Weather, or Not category archive
The Fire This Time 0
Afterthought;
Yesterday, we finally got a break from two weeks of oppressive heat.
I must say, I cannot remember a heat wave which felt so oppressive as this one. I’ve been known to ride my bicycle in 90s Fahrenheit weather and still enjoy the ride, but this time I stuck to the inside bike.
I am not sanguine.
I fear we are well past the tipping point.
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
Current events do not give cause for complacency.
Dinosaurs Redux 0
I saw pick-up truck yesterday with a bumper sticker reading, “This vehicle is fueled by recycled dinosaurs.”
I thought of that when I saw Brian Greenspun’s column in The Las Vegas Sun. He notes that temperatures in Vegas and around the world are breaking records and argues that dinosaurs are still with us. A bit of his article:
That is if the dinosaurs of today — let’s call them the elected leaders who insist on doing the bidding of the carbon-based industries around the globe — will start making decisions designed to prolong life rather than shorten or downright end it!
Personally, I am somewhat less than optimistic.
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
Meanwhile, a Kansas Republican wants to have his cake and eat it too.
The Climates They Are a-Changing . . . 0
. . . and threats from climate-change deniers drove this TV meteorologist to leave has job. Here’s a bit frome the story in the Des Moines Register:
Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke 0
Many of the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states have been under air quality warnings because of smoke from wildfires in Quebec. Yesterday, we could smell the smoke and see the haze, though we are hundreds of miles south of the Canadian border (today, the air is clearer, but the warnings are still in effect). This is unprecedented in my experience, and I’ve lived in this general area my entire life.
Yet, as Michael in Norfolk points out, Republicans continue to pretend that climate change isn’t.
The Climates, They are a-Changing 0
When I was a young ‘un, growing up these parts (actually about 40 miles north of where I type this), tornadoes were unheard of.
They were something that happened in Kansas.
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kevin McDermott runs the numbers–and calls out the misdirection plays. A snipped snippet:
(snip)
For a while, a favorite strategy of the pro-industrial climate-change-denial crowd was to point at every cold snap as if it was incontrovertible proof of the “global-warming hoax,” as they called it. This is as idiotic as, say, showing footage of people milling around peacefully during lulls in the violence of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and citing it as proof that there was no riot. Yet they got away with that skewed logic for a long time.
I fear for my grandchildren.
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
Today, I was running errands in my convertible. With the top down.
In February.
That is not–or at least didn’t used to be–normal in these parts.
Also, we haven’t had snow in at least four or five years.
When I was growing up about 40 miles north of where I type this, we usually had two or three snows a winter. True, they were seldom more than three or four inches (the biggest I remember was eight inches), but they were real white fluffy stuff falling from the sky in freezing weather.
Climate change is real and it’s now.
I fear we are well past the tipping point, and I fear for my grandchildren.
Addendum, the next morning:
Oh, yeah, and today we has to turn on the AC.
The Climates They Are a-Changing 0
I ran an errand today and put my convertible’s top down because the temperature was in the low 70s Fahrenheit. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt because it was not long-sleeved weather.
In February.
This is not the weather that I knew when I grew up 40 miles north of where I sit.
I fear for my grandchildren.
I fear that they will be faced with relentless peril because we refuse to admit that the peril exists.