Let's talk about the weather.
Snow in Vegas? The old granddaddy I-5 and the long and windy 15 closed, within a few hours of Los Angeles where it's rained more in the past week than the whole year. A 19-year old girl in Chicago griped that her face was 'freezing off' -- the wind chill of the Great Lakes, a given, but seems like it's getting more bitter with each passing year.
Yet another chubby, and probably overfed middle-aged American male from a particularly icy chill area of the northeast quips something like, "Global warming? What global warming?"
He wants his snowmobiles and Sunday afternoon football, undeterred, and doesn't see the interconnectivity of things like giant chunks of glaciers melting into the Arctic seas, polar ice caps melting before their time, the coldest winter 'on record' followed or following record heat, hurricanes that can wipe out a major city, drought and wildfires. From today's weather news:
"A major Pacific storm slammed into the West Coast on Sunday...blizzard Warnings in the Cascades were in effect due to the intensity of the storm. By Monday morning, many higher elevation areas in the Northwest were to have received upward of 3 feet of new snow...
Elsewhere, a developing storm was moving northeastward along the eastern seaboard. Another shot of wintry weather was anticipated for New England and the Mid-Atlantic...Snowfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour were expected and many areas were to receive upwards of a foot of new snow."
It's unusually cold even here in Los Angeles where we've had more rain in the past week than the past year. Cold, bone-chilling rain in a city where a fraction of a dew drop constitutes 'hazardous road conditions' and the least common denominator for 'slick pavement' technique has been established. What constitutes a pre-winter-wonderland flurry in Boston or Chicago boondoggles our beloved CalTrans for days.
And, yet, we go merrily along, driving our cars to the mall or complaining about not being able to drive our cars whenever we want, wherever we want while complaining about our faces freezing off.
We want the more comfortable effects of global warming--balmy summer nights where not too long ago, within a single lifetime, it used to be "too chilly."
Scientific brainiacs say within a generation or two, it could go either way--that 'global warming' (the catch-all tagline for how our planet gets warmer when its natural checks and balances are out of wack; how when plants that eat the pollution we create can't keep up, the atmosphere around the earth heats up like a pressure cooker) could ultimately result in the obvious 'heating up' of temperatures like we see most summers OR the more counter-intuitive result of a "new" ICE AGE [the History Channel loves this point of view].
So, perhaps we need new terminology for the active weather pattern we see happening yet, by virtue of our modern lives, choose to ignore on a daily basis [depending on how overly-scheduled and under-fulfilled our lives are at the exact moment when a little 'damp' becomes completely 'drenched' just because we forgot the umbrella, or how many times we look down at the 'portable device' connecting us to people, hot and cold, around the globe, who we may not even see for years, but now can know what they report to be doing, 24-7].
We need a catchy buzzword to convey this crap shoot -- global warming, heads; mini-ice age, tails.
Snow in Vegas? The old granddaddy I-5 and the long and windy 15 closed, within a few hours of Los Angeles where it's rained more in the past week than the whole year. A 19-year old girl in Chicago griped that her face was 'freezing off' -- the wind chill of the Great Lakes, a given, but seems like it's getting more bitter with each passing year.
Yet another chubby, and probably overfed middle-aged American male from a particularly icy chill area of the northeast quips something like, "Global warming? What global warming?"
He wants his snowmobiles and Sunday afternoon football, undeterred, and doesn't see the interconnectivity of things like giant chunks of glaciers melting into the Arctic seas, polar ice caps melting before their time, the coldest winter 'on record' followed or following record heat, hurricanes that can wipe out a major city, drought and wildfires. From today's weather news:
"A major Pacific storm slammed into the West Coast on Sunday...blizzard Warnings in the Cascades were in effect due to the intensity of the storm. By Monday morning, many higher elevation areas in the Northwest were to have received upward of 3 feet of new snow...
Elsewhere, a developing storm was moving northeastward along the eastern seaboard. Another shot of wintry weather was anticipated for New England and the Mid-Atlantic...Snowfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour were expected and many areas were to receive upwards of a foot of new snow."
It's unusually cold even here in Los Angeles where we've had more rain in the past week than the past year. Cold, bone-chilling rain in a city where a fraction of a dew drop constitutes 'hazardous road conditions' and the least common denominator for 'slick pavement' technique has been established. What constitutes a pre-winter-wonderland flurry in Boston or Chicago boondoggles our beloved CalTrans for days.
And, yet, we go merrily along, driving our cars to the mall or complaining about not being able to drive our cars whenever we want, wherever we want while complaining about our faces freezing off.
We want the more comfortable effects of global warming--balmy summer nights where not too long ago, within a single lifetime, it used to be "too chilly."
Scientific brainiacs say within a generation or two, it could go either way--that 'global warming' (the catch-all tagline for how our planet gets warmer when its natural checks and balances are out of wack; how when plants that eat the pollution we create can't keep up, the atmosphere around the earth heats up like a pressure cooker) could ultimately result in the obvious 'heating up' of temperatures like we see most summers OR the more counter-intuitive result of a "new" ICE AGE [the History Channel loves this point of view].
So, perhaps we need new terminology for the active weather pattern we see happening yet, by virtue of our modern lives, choose to ignore on a daily basis [depending on how overly-scheduled and under-fulfilled our lives are at the exact moment when a little 'damp' becomes completely 'drenched' just because we forgot the umbrella, or how many times we look down at the 'portable device' connecting us to people, hot and cold, around the globe, who we may not even see for years, but now can know what they report to be doing, 24-7].
We need a catchy buzzword to convey this crap shoot -- global warming, heads; mini-ice age, tails.
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