NY State friends of mine (who have been fried by the winter of 2015, aka the 'Freddy Krueger of Winters') sent me pictures of snowfall. from the weekend. A day that NYC is a good 10-15 degrees off seasonally normal temperatures in a year when virtually every week since January has seen a snowstorm. Last week, at least for one or two days, Antarctica was a good 30 degrees warmer than Brooklyn.
Mark Twain is credited with the famous adage that ‘everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it’. The credit may belong to Charles Dudley Warner, who expanded on the idea here: When people were once tried almost beyond endurance by the most exasperating of winters he said, “Everybody is talking about the weather; why doesn’t somebody do something?” and this, with its subtle irony of human futility, is perhaps one of the most representative examples of his wit; but his humor was an aroma which interfused all his thought, and filled his page with the constant surprise of its presence.
On my blog, I listed all the weather anomalies so far this year alone. It is telling that near-record cold temperatures in the Mid Atlantic region did not balance out the heat records being set in the southern hemisphere--average temperatures are still going up planet-wide.
We're all complaining about the weather. However (going back to my Mark Twain quote), this is 2015, not 1900. We know (or should know) what’s causing this. Ocean heating is causing the Jetstream to bend. And the same climactic forces that are leaving NY and Connecticut and Massachusetts under mountains of snow are leaving California parched for the fourth year running.The Washington Post (as part of its recent article on the record snowfall) put up a helpful map that showed temperatures by region, and every US Eastern seaboard state's cold weather was more than offset by the big heating going on in California and the rest of the West.
And it begs the question–are all the folks doing the complaining about the rough weather (myself included) willing to do something serious about the climate? And by ‘do something’, I don’t mean change out the lightbulbs or recycle the plastic bottles. Even if you don’t believe we’re looking at near-term human extinction, it’s long past time to stop shrugging our shoulders at what’s happening to the weather as a result of all the crap being pumped into the atmosphere. If this were a really engaged country, every news story about the big snowfalls would be accompanied by a story of how we're doing this to ourselves by pumping carbon into the sky, something we've known was harmful since the 1992 Rio Climate summit.
You want to fix the weather? Then you and I need to get out from behind the farkin’ internets machines and get out on the streets. Start laying serious guilt on your red-state cousins who keep returning people like Jim Inhofe and Rick Scott to political office. And don’t let President Obama and the Democrats off the hook–at the SOTU speech, Obama said that Climate Change was a serious issue and then bragged about the fact that the US was the world’s #1 Oil extractor in the world(and everybody in attendance cheered). We can have lots of oil or we can have a livable climate. Winter has never been my favorite season, but I can't take another year of the kind of pounding we've had in this Freddy Krueger of winters.