Beach Weather: Haven’t the Effects of Global Warming Been Just Great?

So here’s just how shortsighted human beings are. During the last two months, everybody’s been marveling at the wonderful weather we’ve been having here in the Hamptons. New Years Day, you may recall, got up to 60. This past week, under sunny skies, we were touching 50. It’s quite extraordinary. Actually, no it isn’t. We’re doing our job. And we’ve succeeded. We’ve thrown all this crap up into the atmosphere for the past 100 years, and that crap is causing the earth to warm.

But people love this weather anyway. They’ll take it. Besides the rise in temperature, we’ve also begun to feel the brunt of another effect of global warming—wild, extreme weather. But that’s okay, too. Just in the past year, we’ve had a tornado, a huge hurricane, an earthquake, flooding and hail the size of golf balls. Wow. Amazing. None of it has seriously bothered me personally. Why should I worry? (I’m sure we’ll get letters from people saying it happened to THEM and so why belittle all this. Well, that’s the point. It happened to THEM, not me.)

Further to our excitement and joy, we have computers chronicling all this in real time, all spitting out precise information that you can see again and again on television and YouTube. Go, polar bears, go.

Finally, there is this secret here in the Hamptons. It used to be called September. Everything is still in bloom, the ocean is at its warmest, and you can still walk around in shorts. It’s just that the crowds of people are gone. They haven’t learned about this. (So don’t tell them.)

I said this used to be called September, because now the month of June has joined up. June is like the old July. Temperatures in the 80s. The community breathlessly beautiful. No real crowds, except on weekends. As for July and August, there are now days when the temperature screeches to over 100. That didn’t used to happen. But hey, the joint is jumping; we’ve got to stay out of a broiling hot sun anyway to protect our skin, so we’ll tough it out with air conditioning.

Surveys show that about half the people in America will not believe that all these weather changes are being caused by us spewing crap into the sky. They have many alternate explanations. It’s God’s will. It’s the natural heating up of the earth that just happens every few millennia. It’s sunspots. It’s elves. It’s because of The March of the Penguins. I think all the politicians campaigning to be the Republican nominee for president ascribe to one or another of these theories.

This entire article, however, should be considered little more than a rant. We aren’t going to solve this problem. It’s too big a problem. We’ve known about it for 30 years, but no country has the political will to re-do western civilization and its glorious love affair with cars, electricity, gasoline and expansion. Five billion people, uh, six billion people say so. Anyhow, it’s all just too much fun.

Next week I will talk about the new scientific reports on the weather and health effects that will happen if everybody moves all their computer data up into the cloud.