Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the Global Climate)

Two weeks before the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season's official start, a tropical disturbance off Florida mutated into Tropical Storm Arthur.

While Arthur itself (above) has not been a major threat to anyone - it mostly brought a lot of rain and some wind to the North Carolina coast before going out to sea - the fact that it formed as a pre-season system is an unfortunate harbinger of what's to come.  Weather forecasters are predicting a very active Atlantic hurricane season for 2020, with more than a few major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher), making some landfall storms more a probability than a possibility. And let me bring up again the almanacs' prediction for the American Northeast to be under the greatest threat for a hurricane this fall.

Am I worried about a storm that will knock my power out?  Not now, but not for reasons you might think.  I'm not worried about a storm knocking out my electricity because our power actually went off twice in the past week in perfectly good weather.  :-O Both outages were momentary, but both denied us, once again, the ability to have at least one year, calendar year or otherwise, without an electrical outage.  (Our previous outage before this month was in July 2019.)  So, we still haven't had an outage-free year in over a decade, and we likely never will.  A big tropical system for the Northeast blacking out my town would just be par for the course for me by now. 

I look forward to an endless future of this, largely because I look forward to an endless future of more frequent and more severe storms as a result of a warming planet and rising ocean temperatures that no pandemic-induced lockdown is going to reverse.  All thanks to climate change.  So check your flashlight batteries.  This is only the beginning.