Okay I admit I've got a problem. That's the first step they say, admitting it. I drink too much coffee. It keeps me up at night after I've come home from work. I can't function in the morning until I've had about three shots of espresso. I really need to cut down on the caffeine, but I am powerless. Even now, it's nearly one am, my partner A is already asleep, and here I am sneaking a latte into my office upstairs. It's a sickness.
It was really kind of creepy quiet today in Washington. I know that today is Monday, and it's the day after New Years, so things are supposed to be back to some kind of normal here, but when I went into work today, there were no cars on Mass Avenue, and hardly a soul came into the market to buy food. I didn't realize that today was a national holiday, and all of the folks who normally don't work on New Years day had to take an extra day off because they were cheated out of a day of sloth and laziness because New Years fell on a Sunday when they would normally be lazy anyway. Everyone in the city except me, works for Club Fed. Me, I had to work, and since it was dreary and rainy, I had to have a few extra cups of coffee to even get out of bed. I've been kind of jumpy all day, and OMIGOD what was that?!!!
It sounded like thunder!
Okay...it can't really be thunder, because this is January, and well...I've never heard thunder in January. So it's something else, an earthquake, a low-flying helicopter, those things are possible in January. OH! There it is again! It was thunder! I'm sure of it. Wow. That's really freaky. Okay, I'm going to check theweatherchannel to make sure that the extra coffee isn't causing me to have auditory hallucinations.
Wow. The forecast calls for light rain and thunder. In January, as if that were some common occurrence. But nothing about the weather in the last few years has been common, so I guess thunder in January is not unusual? I remember a time when talking about the weather was something you would initiate to avoid making real conversation. Now, people avoid conversations about the weather, because talking about it is scary. Really scary.
Some things have happened over the last decade while we were busy trying to move up the corporate ladder, raise children, find inner peace, or whatever we have been doing for the last ten years, I can almost guarantee, we weren't doing anything positive for the environment. There are two really frightening things that I have read about, both of them mentioned in an essay by William Fauk published in the New York Times.
The first:
A study, published last month in the journal Science, found that the level of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases that can warm the planet, is now 27 percent higher than at any previous time. The level is even far higher now than it was in periods when the climate was much warmer and North America was largely tropical. Climatologists said the ice cores left no doubt that the burning of fossil fuels is altering the atmosphere in a substantial and unprecedented way.
The second:
One of the more alarming possible consequences of global warming appears to be already under way. The rapid melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice caps, a new study finds, is causing freshwater to flood into the North Atlantic. That infusion of icy water appears to be deflecting the northward flow of the warming Gulf Stream, which moderates winter temperatures for Europe and the northeastern United States. The flow of the Gulf Stream has been reduced by 30 percent since 1957, the National Oceanography Center in Britain found. Perhaps you'll remember that in the film "The Day After Tomorrow," the collapse of the Gulf Stream produces a violent climate shift and a new ice age for much of the Northern Hemisphere. Climatologists don't foresee a future quite that catastrophic, but something worrisome, they say, is afoot.
Look, I know you're thinking, "jeez, Tankwoman really needs to chill out with the coffee," but I've read these things in other newspapers, it's certainly not news. And if you've ever had the chance to visit Europe, the possibility of not being able to in the near future should fill you with immediate alarm and regret. I had the chance to visit Scandinavia this winter, and I didn't because I couldn't get the time off of work, but what if that was my last chance? What if I never get to visit Oslo? What if that great city of Venice vanishes in some act of nature just like New Orleans, and I never got to take A to see it? What if the Gulf Stream dissipates and Nothern Europe along with the Northern part of the US freezes like some weird-shaped popsicle just now as heating oil is becoming scarce, and we wage war and kill people for access to it? The burning of oil and the need to stay warm is killing the planet, choking off our oxygen, and ironically we can't get enough of it, we can't drill fast enough, or start enough wars to secure a steady supply of the very thing that will surely kill us.
The sad part about it is not the strange thunder in January. It is the 5 percent of the world's population using 25 percent of the world's resources, and the places that they will never see while they drive to work, or to the Walmart. Instead of changing the way we live, we are rolling the dice and thinking that maybe all of the science is wrong, in spite of the all of the evidence to the contrary that we see and hear every day, and the instinctive voice in our being that tells us that what we hear and what we see is real, we go on destroying the atmosphere, avoiding treaties that would begin meaningful change, and thinking about retiring to Arizona, since Florida seems a like a crap-shoot these days.
Listen....that's a Cat 5 hurricane. It's a polar cap melting. It's the winds of change. It's thunder in January.
