Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Armageddon In New Jersey

On the surface, anyway, the weather in New Jersey this year has been like it always was before. We had cold and snow in the winter, a mild and fertile weather pattern in the spring, and heat and sun in the summer, and not too many brutal heat waves.
Except that we've had a severe-thunderstorm threat once a week for the past five or six weeks.  And a lot of those threats have proven true.
And it's even worse than that. The Washington Post recently reported that, as a result of climate change, New Jersey is warming faster than any other state in the contiguous forty-weight states except Rhode Island.  Insects that should die off in cold winters are surviving and causing problems with the ecosystem.  Winters are so much warmer that Lake Hopatcong, the state's largest lake, freezes less often and less solidly, making the ice too thin to stage winter carnivals like the ones that were popular there a hundred years ago. And toxic algae blooms in that same lake has forced the closing of beaches there and made the lake off limits to boaters.
Me, I'm beginning to see climate change in my lawn!  I'm seeing weeds I've never seen grow in grass before, and even worse, I'm seeing weeds that I've never seen before anywhere!   
My advice?  Deal with it.  Because if reversing or limiting the impact of climate change means Americans changing their behavior, it ain't gonna happen.  I don't need to see Jay Inslee's presidential poll numbers to figure that out.  You see, one of my neighbors has apparently just bought this humongous Ford pickup truck . . . 
Did I happen there's another severe-thunderstorm threat in New Jersey today?

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