ME, THE EXPERT, TALKS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

By Dan Rattiner

All these experts from places like Boulder, Colorado and Atlanta, Georgia, have been telling us what we should expect about the changes in the weather patterns in these parts. Most of what they tell us is dire. They talk in heights of walls of water. They talk about numbers of homes that are going to be flattened. It isn’t pretty.

I think people from far away shouldn’t be talking to us about the changes in our weather patterns. I think we should be hearing about them from our local experts. For instance, me.

I’ve had fifty years of experience, on a daily basis, noticing the changes in our weather patterns. Every day, after I get up, I go outside. I check which way the wind is blowing by licking my finger and holding it up in the air. I check to see if it’s overcast or sunny. I read what the temperature is on my outdoor thermometer. Sometimes I notice that the tide is high or maybe not. Every day for fifty years — except for that winter trip to the Caribbean in 1988 — I’ve noticed the changes in the seasons, the cold in the winter and the hot in the summer. Who is a more knowledgeable expert than me?

And so, I thought I’d tell you what I’ve noticed that has changed over the years. You need to know this.

First of all, there’s the cloud cover in the wintertime. For the first forty of my fifty years, it was always the same thing. God would pull the clouds up over the sky on the eastern end of Long Island just before Thanksgiving and he would leave them there until the second week in April. He might have thought he was doing good by doing this. It was sort of akin to having a down comforter pulled up over you for those five months. But honestly, it was pretty grim. No sun. No Vitamin D. I did notice that in other parts of the nearby world, for example up in Rochester where I went to undergraduate school, they didn’t have this. You got nice bright sunshine occasionally during the wintertime. It would snow like crazy and the drifts would be deep. But they’d crunch underfoot as you walked. And you had to wear sunglasses to protect yourself from the glare. It was nice.

From Rochester, I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts for graduate school, and it was also nice and sunshiny. But with the sea right there, there was a lot of salt in the air and the snowdrifts would melt and the effect was a kind of thick soupy sludge that you had to walk through, an especially splashy problem when you tried to cross a street.

Down here in the Hamptons, we had the soupy sludge and clouds. The worst of both worlds. It was miserable.

For the last ten years, however, there has been a change. Now we have lots of sun all winter. And it’s wonderful. Not sun every day surely, but a heck of a lot more than we used to. Nothing beats sleigh riding in the sunshine. I am telling you this is a big change in the weather pattern on the East End. Maybe it has something to do with grape vineyards, which have now come to cover the landscape. They give off grape odors and so forth and so on, and it chases the clouds away in the wintertime. Or maybe it’s the decline in potato farming. But I have no proof of this.

Another change I have noticed is that the summers are hotter. People say this is because of global warming, but I think if you look at the numbers — which I don’t keep by the way — you’d see that on average over the fifty years the temperature has gone up maybe a half a degree in the summertime.

I think the change in the hotness of the East End is, however, very overrated. What happens is that when we get over the age of thirty, our skin begins to change. It gets thinner and less thermally protective to humans. In fifty years, practically everybody who was born at the beginning of that span is now over thirty years of age and getting older. I take that back. ALL the people who were born here fifty years ago are now having their skin get thinner and less supple and less thermally protective.

And so, going out at the age of fifteen in ninety degree heat feels hot but not really uncomfortably so, but fifty years later, people go out and if the temperature goes over seventy five the heat feels oppressive. That’s the way it is. It seems to have been a huge change. And we don’t even want to go out anymore.

“Too hot,” we say. “Global warming.” But they are talking about a temperature maybe fifteen degrees cooler than it was when they were 21. This gives global warming a bad rap, if you know what I mean.

Still another change I have noticed in the last forty years has been when the beginning of autumn occurs. During those years when we had the down comforter blanket in the wintertime, we had summer in the Hamptons all summer long, right through until the second week in September.

But now, just in the last ten years, I have noticed that autumn comes right around the time of my birthday, which is in mid-August. Suddenly, right out of the blue, the temperature drops into the 60s around August 15. People even say it. Seems like a little touch of autumn in the air. The summer season seems to have come to an end a bit early. I’ll say. It’s a month too early for the last ten years. I even see the trees turning before September 1 sometimes. What’s with this?

And then there are the hurricanes. Fifty years ago we had terrible hurricanes, and all of them came between August 15 and September 30. We’d get three or four a year sometimes. I remember them. They’d knock down trees and pull down the power lines. We were told to put plywood panels up on our windows so the glass doesn’t come crashing in, or out, or something, and in the downtowns where they have commercial grade glass, we were told to tape the glass with strapping tape in a criss-cross fashion. So we did that. Still, with all the sturm und drang, I never saw windows that were crashed in, or buildings that were sent tumbling down the street although it did that in 1938 and there were pictures you could see of this. But that was even before fifty years ago.

Now they tell us that we’re wasting our time putting plywood and the tape on the windows. This is going to be much worse. Just get the hell out of there. They put up the evacuation route signs. You have no business being anywhere but up on top of a mountain in the Catskills when a hurricane comes. And they will come not just between August 15 and September 30 but anytime for five months between July and November. They’ll bring tidal waves, flood, famine, pestilence, you name it. But then again, we don’t have any. No hurricanes whatsoever. Haven’t had one in ten years and even then it was like maybe it knocked some lawn furniture into the pool or something and that was it.

The “experts” say this long stretch only proves that the big one is on its way. We’ve been so long without one, the giant hurricanes are backing up. This is similar to saying that if some highly rated ball baseball player comes to the majors and for ten years only bats .196, saying boy this guy is going to bat .425 any day now. Got news for you. They say he stinks, and they send him back down to the minors.

I assure you that this Chicken Little the Sky is Falling Hysteria is certainly not being carried out by what I see going on here on the East End. What I have noticed is that out here at Town Dock, the high tide mark is about half an inch higher than it was fifty years ago. So that’s what happens when Greenland and Alaska and the South and North Pole melt. Your Scotch gets higher too when the ice cubes melt. So be it.

As for the rest, it’s a lot of hooey. Trust me on this.