We, Warming Up Fast

 ON A WARM SUMMER DAY in the middle of December in the midwestern United States, I was out in my yard, picking up sticks. I do that a lot. I planted twenty saplings fifteen years ago, they grew up, and they shed. So go the unintended consequences  of my meager albeit sincere effort at mitigating climate change. I wonder how much carbon they have sequestered?... Enough to grow a lot and shed a lot of sticks, obviously. My neighbor, also out, piped up: "Nice day, aint it"? Standard,mundane, harmless banter. Indeed it was a nice day, being seventy five degrees in December and all, but, sometimes i want more than friendly innocuous banter. Sometimes I simply cannot be content to say "yeah, nice day", and leave well enough alone. Instead I said: "Yes, but should it really be seventy five degrees this often in the middle of December?" He allowed as how it shouldn't, as people always do, when I say something like that, which is often. Emboldened, I trudged on.I remarked that every October for the past several years half of the days have been in the mid eighties, and that in November, temperatures in the upper seventies are no longer uncommon, and that it didn't used to be that way, not when I was a kid, back in the sixties and seventies.My climate change lecture is always brief, inviting, evocative. I further remarked that October has become a summer month in our part of the country, and that November and December are apparently following suit.When I say all that, which is often, people over the age of fifty always agree with me, because they can all remember when October was a cold month, as were November and December, and spring began in late March, not late February like it odes now. Everyone also agrees with me when I mention that it is only going to get weirder, and that by the time we are dead and our grand children are our age, the world will likely be one...hot...mother. Most alarming of all is the obvious fast rate with which the world is warming, the climate changing. Climate scientists are all alarmed, as each year is hotter than the previous.For climate scientists, for me, and for anyone paying attention the facts are obvious, as are the causes. The current rate of warming and change greatly exceeds all previous extrapolations, which is doubly alarming. Climate change is upon us now, is getting worse fast, and what we once considered to be a threat to future generations is a threat to we here now the living.its impacting us more every day. And, all things considered, maybe this is for the best, maybe this is the way it should be.Future generations did not create this problem. maybe we can do something to fix the mess we have made, before its too late. Probably not, but...maybe.