Global Warming Stories

Jen Panofsky, of Snyder's Patch Oregon, has lived on the coast for most of her life and is well-familiar with the ebb and flow of tides and coastal weather. However she has been shocked in recent summers to see the degree to which the ocean seems to be moving towards her log-style home (built by her father in 1931) threatening to engulf it.

"We used to play as kids" says Jen, "in the front of the house where the well is, but now the well itself is full of water right to the top, and if things keep up this way it will be totally submerged in another two years."

But that is not the worst of Jen Panofsky's fears.  She also has noticed the growth of seaweed that is slowly developing what she calls 'legs' in the sense that it has tendrils that are creeping up towards her home at an alarming rate.  The seaweed, which previously stayed in the coastal water, is now finding a kind of warmth an encouragement to evolve into a moving plant, possibly because of global warming, and it seems to be evolving too quickly for Miss Panofsky's comfort. 

"I don't know but that the seaweed has some kind of bad intention toward me and my home, and I'm not really willing to stay around and find out", said Jen last month.

She will be moving to much higher ground soon and just leaving the evolving sea-form to do what it will.  But Jen believes that global warming is certainly at the heart of her crisis.

In the northern Canadian region called the North West Territories, there is a town of barely 100 people, where Jimpson Tallmun lives with his family of 9, making a living hunting and fishing and really living off the land.

Jimpson is a hardy soul with a large family and he needs to sustain his lifestyle by a close communion with nature. This communion is threatned now by global warming, which is doing something to the ground that has never happened before.

"The tundra is not completely freezing", says Tallmun, " not deep down anyway...it's turning, especially in the summer months, into a soft, mucky, sucking quicksand...."

Animals everywhere are being drawn into the earth in long, torturous and lingering deaths and the number of game available for Jimpson to hunt is becoming progressively less.

Jimpson is also terrified that one day one his clan will wander into a quagmire and expire there before he finds them--since he has three children under the age of 5, and many above that age--all of them vulnerable.

Jimpson will have to stay and deal with the effects of global warming, because he has no alternative. But it is a tragedy that his life will never be the same as it was and never as pleasant or idyllic.

One of the most unusual spins on global warming is found in Dos Nenos Florida, where the Tito family are worried about the over-growth of plants and trees. In Nenos, an historically luxuriant locale, vegetation-wise, they have been noticing such an increase in vegetation, by virtue of the higher temperatures and more available water sources, to be leading to a strangulation effect on their orange trees.

"My trees are suffering from slow strangulation" said Franco Tto, "and they are producing smaller oranges and even the ones that are grown are strangely twisted and almost abnormal...I really think that my trees are being vampirized by some kind of virus that the warmer temperatures are creating."

Franco's concerns are not unfounded, because some other farmers in his area have noticed that their oranges are showing similar frightening, and grotesque shapes, not normal for the typical orange but rather more consistent for soemthing from a horror movie.

The effects of global warming are not just dangerous to our environment, but may be showing the first signs of an actual evil influence that the warmer earth is spawning.

We can only hope that it is not so.