Skip to main content

A Nudge of Climate Change



Mari and I visited friends and relatives in Tucson just a few days ago.  It was during their frigid winter month:  January, or course!  Seventy degrees.  Mari was too warm.

During last night, I awoke thinking that she and I have to find a middle ground; perhaps Nebraska.  I was cold.  The reason I was cold, I discovered when I got up, was that our boiler--the contraption that heats water for our faucets and for room heating--was not working.  It was 54 degrees in the house.  Fortunately, we are in the midst of a heat wave:  it is 15 F. above, not below, zero, as it was a day or two ago. 

The view above is out the window over where I sit and type this.  Penguins are flolicking in the neighbors yard.  Whoops!  I think they ducked down behind the broken igloo! 

We have gas space heaters in both garages, up and down, so I turned them on, and put fans in the doors to the living quarters.  I fired up the wood stove in the living room.  We are gaining on the dark side of global warming.  It is already up over sixty degrees F.  What good luck this did not happen last week, while we were out of town!  The repair man will be here sometime today, maybe, the scheduler said. 

The dark side of global warming is that the almost-unknown effects of glacial melting, and all of that, does not mean that it gets warmer everywhere.  It messes up all the weather patterns.  Ice melts, ocean currents change temperature and pathways, some dry spots broil, others get wet, and Mari gets hot in Tucson, and I get cold in Minneapolis. 

We had a water pipe burst last winter, resulting in an extensive repair of our lower floor.  We do not need that, again!  I would move to Florida, which I know almost nothing about, but about which I have a mass of negative opinions, and where tropical fish are freezing to death, or cooling to death, and where Tea Baggers are heating up.  You see, that is the mixed result of global warming, or global climate change.  Old fish heads, like me, get cold, and those engaged in Tea Bagging heat up.  Personally, I prefer getting cold, but that is just a political opinion, probably. 

Anyway, living in the cold did not damage Sarah Palin, appreciably.  She is just as perky and intelligent as she always has been.  I find long-term hope for us all in that simple-minded fact. 

I don't want the whole globe to warm, but just a little nudge toward a temperate climate inside the house would be nice. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more