A New Jersey town fell victim to the global warming religion, and tore down their ski area.
Back in the winter of 2007, I wrote a column on the demise of Belle Mountain, a public ski area just a few miles up the road from Trenton.
At the time my column ran, the chairlift towers were still standing as a mute memorial to a bygone era. But the area had been closed since 1998, when Mercer County officials had to shut it down because of warmer winters and declining crowds.
Not long after the column ran, the county tore the towers down. This year, though, there are a lot of people who could use a lift up the hill. When I visited Belle on Sunday, the hill was packed with sledders, snowboarders and even a couple who were sliding down on the cardboard box their flat-screen TV had come in.
I skied down just to get the sensation of what it must have been like long ago. My conclusion: Pretty good for a spot just outside the state capital.
When I got home, I put in a call to Don Easterbook. Easterbrook is a professor of geology at Western Washington University who is an expert in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of change in ocean temperatures that has great influence on the climate.
I’ve been talking with Easterbrook for years about the complicated topic of global warming, but only recently has his specialty come into the news. It seems that a lot of climatologists are using the PDO to explain why we’re getting all this snow in the midst of what was supposed to be a warming period.
“The colder it gets, the more it seems like it drives them into a frenzy,” he said of his fellow scientists.
The scientists’ explanations for all that snow are complicated, but Easterbrook’s prediction is simple:
“Get used to it. It’s gonna keep coming.”
Love it Steve, got my popcorn and watching