Can't Beat the Heat!

As I write this, the thermometer reads a balmy 64 degrees Fahrenheit --in the middle of December. This is something that I am fairly sure has never been encountered in recent memory. While it's certainly enjoyable to not have to bundle up in the winter, this is simply a mask for a much more serious issue. I've held off on doing an entire post dedicated to global warming on this blog for a variety of reasons. This is partly because I assume my readers are already familiar with it and I want to discuss things that need more time in the limelight, and partly because it's such a polarizing topic (even though it really shouldn't be).
Global warming, now better known by the annoyingly vague pseudonym of "climate change", is well understood to be the result of human activity--more specifically, the result of human industrial activity in the past 200 years. During this time, the average temperature of the Earth has increases to an even greater extent than it already had at the end of the last ice age. The most obvious symptoms of this are, of course, the loss of glaciers and ice caps, the desertification of tropical regions, and the acidification of the seas.
Those people who deny the reality of global warming tend to point out that snow and ice, sometimes in record-breaking amounts, continue to be a part of winter weather in many temperate areas. This is especially true, perhaps not coincidentally, in the southeastern United States. Now, of course, we find ourselves presented with a genuinely warm winter, with temperatures hovering in the 60s and even the 70s, and I can scarcely begin to imagine how global warming deniers might rationalize this.
While still focusing on the environmental aspects of global warming and how we can get people to acknowledge them, perhaps I should also mention a more aesthetic consequence. With global climate heating up, it may be that for may of us, snow in winter is going to become a thing of the past.