We wrote about the demise of the Bonneville Salt Flats some 25 years ago. That was after Speed Week was canceled or cut short for the fourth year in a row.
We had the scientists and the racers all swear on a stack of whatever they swore on that racing on Bonneville was a thing of the past.
Funny how quickly we forget.
The sun came out and stayed out and we had 25 years of great race weather.
The last two years have been wet and like a quarter of a century ago people are predicting that the Salt Flats will die.
Eventually they will be right.
In two hundred or 500 years the Bonneville Salt Flats will cease to be. We won’t be around to see it but the flats like everything else are temporary. Until then however there will be races. 20 or 25 years of great races and punctuated by two, three or four years of wet weather.
We also guarantee that during those wet years scientists are going to be screaming global warming or coming ice age or climate change. We like the phrase climate change the best because it means absolutely nothing.
Our daughter was very annoyed with us when we scoffed at the idea. We couldn’t see the facts of climate change right before our eyes. We did see those facts we just didn’t get excited about them.
There is something to get excited about. It is getting very little press but we have heard that the Sahara and the Arabian Desert are getting greener with every passing year. Seems that there could be an upside to global warming and the melting icecaps quench a thirsty desert.
The warmer it gets the wetter it gets and while some new wetness could mean rising sea levels what if it means more abundant rainfall?
We just read another disaster prediction about global warming. It looked pretty bad but the only thing that has already happened and can be seen via satellite is the greening of the deserts.
Yes the future sounded otherwise awful but what if the worse case scenario does not come to pass?
Who would disdain a little more green?