Do you really need to be told about the famous quote falsely attributed to Mark Twain?
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco
A funny thing happened to me yesterday on my way to the cold, foggy, town in which I grew up:
I nearly melted.
It was the warmest August date ever in San Francisco, which topped out at 98 degrees, smashing the previous high for Aug. 24 by 9 degrees.
This is my hometown. It is never, EVER boiling hot in the summer. It is cold like the chasm where Dick Cheney's heart would have been.
Thanks to {do not say global warming}, things everywhere are changed. It's a change of a weathery pattern of some kind.
All I know is that the most beautiful city I've ever seen was an ugly, fetid, stinky swamp yesterday, and it sucked. Except for all those homers the Giants hit. w00t!
And it was not just Baghdad by the Bay. Oh, no.
Santa Rosa reached 106, breaking its record for the day by 4 degrees.
It was so hot that cooling centers with air conditioning and water were set up in some Bay Area cities, including Petaluma, Campbell, Cupertino, Morgan Hill and San Jose, where temperatures reached 102.
Yeah, yeah. Complaining about the weather. It's been done.
And if you even try to to say this is due to global warming, then you are as stupid as Sean Hannity, the whiner who claimed that feeling cold in winter meant that global warming is a hoax.
Well, yes and no.
Mostly no.
It is true that one isolated incident does not a pattern make.
But when the weather incidents form a pattern, and the incidence of the incidents is increasing at an alarming rate, well, that is climate, not weather.
Just last summer I was up in the Pacific northwest. You know, that cold, dark rainy place? Funny thing happened. They shattered all of their existing record highs!
Whoodathunkit?!?
When places that have never bothered to install air conditioning anywhere suddenly start blasting over 95 degrees, do you think that maybe, just maybe, something is very different than it has ever been?
Climate change is upon us.
With a vengeance.
And not just in this country. Especially not here.
The angry planet will ravage the poorest nations hardest, and earliest. Those people who must live in a ramshackle hut to have a modicum of shelter will see their world destroyed by the big, bad wolf of climate chaos.
But it isn't their fault. They are not warming the planet. This is on us.
This is a lesson about our own willful blindness, our callous disregard, our foolishness, our stumbling in mere semi-consciousness, as zombies through the cultural detritus that defines, numbs, and blinds us.
It's enough to make those of us who get it scream What the fuck is wrong with you people?!?
The ignorant and evil fools love to laugh at Al Gore, but when the rest of us mostly shrug about climate issues, throwing our hands up in despair, are we much different?
You drive a hybrid? Good start!
But let's try to keep doing everything we can on a daily basis to unfuck the gulf, unfuck the Earth's atmosphere, and unfuck the lives of children not yet born and alive today, and the billions of people now suffering - NOW SUFFERING - due to our previous baffling intransigence on this single most important issue the world has ever faced.
By a factor of we're all dead if we continue to ignore it.