The World's Fair

In response to the "Hooray for Global Warming" article as queried by this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger, I offer this public message from a representative of the glacier community:

Dear humans everywhere:

People. I'm melting. I'm actually melting.

Are you not paying attention to what's going on here? Are you not following the news? Are you just out and out disregarding the collected and heated but (get this) generally agreed upon advise from a whole bunch of experts? Is it because you don't trust them? Because please don't tell me that you'd rather trust the advice of something like the current U.S. administration - an administration that (by the way) sounds sort of actually o.k. with the idea of the Earth and everything else being created in seven days! I mean, am I missing something here? Am I actually losing my mind?

No. I'll tell you what I'm losing. I'm losing parts of me. Yeah, and we're not talking money or livelihood or security or anything wussy like that - we're talking about actual bits of me. And guess what? Those bits are not just useless bits. Sure, right now, they're only my extremities, but you want to know something? I happen to like my extremities. My wife likes my extremities. That's right people - you know what I'm talking about.

Really now, don't you care about us glaciers anymore? Personally, I'm not that fond of tourists on cruises, but hey, I'm just doing my job. It's not like we pretty ourselves up for nothing. We matter. I'm mean, one minute, you're like "ooh, cool, look at my heart-shaped ice cube in my heart-shaped martini glass" and the next, you're like installing 17,000 Christmas lights in your front porch.

And what's up with all these SUVs? I mean, don't get me wrong, they are cool and all, but seriously why so many? I understand that some individuals may actually need an SUV to do that all-terrain stuff - to, you know, ride over places like my sorry backside. But what about the average North American family with their 1.86 kids? Unless maybe it's because these folks actually need the 12 cup holders that come standard with these vehicles. Man, that would be a lot of caffeine, although I guess looking after kids is pretty tiring stuff.

But you know what? Don't even get me started on children, because I use to have two little ones. Yeah, they were precious little things, just a touch of permafrost. Really cute and loved them to death. But then one day, we woke up and BAM! They were gone - just disappeared completely. My wife freaked! Even cracked a bit. I mean, I've been around for, what, more than 100,000 years, and yet my poor kids barely made it past floating. Why is it always the children that end up getting screwed? Not really fair when you think about it, is it?

Anyway, I've said my piece, got it off my shelf, so to speak. Besides, a sparrow just landed on me - shit, now that can't be good

(First published at Terry.ubc.ca)