We are having the mildest, coolest summer since I’ve come to this region. We still have extremely hot days but we also have normal days. Kids haven’t been cooped up inside for months. In the evenings, they play volleyball in the backyard, which is normally unheard of in this area from May till late October. I’m very glad because usually they get prison pallor in summers.
I’m not saying this to make a political statement but simply to express gladness in response to surrounding reality. However, when I mention the nice weather to people on campus, the reaction is almost always a panicked “But this doesn’t mean there’s no global warming!!”
No, it doesn’t. I wasn’t saying it did. In fact, I was making absolutely no generalizations about the state of humanity. I was simply remarking upon something that we all know is a big problem in this region. Everybody who lives here knows that we have very specific geographic conditions that create the high heat / extreme high humidity problem. People who are healthy as horses start having blood pressure issues when they come here. It’s a bad local climate, and one should be able to mention it without being drawn into a debate on global climate.
People are so afraid of unorthodox acts of speech that they freak out when they suspect they are about to witness one. But even the fact that they jump with fear when a colleague says, “Hey, nice weather today” doesn’t help them see that something is very wrong.
Clarissa's Blog 
When I was a kid, I wondered why old people always talked about the weather (whenever they weren’t talking about their arthritis and rheumatism). I learned that it was because it was considered bad form to talk about politics or religion, since you didn’t want to risk being controversial or offensive. Now you can’t even talk about the weather without people flipping out. And people wonder why I’m such a recluse…
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“this doesn’t mean there’s no global warming!”
I just saw a report on a Polish news channel about how hot today is (32 C where I am which is hot but I remember much higher mid august weather) and talking about howhot July was (actually kind of normal) and climate change yada yada yada
What they didn’t mention was the unusually low temperatures for the first half of August… often peaking in the low 20s or even high teens….
Do they expect viewers to not remember?
This is why I’ve long bowed out of the climate change camp…. too many bad faith arguments in both directions (plus I’m absolutely positive there’s nothing people can actually do that would have any significant effect).
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Many religious people find it hard to experience such an all-embracing, intense, deep faith as the climate change crowd feels non-stop.
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It’s been regular mid-august unbearable here. But we had an unusually long and cool spring this year.
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I’m surprised. The people who reacted so fervorously to your bland comment could have used the “abnormally” mild weather as evidence of climate change. The fact that they didn’t proves once more that climate change is a cult and its adepts obtuse people in need of a faith.
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Agreed, there is a much higher level of self-censorship than in the past; it’s almost like walking on a tight rope making sure nobody gets offended.
Having said that, the amount of forest fires in recent years has been staggering. On the East Coast you can actually see the smog from Canadian wild fires hundreds of miles north, making the air quality so bad it’s borderline dangerous to breath outside air. That has been very sobering; I don’t remember this happening when I was younger.
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I hear that the work of clearing the fallen branches was stopped a few years ago in Canada and California. This always leads to forest fires but apparently there was some new theory that this wasn’t going to happen. Then, of course, it did. This is an issue of extremely poor governance because in both Canada and California there’s no fear of not being elected, so the government does whatever it feels like.
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