Enormous Changes

 Greetings from sunny California!

Oppressively sunny California. I have been struggling with trying to remember which comedian wondered if Eskimos ever got tired of their weather forecasts. Here in the Golden State, we are kind of done with all that extra sun. We are on fire out here. And the forecast is for more sun. And fire.

Meanwhile, on the right hand side of the country, things are underwater. Initially, there was some relief in the word that Ida had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. And then the flooding began. Torrential rains pounded New York and New Jersey. While folks in Louisiana are still waiting for the power to come back on, the D Train is running late because it is under of water. 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents part of this undersea kingdom , tweeted, “The Green New Deal, which is a blueprint to create millions of good jobs rebuilding infrastructure to stem climate change & protect vulnerable communities, is unrealistic. Instead we will do the adult thing, which is take orders from fossil fuel execs & make you swim to work.” 

And that may seem like a bit of hyperbole, but out in California where wildfires have been raging for months, commutes, school schedules and everyday life has been disrupted by the ever-shifting realities of the climate. The changing climate. The global warming that was referenced with such irony by deniers when winter came in such a crush last year is here now. The sun is boiling the water and turning it into severe weather that is wreaking havoc in all parts of the globe. Drought on one side of a continent and torrential rains on the other. My family in Colorado has felt little of this disparity, since they have experienced fires and flood in recent years. This summer has been one of few extremes, with nothing catastrophic. However, they can remember floods and fires coming in alternating waves in summers past and they can anticipate more of the same moving forward. 

Which is not news, really. It's just science. It's not weather. It's climate. 

And it's changing.

Really.