Changing the Climate

I REALLY PREFER going running outoors, on a beautful day, in a beautiful environment. But my treadmill'll do, and it is, like, so easy to just walk into the dining room and hop on the machine with the radio turned on to loud rock. As the weather cools down this fall, assuming it does, it will be more tempting to walk out the front door and down the street, walking, jogging, running, whichever. The drought in my part of the country continues, as I assume it does in a fairly large part of the country. Every time somebody fairly close to us gets rain, it gives me hope. These long droughts, punctuated by rare periods of extreme rain, can become a bit tiresome. What it the periods of extreme rain quit coming? What if a normally rainy area turns into an arid region with little or no rainfall? If the annual rainfall suddenly dropped precipitously, presumably the ecosystem would also change considerably. Forests would evolve into prairies, and prairies would become arid and desert like. Ad, evidently, it can happen in a hurry, from one year to the next, a region can change from abundant annual rainfall to little and dwindling annual rainfall. Obviously, we human beings do not always make the best decisions regarding where, in relationship to water and weather, we construct our habitats and cities. For example, for there to be a big city where Los Vegas is is probably not a good idea, based simply on access to water. Ditto Los Angeles and San Diego. Not only does the climate change naturally, it does so quickly sometimes, During the past few hundred years the northern hemisphere, especially Europe and North America, have undergone significant natural climate changes, from semi Arctic climate to warm semi arid. The was at least one summer in the United States in the early nineteenth century when spring and summer essentially never arrived. It snowed in August in New England. Where I live the winters have gotten noticeably warmer over the past twenty or thirty years, and it hardly ever snows anymore. I almost miss the snow. Even though I am seventy one years old, I am in pretty good health, and these days that often means a longer life expectancy. I might still be around when the climate really starts to change big time, as it has already changed and is changing by the day. Rank and file people need to understand, must understand that when you pump, place, emit, spew millions of tons of a poisonous gas into the atmosphere, it has an impact on the atmosphere, and therefore, on every living thing that relies on air, including us. But I think maybe we are becoming more aware of the problem, and are starting to do something about it. Over the next couple of decades billions of people will be born into this world, and their chance of thriving to a very real and large extent depends on what we do with the rest of our lives, what our species, home sapiens, does to and with the planet Earth, and how enlightened our descendants are in terms of taking proper care of the fragile ecosystem of planet Earth. As unsettling and frustrating as a drought is, the inevitability of its ending is comforting. Besides, humanity, technoogically, is on the verge of being able to control the weather. And if we don't end up controlling the weather and the climate, artificial inteligence no doubt will, unless we make sure it doesn't, while we still can. Human beings have damaged, messed up the Earth. Maybe AI can and will repair the damage. Let's just hope that it doesn't also eliminate the human infestation which caused the problem.