Fall officially fell on Friday, at 4:02 PM EDT to be precise. That’s when the sun crossed the celestial equator, an annual event called the autumn equinox, heading south for the next three months until the winter solstice, which will happen in the U.S. on Thursday morning, Dec. 21. Nights will quickly get longer and days shorter. Arctic ice reached its seasonal minimum several days ago and will now begin rebuilding through the long polar night.
Which means that colds and flu will be making their annual debut. The nasty little bugs never really go away, and it’s not completely clear why they usually peak in late autumn. But infectious disease experts suspect at least two factors are at play: the greater number of people crammed into smaller volumes in cold months passing the germs around, and since the tiny microbes travel in tiny droplets expelled by those already infected, the drier, colder air associated with fall and winter allows those droplets to persist, giving them more time to find a viable host.
For now, summer-like conditions still linger in much of the northern hemisphere, and more hurricanes are certainly possible, as the final named storm back in the record-shattering 2005 season lasted into early 2006! But stores are already loading up on items for Halloween. Pumpkin festivals, fall harvests, and the first snowfalls are just around the corner. The holidays will be here before you know it. And in no time clowns like James Inhofe and his fossil-fueled buddies will be tossing snowballs onto the floor of the House and Senate as irrefutable evidence that global warming is a hoax.