The Big Chill

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Well, technically this is true, but if we were to pursue this notion more fully, I think we might decided differently. Did you drive to work today? Did you hang out in a rice paddy? How about your air conditioner? Has it been turned on this week? There are lots of ways that we change the weather every day. We just don't think about greenhouse gases and how things change with the tiniest bit of extra carbon or methane or nitrous oxide. Every little bit adds up to a lot. There are a lot of cars and a lot of cows and a lot of us out there making interesting new combinations out of our atmosphere.
This confounds some, since they have heard the term "global warming," and they immediately point to the drifts of snow in New England to say, "That doesn't look very warm to me!" And they'd be right, after a fashion. The torrential rains and the blizzards that have become much more prevalent recently hardly seem to suggest that we might all one day just burn up. That is unless you start to take a gander at the drought in California.
Last week the local weather guy wanted us all to take notice that the three feet of snow in Boston was eleven inches more than could be found on the ground at Boreal Ski Resort in the mountains just a few miles from the Nevada/California border. That's just a little more than two feet of snow where schussing should be taking place through February and hopefully into March. Boston, a rather metropolitan area I'm lead to understand, has half again that much and is bracing for more. Something is wrong.
That's why I'm asking for all of you to take a moment and put your thinking caps on. All that snow in Massachusetts and elsewhere back east is not going to do them, ultimately, much good. We need that moisture out here in California to grow the rest of the country's avocados. What sort of transmogrifier or matter transmitter would it take to beam some of that wet stuff back across the country where we could really use it? If you can't figure out a way to move all those molecules across the continent, maybe you could figure out some sort of freeze-ray. Preferably something that did not burn fossil fuel.