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...

Accountability

Mathematics as a discipline teaches accountability. Every claim, whether it be a computation result or a statement (theorem) about how things work is accountable. We teach this accountability developmentally, with lower expectations at the beginning, and sometimes folk who study mathematics casually don't understand this. In my multivariable calculus classes, which I teach most frequently, I usually phrase my expectations as "give me a reason to believe your answer", citing my time working at an investment bank where my recommendations had financial repercussions and my supervisor never took my word for anything. In higher-level mathematics classes such as Abstract Algebra or Analysis I can be more explicit: these are the things we all agree to assume, these are the proof techniques which we understand; can you make an argument that convinces the community who have accepted those axioms and rules of inference that what you claim is true? We work hard to remove the ego fro...

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...