I know I am beginning to sound like a broken record in some regards, but this can not be a normal weather pattern. Here we are in the second week of May with a named storm off of the East Coast, the daily temperatures in the Blue Ridge Mountains are forecast to be as high or higher than they are here on the Texas Gulf Coast. Even without the “caused by human actions” added to it, it would appear that climate change is upon us.
The climate change deniers seem to get stuck on the “caused by human” phrase, they seem to want to call it part of the natural cycle of weather patterns. Does it really matter? Seems to me if we don’t accept that our actions are causing the problem we aren’t going to change the actions. So really what the deniers are saying is they do not want to change the actions they are taking that the human caused climate change accepters are saying is causing the problem. In other words “It’s my Hummer and I’ll drive it till you pry my cold dead fingers from the steering wheel.” Though to this day I have to ask…Why a hummer? It seems that each year for the last decade sets new records for weather both up and down. Think about it, I am sure frosts in May are fairly common in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Frosts like the one they had this very week. But from the records, 80 degree highs are not. So it seems pretty strange to have both in the same week…At least to me.
The biggest problem these higher than normal temperatures are going to cause is in cooling homes that have never faced long summer months of 80′, 90’s and occasional 100 degree temperatures. Down here in the south the population did not start to grow until the development of economical (or so we thought) air conditioning units. There are large sections of this country that have never had to deal with high temperatures on a continuing basis. Wait till you see how that effects the economy. You only think you’ve seen brownouts and blackouts in the past compared to what everyone plugging in an ac unit on a hot day will do…
I live in one of the most air conditioned places on earth. And every summer we have deaths from the heat. We have ozone alerts almost daily as the temperatures rise. This is not a desert where the heat and dry suck the moisture off your body in a cooling evaporative effect. Air conditioning’s main effect is to remove the moisture from the air which cools it and therefore your body, both by temperature and evaporation. As the temperatures rise in the more humid parts of the country they will find it’s the humidity as much as the heat that does in the body. And that is where ac units shine, they remove the moisture. Sadly, in the process they dump heat in the great outdoors adding to the overall warming of the planet…
Enough of my rambling…
If you guys get together today in Floyd for a bloggers forum, pull out a chair for me I’ll be there in spirit if not in body. That’s one meeting it doesn’t look like I’ll catch in the foreseeable future. I never seem to make the trip to the mountains at the right time of the month…
The clock is screaming at me to shut down for the morning so…till later…