![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talkin about the weather
Oct. 25th, 2005 01:33 pm(I'm sorry I don't remember how to do an LJ cut tag, so I apologize for cluttering up your friends page with this random meander through Martha's brain...)
Remember when talking about the weather was small talk, something to do to pass the time of day with strangers at a party or in line at the grocery store? When did weather become a topic loaded with political and religious implications?
I may be paranoid, but it seems to me like the increasing peculiarity of the weather over the last few years is a political agenda waiting to happen.
In 2002, it was 90 degrees in April and then snowed in May.
In 2002-03, we had record-breaking amounts of snow in the winter.
In 2003-04, we had a blizzard in December and then three record-breaking weeks during which the temperature never rose above 0 degrees fahrenheit.
In 2005, so far, we've had a blizzard (January), a month of rain (May), three months with no rain, an unprecedented number of hurricanes causing an unprecedented amount of damage.
The above statistics are very, very skewed because I'm too lazy to look up what was going on elsewhere in the world, but I only mean them to serve as a basis for my next thought:
Some people see the strange weather as acts of God (and earthquakes play into that opinion, admittedly).
Some people suspect that the violence of the weather lately can be attributed to the way humans have been treating the Earth (badly).
The problem is, the segment of the population who take the Acts of God view overlaps very strongly with the segment of the population who influence legislation governing how humans are allowed to treat the Earth.
Another random thought:
On September 11th 2001, many people had eighteen minutes of "that was a horrible accident" before they faced "that was an act of terrorism." I feel like we're in the middle of the parallel to that 18 minutes, here at the beginning of what may be a drastic change in global weather patterns. It still seems like it might be coincidence. I wonder if we will look back on these past few years and think how innocent we were, just before we as a species realized that we had permanently munged our environment.
Remember when talking about the weather was small talk, something to do to pass the time of day with strangers at a party or in line at the grocery store? When did weather become a topic loaded with political and religious implications?
I may be paranoid, but it seems to me like the increasing peculiarity of the weather over the last few years is a political agenda waiting to happen.
In 2002, it was 90 degrees in April and then snowed in May.
In 2002-03, we had record-breaking amounts of snow in the winter.
In 2003-04, we had a blizzard in December and then three record-breaking weeks during which the temperature never rose above 0 degrees fahrenheit.
In 2005, so far, we've had a blizzard (January), a month of rain (May), three months with no rain, an unprecedented number of hurricanes causing an unprecedented amount of damage.
The above statistics are very, very skewed because I'm too lazy to look up what was going on elsewhere in the world, but I only mean them to serve as a basis for my next thought:
Some people see the strange weather as acts of God (and earthquakes play into that opinion, admittedly).
Some people suspect that the violence of the weather lately can be attributed to the way humans have been treating the Earth (badly).
The problem is, the segment of the population who take the Acts of God view overlaps very strongly with the segment of the population who influence legislation governing how humans are allowed to treat the Earth.
Another random thought:
On September 11th 2001, many people had eighteen minutes of "that was a horrible accident" before they faced "that was an act of terrorism." I feel like we're in the middle of the parallel to that 18 minutes, here at the beginning of what may be a drastic change in global weather patterns. It still seems like it might be coincidence. I wonder if we will look back on these past few years and think how innocent we were, just before we as a species realized that we had permanently munged our environment.
