Once in a Thousand Years… yeah, right.(1)
The Rumor Mill (that is, the News) has it that Southern California yesterday had a “once in a thousand year storm”. My memory tells me that that’s for the 2nd time this year, however — 4″ in an hour last August, only 3″ in an hour yesterday.
Remember when “storm of the century” mean exactly that?(2) And now we have a “storm of the century” reported several times a year, and it’s now considered normal.
Yes, bad rains, heavy winds. Flood, flood, flood.
And more rain expected, apparently. hard to believe the pictures the Rumor … I mean, the News, has is southern Cal. It just doesn’t go.
But then… hurricanes on the western seaboard? That doesn’t go either. It’s all new weather behavior, “never seen before”, and STILL I get folks claiming climate change is just liberal conspiracy.
(Can’t be… I go to those meetings and we never talk about climate change. So there… 😀 )
Get off it people! It’s past time to do something about it. We can no longer stop climate change. Impossible now. But we can still limit the damage unfolding.
Do you want the 7th generation from now to have a place to live or not? That’s all there is to it.
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1. Have we been keeping weather records that long? I always get a hit — some where — when the Rumor Mill… I mean the News, makes absurd statements like that. Storm of the Century in 1999 was hard enough to justify… storm of the millenium? Oh gimme a break! (As they say, some where.)
2. You’d have to be over 30 at least to understand what I mean by storm of the century, I think. Younger people will have absorbed that term as something that happens several times a year now, and will have no background context for how that is emphatically not normal. There in lies one of the problems with understanding climate change: you have to shift out of the very tiny, very limited Human scale of time. Planetary events take decades, centuries, millennia to unfold.