January...it's the new April!
Or: Climate change scares the methane out of me...
I awoke this morning to another beautiful, balmy, 55 degree January morning and I suddenly realized that "Winter" as I once knew it is dead. It's not just a "warm-snap," or a freaky patch of weather. Its been like this for the past week. A day or two prior to this warm period the weather was bone-chilling, skin-biting cold. This happens EVERY year now: we have several periods of one to three weeks where the weather is just unseasonably warm, Springtime warm. Its been like that for at least the past four winters I've been in NYC. That's just the way it is now, much like the way Autumn has almost completely disappeared.
Call me old fashioned, call me alarmist, call me "Chicken Little," but I don't ever remember it being like this in the winter. I seem to remember a time when, for spans of several weeks, even whole seasons, I had a general idea of the kind of weather I could expect. Yeah, it might snow unexpectedly, or it might be a little warmer than usual here or there, whatever. But this a little too odd, and a little too prolonged for me.
The words "global warming" are now as firmly entrenched in our everyday language as the words "car" and "grocery store." We crack jokes about global warming when the weather stays in the 70s until late November (as it did this year). We joke about how we'll be able to play outdoor sports all year round in a few years, about how our neighborhoods might be underwater some day soon...but the laughs are a little hollow, and the jokes are just a way to swallow the pill that the climate is changing before our eyes, as we walk around in short sleeves in the dead of winter.
Climate change is staring us in the face. It is so blatantly obvious, that its almost hard to believe it is actually true. Kind of like Hitler's "Big Lie" theory in reverse; the Big Lie theory is that if you tell a lie so enormous, people will believe you simply because they cannot think someone would be so bold as to tell such a lie. In this case, when climate change and global warming are household words, were are experiencing radical changes in the climate but we almost cannot believe the climate could be chaning so fast.
I'm not so simple as to believe that a few warm days in January herald the Apocalypse, just as I don't think that I have a brain tumor every time I get a headache. But the signs of climate change are there, and they are mounting every day. Whether or not you're a liberal, conservative, or Al Gore, you're going to have to deal with it.
So strap in...it's going to be a strange ride.
(Write me back with some comments, please)
I awoke this morning to another beautiful, balmy, 55 degree January morning and I suddenly realized that "Winter" as I once knew it is dead. It's not just a "warm-snap," or a freaky patch of weather. Its been like this for the past week. A day or two prior to this warm period the weather was bone-chilling, skin-biting cold. This happens EVERY year now: we have several periods of one to three weeks where the weather is just unseasonably warm, Springtime warm. Its been like that for at least the past four winters I've been in NYC. That's just the way it is now, much like the way Autumn has almost completely disappeared.
Call me old fashioned, call me alarmist, call me "Chicken Little," but I don't ever remember it being like this in the winter. I seem to remember a time when, for spans of several weeks, even whole seasons, I had a general idea of the kind of weather I could expect. Yeah, it might snow unexpectedly, or it might be a little warmer than usual here or there, whatever. But this a little too odd, and a little too prolonged for me.
The words "global warming" are now as firmly entrenched in our everyday language as the words "car" and "grocery store." We crack jokes about global warming when the weather stays in the 70s until late November (as it did this year). We joke about how we'll be able to play outdoor sports all year round in a few years, about how our neighborhoods might be underwater some day soon...but the laughs are a little hollow, and the jokes are just a way to swallow the pill that the climate is changing before our eyes, as we walk around in short sleeves in the dead of winter.
Climate change is staring us in the face. It is so blatantly obvious, that its almost hard to believe it is actually true. Kind of like Hitler's "Big Lie" theory in reverse; the Big Lie theory is that if you tell a lie so enormous, people will believe you simply because they cannot think someone would be so bold as to tell such a lie. In this case, when climate change and global warming are household words, were are experiencing radical changes in the climate but we almost cannot believe the climate could be chaning so fast.
I'm not so simple as to believe that a few warm days in January herald the Apocalypse, just as I don't think that I have a brain tumor every time I get a headache. But the signs of climate change are there, and they are mounting every day. Whether or not you're a liberal, conservative, or Al Gore, you're going to have to deal with it.
So strap in...it's going to be a strange ride.
(Write me back with some comments, please)
Comments
I hope USA starts to get realized of this problem because if you don’t change there is nothing other countries like us can do. We have only around 34millon habitants in Argentina and most of them are not industrialized, with this I mean they don’t have a TV, AC, PC, so what can you ask them to do for global warming? Nothing, absolutely nothing. So for us the countries that are not industrialized like USA the only thing left to do is seat back, feel the changes and wait till one day North America will finally change and get realized of this problem like Europe has. If you want to know more read about the Kyoto Protocol.