What the Heck Happened to Spring?

Managing Editor

   I don't do heat well.

   My Nordic blood was made for much cooler climates. I would gladly take a permanent Icelandic existence over the deep southern heat, which could only exist by virtue of having somehow slipped out of Hell.

   I sleep with a fan blowing all year round, and I shut the heat vent to my bedroom in winter. I wasn't always this way.

   Perhaps I'm showing my age a bit, but I seem to recall a time when the South actually had a spring season. Now, Mother Nature shifts indecisively from winter to summer and back, only to head straight into summertime temperatures leaving snowfall behind by only a few weeks.

   Chalk it up to that famed and fickle “Arkansas weather.” You could even call the odd weather events flukes. Couldn't have anything to do with climate change.

   Except when it does.

   The scientists who study this stuff all agree, and the ones who don't smell like oil-slicked money; human-driven global warming is happening. I know. There are a lot of people who don't believe this truth; in fact, the number of people in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia who believe that climate change is real and caused by humans has drastically declined.

   If you are one of these people, I don't blame you. There is a lot of conflicting information out there, and perhaps it is even easier to believe the more comfortable story when down deep you do not really know who is right.

   Imagine, just for a moment, global warming is real, the people who try to convince you otherwise are the mouthpieces of those whose perpetually-growing wealth depends upon your continued consumption of dirty energy, life systems are truly in decline and a 180-degree turnaround right now is the only thing that will save our species and others from extinction.

   Pretend, just for a moment, the naysayers are all wrong and the alarmist tree-huggers are right.

   Do you act?

   People love science when it eases their burdens and workloads, when it brings us cool new technology, when it heals a loved-one's injuries or cures their cancer. People don't love science when it causes us to question our beliefs and behaviors, forces us to change our self-destructive ways or tells us things we don't want to hear.

   Science is telling us something. Mother Nature is telling us something. And for the religious, especially Christians: If you know the landlord is coming, shouldn't you clean up the place?

   I suppose it will be some time before the signs are clear enough for some, and even longer before enough people realize what's at stake and begin to demand cleaner energy. I already have fans blowing in winter; I'd rather not have to run my air conditioner in March.

   Oops, too late.     

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