Boy Scouts: Mine Canaries of Global Warming?

From the newsletter of Unknowncountry.com, the website of Whitley Strieber, co-author with Art Bell of The Coming Global Superstorm, the basis for the movie The Day After Tomorrow:

Another Scout Struck by Lighting: Take Warning

Before today's tragic death of another boy scout in a lightning strike, this had already been the most tragic camping season in the history of scouting.

. . . 300 scouts at the [annual] jamboree were overcome by heat exhaustion. Then, a few days later, two more scouts were killed by lightning while camping in Utah.

Now another scout has been killed by lighting while in a log shelter at a Utah camp.

[These] injuries and deaths . . . have happened because the weather is changing much more rapidly than even the most pessimistic global warming scientists anticipated.

The scouts were felled at their jamboree because of record heat in the United States this summer, with some areas, such as New York, experiencing all time records. They were not prepared to bear the heat, and their activities were designed for what we still consider "normal" summer weather, with the result that they became overheated and collapsed.

The lightning deaths have taken place because storms are developing much more quickly than ever before and are much more electricially active in the US than we've come to expect.

So, take warning, if you engage in outdoor activities this summer, understand the warning signs of heat exhaustion and be prepared to heed them.

Above all, if you find yourself in an electrical storm, take precautions. Do not shelter under trees or, in open areas, or in the highest spot in the area. Seek shelter immediately at the lowest point you can find. Do not count on trail shelters to protect you from lightning. When they were erected, the weather was very different.

Comments

[sleipner]

See! See! I told ya so!!!

[Spud]

I have different ideas about global warming. Weather is no different to me where I live than it has ever been. If we were to eliminate what many believe to be the causes of global warming, we still would have weird weather. Having said that, we should do all we can to lessen the causes of man made global warming. If we do that we'll have less pollution, but still weird weather. Just my thoughts.

[AmbivaBro]

I agree w/Spud.

Scouts are dying 'cause the weather's changing? Oh, my steaming red arse. Scouts have been dying in lighning strikes ever since there've been Scouts. They die because they're poorly supervised, hyper kids out in Nature, for which they're poorly prepared. This summer was worse, because there was a Jamboree that coincided with a heat wave. Doh!

Man, we're so alarmist: if something like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened today, we'd say the building burned faster because of global warming. Puh-leeze.

[amba]

Wull, the author of Coming Global Superstorm and the novelization of The Day After Tomorrow is alarmist by definition. In fact, that would be putting it mildly.

[amba]

BTW, I once had a friend -- my first "old" friend, I was in my 30s and she was in her 70s (Margaret Webb, for those of you in the know) -- who lived in Florida and had kept a "weather diary" for many years. The great advantage of that was that she'd have many years of, say, "May 20" all on the same page. And she found that every year, she'd say "God, this is weird weather," and then she'd look at her weather diary and discover that it had been exactly the same most other years.

[karen]

I agree w/Spud, too. But, to me it isn't that fossil fuels in the ozone are the major culprit ( I could be wrong) but, it's the paving and huge buildings. These things reflect heat. Then, you have no good management of these parks you say Bush torches? i can't remember a year in the not-so-past that the West hasn't had mj. fires. Fire is nature's way of cleansing and cleaning and creating. Stiffling nature isn't management.

Also, where people build and the runoff and erosion it creates is a concern. Up here, anyway.

This summer has been one of the sunniest and most awesome I can remember. Like when I was younger. It's actually haing weather!!

[sleipner]

The biggest problem with the environment is that to me at least there are enormous flashing red warning signals everywhere...and we just keep going about business as usual.

Until and unless the government admits we have a problem, we will continue to binge-guzzle oil and pump out the pollutants. We need a twelve step program for oilcoholism.