One generation learning from another is more than a one-way street of grown-ups teaching younger folks. Sometimes traffic flows in the opposite direction too. With their energy and fresher perspectives, sometimes the youngsters can teach the oldsters a valuable lesson or two as well. One such area where this is going on is recycling. Students at Madison County High School are showing Madison’s post-teen crowd that showing Mother Earth a little respect is not only an important and responsible thing to do – it’s easy.

To the citizens of Madison County: We have just completed three days of workshop meetings, reviewing county revenues and expenditures in order to prepare a proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2011. Very soon we will publish a notice of the proposed budget and a proposed real estate tax rate, which will be the subject of a 7:30 p.m. March 29 public hearing. We will not vote on a final budget and tax rate for FY2011 until April 13.

Madison County is perhaps puny in population, but colossal in caring. That was demonstrated Sunday when an overflow crowd packed Haywood’s Mount Carmel Baptist Church for a special Haiti-relief concert that organizers say raised $2,100. The money will go to aid the Caribbean island nation’s Jan. 12 earthquake victims through the University of Virginia Nursing Students Without Borders program.

Freezing winter atmospheric temperatures, even though slightly warmer than in the past, cause much of that evaporated moisture to dump back on us in the form of snow. Therefore, as long as we have winters, planet warming will actually cause more intense blizzards.

Down here, 90 miles south of D.C., we are about to triple our average total seasonal snowfall of 12 to 24 inches. With even more snow this week, this is a good time to talk about global warming.

There is much discussion these days about global warming. That is as it should be, but it is unfortunate that the issue of climate change and its effects on the planet and our lives (and especially the lives of our children and grandchildren) is so often used as an emotional political wedge to divide us. This is a complicated issue, and the facts are often lost, muddied and even ignored, as self-interested politicians and partisan talk show hosts fan the flames to generate votes and boost ratings.

(The Copenhagen Global Warming Conference) is over and, thankfully, what a bust (except for a huge carbon footprint)!  Even the (mainstream media) couldn’t spin a win out of this non-event! My question to you true believers out there is this: How much new data or how much falsified data will it take to shake your faith, take off the blinders and open your minds to even the remote possibility of several less “fatal” alternative climate scenarios such as natural (non man-made) fluctuations or that dire predictions of global catastrophe and our ability to avoid it may be exaggerated?