Nerd Pride Radio

I'm sure we have posts about climate somewhere in this pile that I can't find it offhand. Remarking on micro changes in your local area does not really help either, but I'm just tired of it being so hot in October. I'm tired of this weather happening in February. Fall is perhaps my favorite season and it's being wrecked over the last decade or so in a very noticeable way.

It's hard not to be somewhat depressed about this one also contemplating the two of the one two hurricane punch that is on the way, and since we're not even that far into October I wouldn't rule out a third punch because we haven't had a hurricane originating in the Atlantic make its way all the way across yet recently. Luckily those hurricanes have been going north. It just feels like the pace we were told to expect over 200 years is more like a 30 to 50 year pace.

I went to the ACL festival this weekend and it's one of the hottest I've ever encountered. Blistering hot and the sun was oppressive (although we still had one of the best ACLs ever).

It's weird when people deny climate change. When I was 7 or 8, my brothers and I would go to the Florida panhandle every summer for a month to stay with my grandparents, who lived in a beach house outside of Panama City Beach. Back then we didn't have sunscreen. Indeed, back then people used tanning oils to actually accelerate the sun's UV rays. And while we'd end up with two sunburns or so over the course of a month, it wasn't that bad. And we'd be in the sun probably six hours a day. We'd get really tan and all, but only a couple of sunburns over the course of the summer. But now if I go to the lake without any sunscreen for three hours, then I have a brutal sunburn. I know this is anecdotal and probably indicative of nothing, but this phenomenon has stuck with me.

When we were kids in Nebraska, we could count on the first snow falling in November (or so times as early as October). The somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd week of December, there'd be the big snow, and then there would be full snow cover on the ground until late February. Sometimes a little warmer. Sometimes a little colder. But that was the norm, both in Nebraska and upstate New York.

Now I'm still in Nebraska, and it still snows every winter, but it's unusual to have snow cover that sticks around for more than a few days. There's always warmer, snow-free throughout the winter.

The weather has completely changed in my lifetime. And it's so obvious that I really feel like anybody my age or older who says otherwise is in some deep state of denial. We have always had weather extremes, particularly in the Midwest where it can go from burning hot to blowing blizzard. But we're in a whole different zone of climate now... I feel like we've moved three or four hundred miles due south. It's becoming an issue for me because I don't want to stay here with this weather but I'm tethered here by about a hundred reasons.