I don’t remember, to be honest, whether global warming one-liners were flying around when it snowed here in the Houston area on December 4th. We were all too busy staring flabbergasted out the windows to pay much attention.

I’m sure, though, that the wits were regaling everyone with their brilliance. “Hey! How ’bout that global warming eh? Hawhawhawhaw!”

**nudge nudge**

That line’s so worn out, it reminds me of my daughter’s Blankie — all three threads of it.

In contrast, here’s Senator Jim DeMint on Twitter yesterday:

It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries “uncle”

Folks, that’s just flat-out funny. Finally, a (relatively) original quip; I laughed right out loud.

Last summer, though, while much of the country sweltered under endless, devastating, record-setting heat, the Jim DeMint’s of the world were silent. Instead, we had the voices of gloom! and doom! in our ears. Polar bears were falling off their slivers of former icebergs, and the waters were rising fast as the Himalayan snowcaps melted.

Or something like that.

Does any of this affect how we handle the environment? It shouldn’t. Taking care of the planet (or rather, our little piece of it) is just common sense. Dogs won’t live in their own excrement, so why would we?

And if the Earth is cooling rather than warming, does that mean we should continue our dependence on foreign oil? Of course not. Freeing ourselves from the geopolitical nightmare that is the Middle East should be a national priority, period.

Frankly, both sides of the global warming argument look just a tad overwrought and confused to me these days. I think we should help them out by (re)introducing a new word — something that will encompass record heat to record snowfall, and everything in between.

It’s an old word. A forgotten word.

The word is…. “weather”.