The Air, Getting Violent

ACCORDING TO MY FATHER,when I was a pre toddler,I was sitting in my "high chair" (Do they still have those, or have they vanished off the market for being top heavy) one fine morning,eating my bowl of Malto O Meal, flinging it ll overthe room with my little yellow plastic spoon, when my mom noticed that I was staring out the kitchen window, utterly transfixed with enraptured fasciaation, eyes wide with apparent amazement. Mom asked dad: "what's that kid so interested in?". Dad,a lawyer accustomed to weighing evidenceand drawing conclusions, resposnded: "Its raining. He's amazed at the rain. he's never seen it before." I don't remember the incident,but knowing me,I an imagine being amazed and confused by rainfall. I stll am, in a way, seventy years later. Mom, a nurse,was utterly fascinsted by the weather. It was her favorite topic of conversation,any time,with anybody, as everyoe who knew herwas aware. Every day she watched the news on TV, but turned the volume and focused her full attention on the boob tube when the weather report was being given. She enjoyed talking about the weather as much as I enjoy talking sports, politics, and religion. I can recall getting frustrated with her sometimes,and trying to change the subject, However, now that I am a senior citizen, I notice that I have,over the years,gradually become more inerested in the weather. I've always been profoundly impacted by it, since so many of my favorite activites are outdoors. The mere fact that I am old enough to have seen the drastic climate change ofthe past fifty years. Every living person over the age of say, fifty, has personally experienced climate change, and will tell you so. Conservative old people easily relegate it to the category of "naturally occcuring", refusing to acknowledge the obvious, that climate change is at least partly, probably mostly, and perhaps exclusively caused by human activity. Of course we can not say hat the climate wouldn't be changing without human beings; you can never prove that something doesn't exist, only that it does. Rush Limbaugh used to say that nature itself is so huge, so powerful, and that we humans are such small, unimportant little creatures in the braoder context of the universe, that we couldn't possibly have real impact on this planet and its environment. As usual,Limbaugh was wrong. Huge indeed is the universe, but not so much is this planet, which in our modern era of communication and transportation seeems increasigly small. I remember awakening in the middle of the night when I was in ninth grade, and seeing four inches of snow on top of the garage, with snow pouring down in a torrent. We ended up with a foot of snow, and missed school for four days. I loved every moment,but started getting restless about missing too much school. My largest snowfall is little over two feet, which I have experienced twice, I waled outside one day when the temerature was one hundred and ten, and one morning when it was minus twenty. On both occasions I was aamzed at how briefly I was able to endure these extremes. I lived in Aspen for one full year, includinga winter, but that particular winter there was a winter drought in the Rockies, and surprisingly little snow. In a few days when our current snow, which might top out at about one foot, start to melt, we will quite likely return to the drought we were having until it fell. All forms of extreme weather will eventuate from now on. In time climate change deniers will understand that climate chnge is real,an that it will minifest in extreme weather of all kinds; hot, cold, dry, wet, violent, extreme. The more carbon, the more heat, the more heat, the more violent the atmospheric motion. I fear we haven't seen anything yet.