Record Setting Days

SEVERAL DAYS AGO the average global temperature, compliled from readings taken at numerous locations all over the planet, was sixty two point eight seven degrees Fahrenheit, the highest its ever been in recorded history for a single day. The last time the average global temperature reached this high was tens of thousands, maybe millions of years ago, in another clamatic era, before the most recent ice age, out of which the world emerged only around the year eighteen fifty. This new record setting day broke a record which was only a few days old, and another which had stood since 2016. The system in place to measure this is quite reliable, verifiably. The cllimate scientists and meteorologists who created it can clearly explain how it works, to anyone willing to listen. One can easily imagine a narrow minded, skeptical conservative, a climate change denier, insisting that the science is wrong, that the science is "fake news"; liberal propaganda intended only to provide an excuse to involve the government in the economy, to convert from fossel fuels to wind and solar energy, the ultimate evil, for some hidden, nefarious nebulous purpose. In their desperate, deranged, fatuous denial of climate change, conservatives, desperately trying to justify their obsession to resist change and to preserve the economic status quo, will tell any lie, and deny any reality, without hesitation. Such is the insanity of modern conservatism. Somewhere, buried deep within their self deluded, brainwashed minds, they know the truth. Against all moral decency and intellectual veracity, they continue to force it to stay submerged, drowning it beneath a murky swamp of idiocy they willingly embrace. Meanwhile, we the people of planet Earth are only making the situation worse, hastening our own doom, stealing the future from descendants we are murdering before they ever have a chance to enter the world and live their lives. Our efforts to ameliiorate and reverse human caused climate change are, quite literally, too little, too late. I am now confronted with the very real probability that I, despite being sixty nine years old, will live long enough to witness a summer in which the temperaure where I live reaches one hundred degrees on the first of June, and remains there until Labor Day. When I built my house, nearly twenty years ago, I planted saplings entirely surrouding it, in what was then a vacant, bareen, construction site of a yard. Also, my house was deliberately positioned as to be wedged between three huge extant shady trees, two on the east side, one on the west. During the heat of the summer when the sun arcs across the sky at its highest point, my house is bathed in direct sunlihgt for only two or three hours each day. Most days, even when the temperature reaches ninety degrees,my house is sufficiently shaded that the temperature innisde does not rise above seventy six degrees, a nice, cool, pleasant spring temperature. The air conditioner, which I have set at sevnety eight, never comes on.At night, I open all windows, and use window fans to suck in sixty five to seventy degree air,ad by moring, the house sits at a comfortabe seventy two degrees, usually. I can go an entire summer and only sparingly use my efficient central air conditioning system. Because of this, the limited heat load, the system, though twenty years old, still operates efficiently. My electric bill is quite low, and my cats and I are comfortable all day, the shades drawn, in a cool, dark, pleasant house. Everytime I venture outside, which is as seldom as posssible, I hear all my neighbor's air conditioning units running full speed ahead, day or night. I suspect that they keep their thermostats set in the low seventies, and keep their house cold. When its ninety five degrees outside, seventy eight degrees on the inside is perfectly comfortable, and even seems cool. That fact my neighbors, and I suspect most Americans, simply choose to ignnore. Fine. Let them pay their exhorbitant electric bills. I like saving money. Not so fine is the fact that air conditioning, by removing hot air from houses and tossing it outside, only makes it hotter out there on the hot city streets. Air conditioning, wonderful though it is, only exacerbates climate change by heating up the planet, not insignificantly. All big cities, already heated up by acres of heat absorbing concrete, compound their own misery with thousands of air conditioners, churning away at higher levels than necessary for acceptable levels of comfort. And so it goes on our sick and dying little planet, where all hope for a sustainable future for future generations is being traded for a few more years of creature comforts, for our greedy, thoughtless, hedonistic selves. Little wonder that so many of us prefer to ignore reality, and to live in our own little fantasy world, where nothing is wrong, and we are always comfortable.