Dear Chick,

You and your teammate Henny Penny are stirring things up quite a bit lately. Ever since you quit screaming about the sky falling and switched to global warming, we now have children crying themselves to sleep over the fate of drowning polar bears, pop artists broadcasting advice to us to limit the use of toilet paper to one square per visit (to save our forests), and folks here in Bangor marching through the mid-April blizzard to demand that the federal government do something, anything, to prevent us from frying to death. Clearly, you need a bit of perspective on this crisis du jour. Please, before you spread any more alarm, try to pass the following quiz:

1. Over the past million years there have been several ice ages. The last one ended about 10,000 years ago. The end of each ice age was caused by (a) global cooling (b) global warming (c) George W. Bush

2. Around the year A.D. 1000 grapes grew abundantly in Scotland. Norsemen settled in comparatively balmy Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. Then it got colder and they went home. This is (a) true (b) ignored by Al Gore’s movie (c) both

3. Carbon dioxide, the “pollutant” we all exhale, is blamed for global warming, which is said to be all our fault. Actually, (a) it’s a minor component of the “greenhouse” gases, water vapor being much more important (b) the greatest amount, by far, of atmospheric CO2 is unrelated to human activity (c) if you insist on worrying about it, the ability of CO2 to absorb back-radiation from the Earth is limited – multiplying its concentration doesn’t result in an equivalent increase in its greenhouse effect (d) all of the above

4. The polar ice caps on Mars have been observed to be shrinking at the rate of about 10 feet per year, and its surface temperature has increased by about 1 degree C over the past decade. This is most likely due to (a) American Mars Rovers (b) Something to do with the sun? (c) George W. Bush

5. The Earth’s temperature and sea level of the past century represent the ideal which should never change, and, by golly, we should see to it, with tons and mountains of new laws and regulations (a) yes (b) no

Answers: 1.c, 2.c, 3.d, 4.c, 5. you decide

So there, you two, here’s my advice: Lighten up! Get a life! Or at least find something else to panic about.

Your friend always,

Alan

Alan Boone is a semi-retired physician living in Bangor.