Global Warming - by Bob Siegel - This has certainly been an interesting winter for our climate. Here in Rochester, it started out with exceptionally mild weather. People were delighted to be walking around in shirtsleeves in early January, while at the same time trying to ignore a nagging sense of disquiet reminding them of what Al Gore’s film had so recently and so successfully pointed out about the impact of our contemporary machinery on the greater machinery that makes our planet inhabitable. Officially, this "warm spell" was attributed to El Nino. But as Tim Flannery points out in The Weather Makers, El Nino cycles have been getting longer and warmer over the past thirty years due to unprecedented warming in the Pacific Ocean, a direct result of the greenhouse effect. Last year was, in fact, the warmest American year on record. The recent warm spell was a good time for reflection, even as farmers worried whether it would ever freeze hard enough to kill off last year’s insects.