My backyard has been covered with snow measurable in feet for all of February. A recent rainstorm tried to dissolve it without success. Today it is snowing once again.
The storms have added some excitement to an otherwise uneventful month; school kids are out of snow days, and conversations with strangers are friendlier because there is a sense that we are surviving together. But I can't help thinking, "this is just weird."
After the biggest storm so far, a sign appeared in a yard - set atop a five-foot snowbank - that read, "Oh No, Global Warming." The sign was even pictured on the front page of the local paper, with a caption referring to it as a joke. Was it? Or was it a political statement?
I hope it was a friendly joke, because it deserves no credit otherwise. The fact is one cannot look out their window on a single day and contemplate climate change; they must look out their window all year. Grade school science class taught me that weather is about cycles. A hotter sun causes more evaporation (just look at your grass in July). More evaporation means a wetter atmosphere. A wetter atmosphere means more precipitation.
A warmer ocean surface in a given year can also mean bigger storms (called El Niño years). Now there simply is not a computer model that can reliably connect global warming to El Niño frequency, but it does seem that the occurrence has increased from the past average of every four to five years. I also recognize that we've had snowy years in the past. While Pennsylvania has broken daily snowfall records, our annual precipitation totals are not off the charts.
Regardless, a home repair contractor recently told me that he cannot get a gutter to work these days. The storms overflow them. And there are hundreds of I've-never-seen-anything-like-this stories out there, all talking about the weather.
What's my point? We must adapt.
I bet you thought it was going to be whether or not global warming is real. I'll let the scientists and politicians battle that one out. I do not need a label or a study or a tax incentive to tell me that our environment is changing. And if our world is changing, then so too must we.
So how do we adapt? Do we just build bigger gutters?
How about letting our coastlines return to a natural state so they can do the storm-protection job nature designed them to do? How about adjusting our lifestyles so that we can get the companionship, food, supplies and other needs locally to reduce our desire to have every road and airstrip open 365 days a year? How about we start respecting our place in the natural environment instead of trying to figure out how we can win despite it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play in the snow.
The storms have added some excitement to an otherwise uneventful month; school kids are out of snow days, and conversations with strangers are friendlier because there is a sense that we are surviving together. But I can't help thinking, "this is just weird."
After the biggest storm so far, a sign appeared in a yard - set atop a five-foot snowbank - that read, "Oh No, Global Warming." The sign was even pictured on the front page of the local paper, with a caption referring to it as a joke. Was it? Or was it a political statement?
I hope it was a friendly joke, because it deserves no credit otherwise. The fact is one cannot look out their window on a single day and contemplate climate change; they must look out their window all year. Grade school science class taught me that weather is about cycles. A hotter sun causes more evaporation (just look at your grass in July). More evaporation means a wetter atmosphere. A wetter atmosphere means more precipitation.
A warmer ocean surface in a given year can also mean bigger storms (called El Niño years). Now there simply is not a computer model that can reliably connect global warming to El Niño frequency, but it does seem that the occurrence has increased from the past average of every four to five years. I also recognize that we've had snowy years in the past. While Pennsylvania has broken daily snowfall records, our annual precipitation totals are not off the charts.
Regardless, a home repair contractor recently told me that he cannot get a gutter to work these days. The storms overflow them. And there are hundreds of I've-never-seen-anything-like-this stories out there, all talking about the weather.
What's my point? We must adapt.
I bet you thought it was going to be whether or not global warming is real. I'll let the scientists and politicians battle that one out. I do not need a label or a study or a tax incentive to tell me that our environment is changing. And if our world is changing, then so too must we.
So how do we adapt? Do we just build bigger gutters?
How about letting our coastlines return to a natural state so they can do the storm-protection job nature designed them to do? How about adjusting our lifestyles so that we can get the companionship, food, supplies and other needs locally to reduce our desire to have every road and airstrip open 365 days a year? How about we start respecting our place in the natural environment instead of trying to figure out how we can win despite it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play in the snow.
