Lucy
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I agree that it may not matter whether global warming is literally the problem, it certainly is the problem symbollically. Folks won't listen to the warnings about overpopulation but they seem to listen to the problems about global warming.
Certainly I don't see the daily temperatures in my neighborhood breaking any old records. There have always been a lot of fluctuations in daily temperature.
But I do wonder about trends and how I might understand them on a personal level. I grew up further south but moved to New England as an adult; I expected cold snowy winters, especially since I spent a long cold winter in Minnesota with snow on the ground from November to March! I thought from books I read as a child that New England would be like that. It wasn't (not that I'm complaining...!). How did people around here used to hitch up the sleigh and travel from point A to point B? Over a long period of time, there have been winters where you could do that, but they have been infrequent and not so recent. MAybe people didn't travel by sleigh 100 or more years ago as often as I thought.
On the other hand, the food supply has diminished. That is real. When the white settlers first came here, lobsters crawled freely on the beaches and were considered food only for poor people! I think they were called mud roaches. You don't see that today. Also there are reports of schools of cod closer to shore and having much larger fish...maybe not cod, but some other fish they have here (sorry I'm not a fish person). Now fishermen have to go far out to fish and there are significant limitations on the size of the catch.
So I don't know if the glaciers breaking up is a danger or is cyclical, but I think the food supply may be decreasing in real time. The overpopulation thing is real. So I am willing to listen to the global warming people.
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