Up here in Alaska, regardless of whether you are a Conservative or Liberal, the one thing that nobody disputes is that global warming is a fact. To those of us who have lived here for 30 or 40 years the evidence is undeniable. We have seen summers that are regularly in the high seventies and low eighties, ten years ago that was fucking unheard of.
By way of illustration let me tell you a story. When I was ten years old in,1970, my family drove out to Portage Glacier. Now Portage Glacier was a premiere tourist attraction because it was right off of the highway and easily accessible. The glacier was in a lake of the coldest water I had ever felt. It was this beautiful blue color and so close to where I was standing that I picked up a rock and threw it at the mound of ice striking it before my mother asked me to stop. I did not even have to wind my arm up to throw the rock at the glacier, it was that close.
Now as the years went by the Park Service constructed a cabin with a viewing deck and opened a restaurant a gift shop and other touristy things. Now I never went out to Portage glacier again until two years ago.
It's gone!
Well it is not completely gone, but now the only way that you can see it is to get on a ferry and travel up the icy lake, around the bend, and then there you can see what is left of it today. Okay the damn thing a over a million years old but in the last thirty years it has melted to half of the size that I saw as a ten year old boy. So do we have a global warming problem? No shit!
If you are at all curious here is a link to what it looks like today.
http://www.alaska.net/~design/scenes/portage/portage.html
