":"2018-07-23T19:32:43","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T02:32:43","slug":"confessions-global-warming-agnostic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Global Warming Agnostic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"My<\/a><\/p>\n

True story.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 1973 and I\u2019m sitting in Mr. Scherberhorn\u2019s seventh grade Social Studies class.\u00a0 He\u2019s rambling on about something, and I\u2019m doing my best to tune him out.\u00a0 That\u2019s because I\u2019m busy pondering whether I could pull off wearing a pair of plaid bell bottoms. \u00a0I wasn\u2019t what you\u2019d call a cool kid.\u00a0 Bell bottoms would have been a stretch for me, plus, I was broke.\u00a0 And I had just as much chance convincing my mother to buy me a pair as I did convincing her to buy me a Porsche Carrera.\u00a0 Then Scherberhorn says something that snaps me to attention.\u00a0 It snaps every other little spaz to attention as well. \u00a0It sat us up in our seats straight as washboards.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudies show that the Earth is cooling rapidly,\u201d he says.\u00a0 \u201cTemperatures are steadily declining, and we are heading into another ice age.\u00a0 We are moving toward worldwide glaciation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glaciation?\u00a0 Suddenly I\u2019m picturing myself walking through high school commencement wearing a fur lined jumper.\u00a0 The Beach Boys were going to need to come up with some new songs.<\/p>\n

Eventually, this whole \u201ccoming ice age\u201d hysteria passed into media lore.\u00a0 (This really happened – all you whippersnappers under 50 can pull out your iPhones and Wikipedia it if you don\u2019t believe me.)\u00a0 In the end, we didn\u2019t move into a new ice age; we moved into something far more frightening – the disco age.<\/p>\n

This is why I am a global warming agnostic.\u00a0 To make matters worse, the \u201cestablished scientific community\u201d recently did a cagey change-up.\u00a0 Now, instead of calling it global warming, they\u2019re calling it \u201cclimate change.\u201d\u00a0 Suspicious?\u00a0 You tell me.\u00a0 Talk about making every hail storm, drought or hurricane proof of your theory.<\/p>\n

Let me be clear, I desperately want to believe in global warming (climate change \u2013 whatever<\/i>).\u00a0 I want to hang with the cool kids.\u00a0 I want to snicker and roll my eyes with the others at the Neanderthal on the elevator who has the audacity to question the wisdom of the established scientific community<\/i>.\u00a0 In short, I want to be wearing the twenty-first century version of bell bottoms.<\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t.\u00a0 I can\u2019t because Mr. Schermerhorn told me we\u2019d all be living in igloos by now.\u00a0 And, the little dope that I was, I believed him.\u00a0 We all did.\u00a0 It scared the hell out of us.\u00a0 I have enough personal insecurities as it is.\u00a0 I don\u2019t need to be the \u201cfool me twice, shame on me\u201d guy.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help my skepticism that we have all these 24\/7 news channels that need something to talk about. \u00a0And weather always makes a compelling story.\u00a0 That\u2019s why television stations love to send their pretty blondes to the beach whenever they\u2019re expecting the annual \u201cstorm of the century.\u201d\u00a0 Add a worldwide cataclysmic twist to a story like that and you\u2019re in Neilsen heaven.\u00a0 Back in the day, we just had old worn-out Walter Cronkite, and when you subtracted commercials, we only gave him 20 minutes a night.\u00a0 And remember, he and the other two television journalists working then had their hands full playing musical chairs with Richard Nixon.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t have time to hype the ice age thing.\u00a0 They simply didn\u2019t have time during their stingy 20 minute allotment to make it hip.<\/p>\n

Mr. Schermerhorn, if you\u2019re out there, thank you for that heart-stopping alert back in 1973.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure you meant well, and I appreciated the warning.<\/p>\n

_______<\/p>\n

WAIT! \u00a0You\u2019re not done yet.\u00a0 Earn good karma!\u00a0 Please comment and share on Facebook, Twitter or your other favorite apps.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s a Three Minute Vacation for your Brain<\/em>.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n

Also-<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Check out these great books:<\/p>\n

The Lawyer\u2019s Song: Navigating the legal wilderness<\/em><\/strong> at \u2013<\/p>\n

https:\/\/buff.ly\/2K41Tax<\/p>\n

Seven Rules for the College Playground –<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

https:\/\/buff.ly\/2IqXxgn<\/p>\n

Seven Secrets You Need to Know to Hire the Right Lawyer –<\/strong><\/p>\n

https:\/\/buff.ly\/2roFIov<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

True story. It\u2019s 1973 and I\u2019m sitting in Mr. Scherberhorn\u2019s seventh grade Social Studies class.\u00a0 He\u2019s rambling on about something, and I\u2019m doing my best to tune him out.\u00a0 That\u2019s because I\u2019m busy pondering whether I could pull off wearing a pair of plaid bell bottoms. \u00a0I wasn\u2019t what you\u2019d call a cool kid.\u00a0 Bell […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[52,51,50,532],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","tag-bell-bottoms","tag-climate-change","tag-global-warming","tag-humor"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1405,"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/1405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jocularious.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}