Skip to main content

Cold

I spent the first 25 years of my life in PA, NY, and CT and have some experience of wintry weather there. I was blessed with warm clothing and dressed for the weather, never unintentionally experiencing cold in any kind of painful way. (I have spent my lifetime confused as to how folk can live in Buffalo, NY or Fargo, ND where God is doing all God can to tell people not to live there. That is cold.)

The rest of my life has been spent primarily in NC. We get some cold weather but nothing too bad. Ice storms are the worst, bringing down power lines on a regular basis. One such ice storm lasted long enough that my family and I were ready to go to a shelter when the power came back on and we had heat again.

For some reason politicians use the extreme cold weather as an argument against climate change, and folk who want to believe it do so, even though it is a sign of climate change that our cold storms have gotten more intense.

Weather patterns have been shifting long-term with the introduction of more heat energy into the atmosphere and air moves more now than it used to. Sometimes it's cold air.

As loathsome as Trump is, greedy, sadistic (particularly the sexual assaults), willing to tell people to hate more to get what he wants, I know deep in my heart that his denial of climate change is the veto of a prosperous future. Since James Hansen from NASA testified in front of the US Senate about the effect of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere in 1988 there has been a divide between good science and the fossil fuel industry. The quantum leap in media giving everyone a voice and a thousand voices to listen to has only made the divide greater.

No president or administration is perfect but on this one issue alone I will be voting for a future and oppose Trump and any other climate-change deniers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...

Car Accident

I was in a car accident a few days ago. There was a stopped car in the interstate and I didn't see it in advance; the car in front of me swerved into another lane and then there it was in front of me. I also swerved but damaged my commuter car, which is old and had many miles on it. The insurance company declared it a total loss.  The damage was where I scraped along the passenger side of my car (and the driver side of the stopped car). I had no deployment of airbags and no damage from my seat belt; no glass on either car broke, so it was a glancing blow if that makes sense. The front passenger wheel was damaged and I could not drive the car very far.  I pulled over to the shoulder and dialed 911. A state trooper made sure I was alright and proceeded to take care of the situation. I was moving slowly, aware that I had had a shock to my system and trying not to do anything to worsen the situation (stepping into traffic when I exited my vehicle, etc.) The trooper took my informa...