If only our averages weren't created by such extremes

 It's mid-afternoon, Sunday, October 18. The "weather app" on my smartphone says the outside temperature is 32℉. Normally, a high temperature at the freezing mark occurs around here on December 1, about six weeks from now. That same smartphone forecasts no significant improvement in temperatures for the next week or ten days. Snow days keep shifting around but about every other day snow is in the forecast. If this continues, combined with the pandemic and any election chaos, we can expect a long Winter of Our Discontent. The "normal" high for today is 57℉, a pleasant temperature for working on and/or in the yard.

October's winds whipped oak leaves

Photo by J. Harrington

Meanwhile, I suspect what appears to be the early arrival of winterish weather has caught a number of folks needing another week or two of autumn to finish off the chores that get our places ready for real winter. We still need to clear the drive of lots of leaves, shut down the lawn mower, start up the snow blower, and put the back blade on the tractor. There's also gutters to be cleaned and a cap to be reattached to the fireplace chimney. It got blown off a week or so ago during one of our wind storms and it's been too wet, windy or cold since then to climb up and replace it.

All of the preceding strongly suggests that what we are facing is climate breakdown, disruption, or volatility more than "global warming." That perspective is reinforced by the National Weather Service's extended outlook for our upcoming winter, "cooler, wetter conditions in the North, thanks in part to an ongoing La Nina." To be clear, we're quibbling about the terminology climate scientists and mainstream media types have been using. We're not questioning that humans have disrupted a stable climate era by emitting too many / much green house gases. We're also angry that a country that once qualified as a world leader is on track to pull out of the international agreement intended to respond to the green house gas emissions and adapt to the climate perturbations triggered by the consequences of those gases.

Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now

Matthew Olzmann

Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,
the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations
of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction.

It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic. 

You probably doubt that we were capable of joy,
but I assure you we were.

We still had the night sky back then,
and like our ancestors, we admired
its illuminated doodles
of scorpion outlines and upside-down ladles.

Absolutely, there were some forests left!
Absolutely, we still had some lakes!

I’m saying, it wasn’t all lead paint and sulfur dioxide.
There were bees back then, and they pollinated
a euphoria of flowers so we might
contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,
“Hey guys, what’s transcendence?”   

And then all the bees were dead.

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Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.