Maine and Global Warming

Mainers are so lucky to live in a place free from the trials and tribulations of global warming.


Thank God we’re not in California. Did you see the wildfires there this summer? One of them burned an entire city to the ground! Well, we wouldn’t have been safe from wildfires in Oregon or Washington or Greece or Sweden either.

How about the heat? California got it bad, real bad … although, they got it just as bad in Japan (20,000 people sent to the hospital) and Britain and Sweden and Oman (that night in Quriyat the LOW temperature was 109°F) and Canada (in Montreal they ran out of space in the morgue), even places in the Arctic circle.

And the floods? The Japanese got hit hard with that one, real hard. But hey, so did the Carolinas. Speaking of hurricanes, was Michael just copying the western wildfires when he too wiped an entire American town off the map? That storm surge was amazing! It’s almost like the sea itself is rising.

But we Mainers got off scot-free. OK, the tick population has exploded, and since 2001 the rate of Lyme disease is up 1500%. Yes the seafood industry is worried, especially with the Gulf of Maine one of the fastest-warming ocean regions in the world, cod populations unable to recover, even the lobster, though plentiful now, threatening to desert Maine waters for colder ocean farther north. After all, that’s how New York State and Connecticut lost 95% of their lobster harvest.

And no we haven’t escaped that sea level rise thing; I remember that “supermoon” high tide a few years ago when the streets were flooded in Portland, Maine, on a sunny day with no wind or rain or storm. The “scientists” tell me more like that is coming and it’s going to get worse, and we have a lot of coastline. Oh well, at least we’re nowhere near as vulnerable to it as, say, Norfolk, Virginia and our nation’s largest naval base, or Miami (suckers!) where seawalls don’t work (leaky bedrock) and there’s no such thing as high ground.

So yes, we in Maine are the lucky ones. We can even turn global warming to our advantage. A golden opportunity has fallen in our lap: let’s market Maine as America’s tourist destination to escape from global warming. Tired of the heat? Come to Maine! Leave your wildfires behind, put the air conditioner on “low,” and don’t forget that if you want swimming lessons, you have to leave your room! Just don’t mention those nasty bloodsucking ticks.

As for global warming, bring it on! First “drill, baby, drill!” then “burn, baby, burn!” Profits will explode with every killer heat wave, and when disaster strikes, the more others suffer, the more we profit.

Maybe it’s time to append a question mark to the Maine state motto. “The way life should be?”


This blog is made possible by readers like you; join others by donating at My Wee Dragon.


9 responses to “Maine and Global Warming

  1. Um, did I miss a stupid pronunciamento from a Maine politician or pundit? It sounds like something the unlamented Paul Lepage would have said. But the linked folderol came from back in 2013–so, less than topical.

  2. Maine can be nice, but I don’t know about the high violence rate there though :-o. It goes WAY back!

    One of my relatives was a Revolutionary War vet who collected a military pension when Congress started to give them out some time well after the end of the war. It was paid once a year. While he was walking from Augusta where he collected his once-a-year payment back to home a–I think–2 days walk away he was robbed at gunpoint and had to wait a full year to get another payment! I’ve never hiked the outback in Maine.Too dangerous!

    • Maine can be nice, but I don’t know about the high violence rate there though…

      There’s always the collected works of Stephen King…

  3. You forgot to mention the increasing freezing rain and sleet that messes up the snow pack with icy layers!! You could also have added that we don’t get -30s and -40s F anymore in winter which used to keep the ticks at bay as well as other pesky insects which are now migrating into the state from the south. And then there are the volatile springs which tend to mess up the birds and the bees with wild swings from cold to hot and back until summer heat finally sets in and leads to more frequent droughts that tend to last well into the fall. Other than that, our climate here in Maine is just perfect!

  4. The boating season on Moosehead Lake is getting longer (but ice fishing season is getting shorter. Ice-out dates have been recorded since 1848.

  5. Sea-Level Change on Mt. Desert Island, ME, 2002. I wonder if the levels clearly observable at Cadillac Cliffs (Acadia NP) were those when the Earth was last ice sheet free …. ? 13 ka? And, by emissions, we’re going back there …

    Control (“The present is the key to the past”):

    (The above is from the linked presentation.)

    (That’s my wife, Claire, at Cadillac Cliffs, Acadia, summer of 2018.)

  6. Maine has upraised beach features because of post-glacial rebound–it was under the ice and pushed down by the added mass:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound

    It takes time for the earth to isostatically respond to the removal of the ice load. It is still rising due to the removal of the load around 15,000 years ago.

    • @Mitch,

      Yes, for sure there was rebound, but best current estimates still fall short some 20m-30m. See below:

      Keven Roy, W.R. Peltier; Glacial isostatic adjustment, relative sea level history and mantle viscosity: reconciling relative sea level model predictions for the U.S. East coast with geological constraints, Geophysical Journal International, Volume 201, Issue 2, 1 May 2015, Pages 1156–1181, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggv066

  7. @Mitch — new finding.

    And sea level has recently risen at Acadia National Park at 9 inches per century which is the opposite direction of what it should be if, as you suggested

    It is still rising due to the removal of the load around 15,000 years ago.