President's Message December 2009

It is hard to think about "Global Warming" when the wind chill is down to single digits, but that is what I am thinking about after attending the free lecture on climate change given at the Hugh Gregg Center on December 8th. Predictions keep getting worse, and whether you are a believer that it is manmade or not things are happening. The oceans are warming, acidifying and rising and the world wide average temperatures are increasing. It seems that areas predicted to get drier are and areas predicted to get wetter are too. Storms are becoming more dramatic as the energy in the atmosphere increases. Our wonderful sugar maples may give ground to the better suited Southeastern pine, and those of us planning to retire in NH in about 50 years will be doing so in a climate similar to the Carolinas! The feeling is that even if we turned off the "carbon switch" tomorrow there is still going to be climatic changes to deal with for several decades. Clearly that switch is not going to be turned off very soon.

It is easy to get depressed thinking about this stuff. I guess it is the helplessness one feels at the apparent lack of individual power to do anything about it and the seeming inevitability of rapid changes coming. Then I look at the calendar and the year and realize that in reality I will not likely have to deal with the real bad stuff. Heck, I'm well past 50 already! Now I'm really depressed...then I think what about my kids and get that uneasy feeling again as the adrenaline starts to flow.

Wait! There is some pretty good trout fishing in Georgia and Arkansas now, so why can't there be in NH in 50 years? If we protect our cool ground water supplies that seep into our rivers and lakes, get rid of unnecessary dams, change some of our large deep necessary dams into bottom emptying hydropower dams, mitigate the warm summer runoff from parking lots and roadways and make sure that all or our rivers have great riparian zones with trees and shade ...maybe it could work? In fact, we are trying to do most of this stuff now. We are not helpless after all! We are just under some time pressure now, and like prepping for final exams, maybe time pressure will be a motivator. We can't pull off the "all nighters" preparing for this test; we have to start preparing now! Let's all get to work!

...OK. I guess it can wait until after the holidays.

I wish you all a restful and peaceful holiday season with your families and friends. After New Year we can all work together to make 2010 and all the years after great ones.

Happy Holidays!
Mitch Kalter