Hot, Sticky and Stupid

The weather has just been flat out stupid this summer. 

It has been unbelievably hot, humid and we haven’t had any real rain in over a month. Some days, I feel like a slab of over-cooked meat. Before my friends in the Climate Change Brigade start rushing around yelling “I told you so” and “the sky is falling, flee the village”, we’ve seen this before.

Every now and then, the weather (like some people) just gets flat out stupid.

It has been so hot this summer that my garage door sticks when I press the remote, our grass looks like kindling and all the plants and flowers Maggie worked so hard to plant reach out and grab our ankles as we walk by whispering in parched little voices, “water, water, please…..some water.”

It’s so hot that even our Springer Spaniel, Jasper, is hard-pressed to be his usual psychotic self and spends much of his time sitting in a corner and staring at me with with a far-away accusatory look in  his eyes and his tongue hanging out as if the weather is my fault. It isn’t!

I recycle (not happily but I do it). Even though we live in the country, we use our car less than the average suburbanite and we use only electricity in our home. No green house gas emission there boy. We use air-conditioning sparingly, barbeque most of our meals and bag most of our groceries in ridiculously too large or too small cloth bags. We're careful about energy consumption and do what we can to keep our little part of the world clean.

In other words, we are living the dream. Like so many others we're following the mantra (or at least most of it) of the environmental movement and guess what? The weather is still hot and I personally don’t believe it is because there is Styrofoam in the landfill, gas-driven economies or plastic bags.

The earth is a hostile environment. It is beautiful in many places but hostile. It is filled with dangerous places, dangerous creatures (some so small you don’t even see them before they bite and poison you) and guess what? The earth has a dangerous climate because the earth is part of a dangerous solar system that is powered by a highly volatile star; we call the sun that is constantly throwing off sun flares which have a very dramatic impact on our world.

There were a number of serious solar flares over the past year and here we are with stupid hot weather. The solar flares burn off all that space dust that acts as a barrier between us and the sun’s harmful rays. Less dust, more heat gets through and my lawn turns to hay and Jasper's tongue comes out and his eyes start to roll.

None of this will matter, of course. The environmental fanatics will be down at the climate-change temple complete with its Icon of Al Gore, holding hands in a prayer circle to try and use positive energy to bring the world together in eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. Either that or they will be celebrating the fact that they were right and the end of the world has arrived.

Unless the temple is air-conditioned, I won’t be joining them. I’d rather burn a little more energy to cool down whatever room I’m in and I’m prepared to risk climate change to get my body temperature back down to 98.6 or somewhere near it.

What really annoys me though is not that our weather goes through periods of extremes like it is this summer but that it has those extremes upside down. It really is stupid. Smart weather would put some of the extreme hot period in winter where it would do some good and some of the extreme cool weather in the summer. That way, we might get some balanced temperatures throughout the year. This would be smart weather because it would be environmentally friendly (not to mention people friendly). It would cut down on the use of power consumption for air conditioners and furnaces to start with.

I’d like to blame politicians for the weather because it just seems to fit so nicely with everything else they’ve screwed up but the truth is, the weather isn’t their fault. I do believe, however, that our weather is a perfect metaphor for our politics; extreme and stupid (C’mon, you knew I was going to mention politics somewhere in the post).

But, in the end, this stupid heat wave isn’t the fault of politicians. It isn’t my fault or the fault of greenhouse gas emissions, SUVs or plastic bags either. It’s just part of the natural order of things and I suspect we would be a lot further ahead if we stopped worrying about who or what to blame for it and started devoting more time and resources to learning how to adapt to it and live comfortably and safely with it.

While you guys work on that, I’m going to get a cold drink and go sit in the air conditioning for awhile. It looks like it might rain soon. I’ve been fooled before by the weather (it’s such a tease) but there is always hope. 

Let me know what you come up with.

RELATED


George Carlin & The Bear On Saving The Planet
http://bearsrant.blogspot.ca/2011/09/screw-green.html

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others