Let’s talk about the weather

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” – Charles Dudley Warner (stolen by Mark Twain)

It’s October the 4th, and where I live, in northern South Carolina, it is 97 degrees right now. Somehow I feel like that’s worth repeating, 97 degrees. It’s not July or August, it’s October, eleven days into Fall…..FALL when the weather is suppose to turn crisp and cool, and the leaves turn red and yellow…..FALL! Instead, it’s 97 degrees, and the leaves and grass are brown and crunchy, Fall.

Two-thirds of South Carolina is in a Moderate Drought to Extreme Drought category. In my little neck of the woods we are experiencing a Severe Drought. We have had a “liquid” (as the weather folks call it) accumulation over the last 60 days of 0.00 inches. So not only is it hotter’n blue blazes it’s also dry as a popcorn fart. Things are suppose to change Saturday and Sunday and into next week, the term I heard today was be “More Fall like” but not today, or this past month. Shit this is crazy.

Every morning I stop by an old convenience store on my way to work and buy myself a Diet Coke. This morning Rick, the owner, was outside pulling wet, empty plastic bags out of his ice freezer. The freezer, filled yesterday for the weekend rush, had died. It has just been too hot, he said, for it to keep-up. I believe it. After four scorching months we all need a break from the heat, even freezers.

Is this global warming? There are people out there a hell of a lot smarter than I am to answer that question but it sure feels like it to me. The weather has gotten all topsy turvy. Seasons don’t seem to be following “traditions” or are just skipping one and running into another. This year we skipped most of Spring. It went from Winter, to a week or two of Spring straight into Summer. Last year Winter ran long, about two months long. The Global Warming skeptics claim that we are just in some sort of natural cycle. That what we are experiencing is just Mother Nature’s course, maybe her correction.

But what these naysayers can’t tell you is what is the end game, where are we headed and how or when it will end. When the polar ice cap melts and floods our city’s will it re-freeze again in 50 years, 100 years or 1,000? They don’t know or they do know and figure they will be dead and gone before it truly effects them. That is the more reasonable conclusion.

I know today, right now, Donald Trump seems to be our biggest problem but if the truth be told Trump is like a gnat on an elephants ass compared to how we are destroying this planet. Here is the thing, in five, ten, maybe fifteen years Trump will dead and gone. All the regulations he overturned for clean air and water can be reversed. Hell most of the industry leaders in the automobile and energy fields have not taken advantage of all of his bullshit deregulation. They are smarter than that. Who Trump is playing too are the small time pieces of shit he pals around with it Mar-a-Lago.

In the end the government isn’t going to solve our climate issues. We will have to solve them ourselves by changing the way we live, and the way we consume or Mother Nature will do it for us. And I can promise you we don’t want her going rouge on us.

“The whole global warming thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.” – Jerry Falwell

Despite what you Evangelicals believe, this planet doesn’t need us. All that Genesis crap about ruling over the Earth is bullshit. It has rocked along for 4.543 billion years and we basically fucked it up in less than 200. Ask the citizens of Puerto Rico how that “ruling” thing went with Hurricane Maria. You Bible-thumpers want another sign to ignore come sit in my backyard on October the 4th, it’s 97 degrees. If you come, its BYOB thank you very much.

“We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.” – Stephen Hawking