Over three decades of running and biking, you develop a natural interest in road kill. While perhaps not scientific, the carnage along our streets and highways provides a sample of local biodiversity — just as beer litter documents the relative preponderance of Bud vs. Miller drinkers.
Only in recent years do I recall seeing possum pudding in the gutter, and an item in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer notes that indeed the possums like it here now. Their proliferation is evidence of the northward advance of warming weather.
Of course, despite its apparent susceptibility to other forms of folk wisdom, the Bush Administration was not about to accept the Possum Index.
A scientific study commissioned by the Bush administration concluded yesterday that the lower atmosphere was indeed growing warmer and that there was "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system."
The finding eliminates a significant area of uncertainty in the debate over global warming, one that the administration has long cited as a rationale for proceeding cautiously on what it says would be costly limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases.
But White House officials noted that this was just the first of 21 assessments planned by the federal Climate Change Science Program, which was created by the administration in 2002 to address what it called unresolved questions. The officials said that while the new finding was important, the administration's policy remained focused on studying the remaining questions and using voluntary means to slow the growth in emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide.
– "Federal Study Finds Accord on Warming," New York Times
I have an unresolved question for them. When I was last in Colorado, I drove past a school with a banner celebrating its mascot, the Gators. What more convincing climate change evidence could you ask for?
Unless it was short for Irrigators...
