There’s a lot of political cartoons about currently making commentary on global warming. There are heaps of them composed with settings of cold, wintery, snowy scenery, and then having some person inside saying something about Al Gore being wrong.

That pisses me off. It’s quite clear that there’s a certain percentage of the world who just don’t get how global warming works. Overall the world is warming, but that does not mean that winter in the Northern Hemisphere will cease to exist. Furthermore, it does mean that you will see increases in extreme weather, including colder winters and hotter summers.

Why am I saying this? Because I’m sweating in 42° C (107.6 in F) heat. Because Australia has been seeing drought conditions get worse over a period of 10-15 years. Because where once you could quite happily water ski, boat and fish (ew - the lake was never that clean to actually eat the fish) in Lake Eppalock, where my great-aunt has a ’summer’ house, it has been pretty much totally dry for a good 10 years. Once you would only see the tops of large (at least 5 metres tall) trees that were submerged in the lake; now you can walk right up to the base of the trunk… from the side of the lake where we used to park our camping chairs by the ’shore’.

Australia is the largest island in the world. Imagine what happened in Indonesia happening to Australia; we’re two-thirds desert already. Imagine if all of our cities, which are mainly coastal, were flooded from tsunamis. Now imagine that we also have to conserve water here very carefully because of this long-term drought. We’re either going to drown in water, or die from lack of it. Australia’s farmers are going bankrupt because their animals are dying and their crops aren’t watered. Either way, you can not be living in this world and be that naive about the concepts of the science behind global warming.

I’m sure none of my readers are so silly to believe that global warming should see warming everywhere at the same time, so this is more of a plea: introduce your friends and colleagues to some science blogs (Bad Astronomy for example). Help them to understand this simple concept: global warming affects areas of the world differently, but on average we’re seeing an increase in temperature around the world. And then get them to pass on the message.

What bugs me? This American-centred concept that if it’s snowing in Michigan (for example) that means global warming isn’t affecting them, the world, or doesn’t exist at all. Al Gore may be an alarmist, but there’s good reason to be. If cartoonists are portraying even 1/10th of the ignorance that exists, then there is something seriously wrong with our education. 42 degree heat would have been unheard of when I was 10; now it’s becoming commonplace. And it’s not because of solar flares or any such bogus science.

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