Amazing. It’s not even March, but we’re getting April weather again. Squirrels are out, the lawns are trying to green up and we seem to have a pair of robins in our holly bush.

And when I drove through Kansas City and Jefferson City today for a long-distance meeting, it was just plain hot. I had to turn on the a/c, which is a big deal for me, since I have lizard blood and like nothing better than basking in a car. (Weird. I know.)

So is this global warming? Well, mmmmaybe …

I guess that’s back in the news a little bit, because I’ve been hearing minor squawks in the news from people who got pissy that George Bush had Michael Crichton to the White House. Who? What? I know. We all have bigger things to talk about now with Iraq civil war and Dubai ports, but some people found the time to be indignant that the president invited Crichton — who authored “Jurassic Park,” “Andromeda Strain” and a host of other science-almost-nonfiction books like that — as a guest. So what’s the big whoop? Well, Crichton most recently wrote “State of Fear,” which more or less says that almost all the global warming talk is baloney and its perpetrators are eco-terrorists. (Chances that Spielberg will make this book into a movie: Exactly zero.)

And while I still believe (as I said back here) that the book is a little heavyhanded and preachy, I was reminded of one of his most interesting arguments by a corroborating article I happened to come across in the Farmer’s Almanac, of all places.

They had a section about the purported climate changes, and I would think if there’s anybody that doesn’t have a political ax to grind about all this, it would be The Farmer’s Almanac.

How much man-made greenhouse gases heat the entire globe is contreversial; the fact that these greenhouse gases are turning cities into urban heat islands is not.

We all know that buildings, streets and sidewalks absorb solar heat; they also absorb heat create by man’s energy use. As cities have grown and energy use has increased, urban areas have grown warmer — .9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in each decade since World War II. This has resulted in urban heat islands, places where the temperature range of a central city differs from its rural surroundings. this difference has been shown to be from as little as 4 degrees Fahrenheit in St. Louis, Missouri, to as much as 18 degrees in Mexico City. How hot can a city get? Recent satellite observations have shown us that temperatures in southern and western U.S. cities are reaching as high as 150 degrees on inner-city rooftops and 120 degrees on streets and parking lots.

Heat islands warp natural rainfall patterns. Hot air during the day reduces rainfall on the cities and their surroundings. Then, at night, warm air radiated from the urban centers rises and mixes with pollution aerosols. Moisture collects around the pollution particles … forming clouds of tiny droplets that are then blown away by wind. Throughout the U.S. Midwest, storms tend to be heaviest east of large cities, where the hot urban air, carried on the prevailing westerly winds, collides with cooler rural temperatures. Scientists have reported that along the East Coast it rains more on the weekends, because most cities generate fewer pollution aerosols on Saturday and Sundays. (The fact that there are fewer aerosols means that each particle can absorb more moisture. These larger droplets fall rather than blow away.)

Skeptics claim that much of the global warming we have seen reflects the increased use and reradiation of energy in local heat islands and is not a worldwide phenomenon.

(And by the way, the emphasis is mine, in case you can’t tell.)

Well, now really. Doesn’t that seem like something that we should all talk about first? Shouldn’t we begin with knowing that if you choose to live in a city, you’re going to have to accept that you’ll be dealing with elevated temperatures, but that they’re a simple fact of city-dwelling life and NOT a reason to tell the whole dang world to open a window? Maybe there are some other factors to look at, but I think it’s incredible that the urban folks can’t be more honest and take the heat (ha ha) for their preferred environment.

I think that people are basically fair-minded. I don’t think I’d tell them that their problems are their own. But telling everyone that the problem is world-wide is just annoyingly overstated, and we ought to turn up the heat (ha ha again) on them to stick to the facts, no matter how inconvenient.

*****

Follow-up:
I couldn’t find a link to the story about people being irritated about the president’s Crichton visit, but in surfing around, I came across this quote from Crichton at a September, 2003 speech that I thought was worth a repeat:

“Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday — these are deeply held mythic structures.”