It's been funny–not funny ha-ha–sitting here on the sidelines watching the changing global-warming debate. While the international scientific community for years has piled voluminous report atop voluminous report detailing that global warming is real, producing all sorts of climatic problems and either is or most probably is human caused, those who originally pooh-poohed the eggheads have gone from saying it's a myth, to it's a normal cyclical weather pattern, to okay, so it's happening, whaddya gonna do about it? to the latest: warm is good, buy new sunglasses and get used to it. Coming soon: Dick Cheney branding the international scientific community a terrorist organization for trying to take away our freedoms.
One thing Orange Countians may have noticed is the fact that the changes happening worldwide now and in the near future that may be tied to global warming–the killer floods, the killer hurricanes, the killer melting glaciers–aren't really hitting close to home. For instance, projections of coastal land being swallowed up by rising ocean levels seem to be confined to far-off places like the west coast of Africa, Manhattan and the far south Pacific.
But now comes word that the added weight of melted glacier water and land tumbling to the ocean floor may spur something we don't particularly like talking (or thinking) about in these parts: earthquakes. Even before all the melting, a link had been established between climate changes and California quakes. Yippee!
Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.