This made the rounds around the blogs, see for example here, here and here. A letter to the editor printed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on April 16 of this year stated:
Daylight exacerbates warning
You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they ?
Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.
CONNIE M. MESKIMEN / Hot Springs
There was a lot of discussion if this is satire or not, and I wasn’t sure (proof). It turned out that it was indeed a joke (a good one). Snopes has an article debunking it, and this wasn’t the first letter of this kind by Connie Meskimen. Read it, it’s fun (I cannot copy and paste directly from the article, so I guess they do not want that I do, though I could work around it).
Oh, speaking of Snopes… (otherwise unrelated).
6 Comments
April 26, 2007 at 2:12 am
I think we’ll have to ship more copies of Private Eye to the U.S. for background reading on this topic. Another good source for debunking online hoaxes and scams or confirming the strange-but-true messages is hoax-slayer.
I haven’t seen Snopes yet, but I have already de-bugged the Arkansas letter for middle school kids who have been visiting my site for weeks searching for a “persuasive essay on global warming”. This is just a starter.
April 26, 2007 at 5:43 am
[...] I found another reference to this letter on The Sietch blog here and have since found, thanks to fermiparadox, that Snopes has debunked it [...]
April 26, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Here’s another nice example of wasted sarcasm on climate change.
April 27, 2007 at 9:51 am
I hope this is evidence that most people in this country finally believe global warming is real……
April 27, 2007 at 10:50 am
Michael, thanks for the link, it’s excellent. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about the comments, though. Rarely anyone saw it as satire.
May 4, 2007 at 3:29 pm
[...] http://fermiparadox.wordpress.com/2007/04/25/outsmarted/ [...]