By Jimmy Williams
Posted: Tuesday, March 2, 2010 8:01 pm

Thank heavens for global warming. There’s no telling what this winter would have been like without it.
As a dues paying member of the Flat Earth Society, I have long been dubious of any meteorological prognostications based on data of less than several centuries.
Here are Al Gore and the other experts making hay (i.e. millions of dollars) on their rhetorical condemnations of fools like me who have doubts about the sky falling based on a couple of decades of weather records.
I’ve driven across Kansas and I can tell you the earth is flat. In fact, in some other areas of the world it is concave, with whole populations of people living below sea level.
At any rate, this winter (it’s not over) started out colder than “normal” way back in December and continued that way, more or less, to the present moment.
A stretch of nearly two weeks at the end of December and the first of January when the temperature never broke above freezing, even in the daytime, was the longest such happenstance in 42 years. We’ve had colder, by far, than the two degrees we experienced the coldest night of that period, but it didn’t last as long.
Then, at the end of last month, global warming forgot again it was winter and let down with a 7.5-inch snowfall and another considerable spell of frigid conditions.
Despite those two extreme events, the winter hasn’t been devastating to plants. No real harm has been done, and only nipping injury and the browning of outside foliage on some things is in evidence.
The last real killer winter we had was in 1985, when the temperature bottomed out at 17 degrees below 0 here and the whole continental U.S. suffered as well. That was, conveniently, just before the global warming figures began to roll in. And that is an inconvenient truth.
It was, also, before the green number crunchers in Britain got into the act, skewing all sorts of data for the sake of political correctness and to provide cover for their movement.
Despite concrete evidence to the contrary, the greens are saying, with a straight face, that those crunching rumors were an inconvenient lie.
I have been a loyal conservationist all my life, except for shooting (at) ducks and other game, but not a preservationist. Once a duck gets more than a couple of years old, it’s too tough anyway, is the way I see it. So, conserve the resource and utilize the harvest.
That is of no consequence here, except to make a point. I don’t approach the global warming debate from the stance of anti-environment.
In fact, I will be the first to admit modern civilization has a sorry record in ecology ratings. We should do more to better that grade. The sky is not falling, however, and it will be centuries, if ever, before it does.
It might get hotter before then, or it might get colder. It has done both in past eons without the help or hindrance of Homo sapiens.
You can panic if you want to, but just as soon as this cold spell is over, I am getting back to weeding and planting.
Editor’s note: Jimmy Williams is production superintendent at The Paris Post-Intelligencer, where he also writes this column.
Published in The Messenger 3.2.10