The dull factual scientific answer to Alissa Walker's provocative question is: Probably not.
Or: Not yet.
After all, even climatologists who spend a great deal of time discussing global warming in the media, such as Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate, are not ready to attribute the cold couple of weeks we had recently to ripple effects of climate change, as he told Warren Olney on Reporter's Notebook recently.
But the irony in Walker's question is real, and will likely become all the more painful in years to come.
As I sat at the gate, finally on my way out of Newark, I stared out the window. The air was swirling with deicing fluid that made the tarmac blur into a dreamy mist and permeated the cabin with that familiar acrid smell. I felt the engines start to shudder beneath me, spewing super-heated jet fuel into a cushion of exhaust below. I looked up into the blue sky crisscrossed with puffy contrails and that's when saw them: My frequent flier miles, evaporating into the atmosphere, soon to fall back to Earth as the latest weirded-up, whacked-out weather system. I realized right then and there that I simply couldn't fly like this anymore.
It's not a prescription — a nagging — to others if it comes as a realization to one's own self.
Kit Stolz 