Global Warming Ruining Fall Foliage: Leaf Peepers Fret

It's come to this.

Some folks are just perpetually miserable.

EAST MONTPELIER, Vt. — Every fall, Marilyn Krom tries to make a trip to Vermont to see its famously beautiful fall foliage.

This year, she noticed something different about the autumn leaves.

"They're duller, not as sparkly, if you know what I mean," Krom, 62, a registered nurse from Eastford, Conn., said during a recent visit. "They're less vivid."

Other "leaf peepers" are noticing, too, and some believe climate change could be global warming.

Forested hillsides usually riotous with reds, oranges and yellows have shown their colors only grudgingly in recent years, with many trees going straight from the dull green of late summer to the rust-brown of late fall with barely a stop at a brighter hue.

"It's nothing like it used to be," said University of Vermont plant biologist Tom Vogelmann, a Vermont native.

He says autumn has become too warm to elicit New England's richest colors.

According to the National Weather Service, temperatures in Burlington have run above the 30-year averages in every September and October for the past four years, save for October 2004, when they were 0.2 degrees below average.

How, pray tell, is this affecting the peepers?

"Leaf peeping" is big business in Vermont, with some 3.4 million visitors spending nearly $364 million in the fall of 2005, according to state estimates.

State tourism officials reject the notion that nature's palette is getting blander. Erica Housekeeper, spokeswoman for the state Department of Tourism and Marketing, said she had heard nothing but positive reports from foresters and visitors alike this year.

This nitwit suggests we should have listened to The Goracle.

But of course.

Which brings us to Al Gore, a guy who nearly became president (and we would have had a hawk for a vice president either way). He goes a little far making his point about global warming in "An Inconvenient Truth" because NO ONE WAS LISTENING.

I think proof of that might be 25 years of wars for oil, SUVs the size of houses and almost no federal support of conservation or alternative energy.

But then Big Boring Al, who arguably shook that label with this film, won the Nobel Peace Prize. And yet the forces of partisanship can't agree on an honor for the town-crier Democrat.