It is July 18th of 2022.
In February, it was so cold the old houses in my neighborhood were hanging quilts inside over the doors and windows and still by day three the heater was struggling to keep it above 60 inside.
In May, it was raining so much we thought we were going to get a repeat of the 2019 floods.
By June, we had stopped raining and hit 100 degrees (F) several times.
By today, we have hit over 100 as many days as not.
Tuesday, expected is 113.
That's tomorrow.
The days that haven't gone over 100 in the last week have hit 98-99.
They always feel hotter--heat index.
No rain since June 10th. None. Not even the usual July 4th post fireworks shower.
People are saying stupid stuff, like "perhaps climate change is real".
Why climate change became popular
While attested since the 1850s and notably used in some 1950s research and reporting, the phrase climate change spread in the 1980s. There was no official call for everyone to start saying climate change instead of global warming, and it’s a myth that scientists changed the name global warming to climate change because they weren’t finding evidence for average rises in temperature across the globe. You can still find resources that use both terms.
However, many organizations, such as NASA, use climate change more frequently because it encompasses all of the predicted effects of global warming and “temperature change itself isn’t the most severe effect of changing climate.” (It’s changes in sea levels and precipitation patterns.) The Changing Language Of Climate Change | Dictionary.com
And don't forget the term "greenhouse gases".
The greenhouse effect is a process that occurs when gases in Earth's atmosphere trap the Sun's heat. This process makes Earth much warmer than it would be without an atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is one of the things that makes Earth a comfortable place to live.
What Is the Greenhouse Effect? | NASA Climate Kids
Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to 2 billion years of its early history, according to computer modeling of the planet’s ancient climate by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
Venus today is a hellish world. It has a crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere 90 times as thick as Earth’s. There is almost no water vapor. Temperatures reach 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius) at its surface.
Overview | Venus – NASA Solar System Exploration
Amazingly, the main issue climate change deniers have is the belief that humans could affect the climate of the whole world.
The deniers also frequently think that an asteroid striking earth could not cause the ice age and that dinosaur bones were placed in the rocks by the devil to make the faithful question God's word---the bible, which makes no mention of such and seems to describe an earth less than 10,000 years old.
So, let's talk about human effects on environment.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930's was well documented. There are both pictures and written testimonies of it as it occurred.
It was no accident that it occurred after the Land Rush and statehood. Suddenly, a huge prairie was being cleared, plowed, and farmed.
Many current farming practices, strip planting, terracing, crop rotation, and planting fallow land were a result of lessons learned from the Dust Bowl: Cause & Impact On Great Depression - HISTORY
That, and the rather ridiculous statements of belief by those profiting by selling land, that the act of starting a farm would make that land more lush and fertile.
The old practice of plowing up endless fields with no attention to erosion, watershed, or normal rainfall in an area resulted in a topsoil, loosened by drought, being blown by the winds of the plains---for miles.
Science.
It's not magic.
It's literally learning from what we can check with our 5 senses and the instruments we can create that help us to use those same senses to see smaller things, detect smaller amounts of a chemical (like taste and smell) feel smaller movements (touch) or hear soundwaves outside the realm of human ear detection.
Ignorance is not the answer---a full-bodied education is.
Thoughts and prayers is not the answer---use of the information we learn from those that study such things, to decrease our own human impact is.
Humans can not continue to live as locust on the surface of our home planet.
We are too many and too impactful.
It is time to view ourselves as actual stewards instead of just consumers.
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