The Enlightened Climatologist

It’s 10:40 on a Tuesday morning.  I should be at school, preparing for my afternoon class on Constitutional Law, but instead, I’m at home, bundled in blankets, and sipping hot cocoa.  The reason for today’s absence can be seen from my window.  The Arlington/D.C. metropolis has been covered in two feet of snow and, with the exception of a few auxiliary government agencies, and some scattered restaurants and shops, the city has been sound asleep since Friday afternoon.  The clouds gathering overhead promise more of the same, and many of my classmates are wondering whether it would have been wiser to take an early spring break.  After all, February flights to the Bahamas are comparatively cheap.  However, for the politically interested, this Narnian-esque winter holds broader implications than an excuse to play hooky.  The Wall Street Journal published a blog last night on the irony of a recent announcement that the NOAA–one of many bureaucracies designed to tell us what to think–would be providing information on “earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons …”  The blog follows on the heels of an article published in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph that chronicles a host of errors in a recent report from The United Nation’s panel on climate change, and reveals that glaciers may not be an endangered species after all.  Not everything, it appears, is quite as settled as we’ve been led to believe.  The Enlightened Climatologist may not be so enlightened after all.