Climate Change is a Drinking Problem

 

Friends,
I wrote the following in the deep drafts of windy February 2008. I think it is appropriate to deliver it now, at the onset of hurricane season:

***

The world weather is getting too tight from an isobar crawl on a sustained drinking binge. The pressure lows are high on evaporation — the best cocktail global warming has ever stirred and shaken, melting the ice of the polar caps and glaciers with a CO2 brandy blow torch breath. I get a feeling that news weather anchormen and women in America have not caught the “drunk” coming on 24/7 in the juiced up climate.

They endure weather’s frightening mood changes, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the killer springtime tornadoes in the dead of winter on the night of Super Tuesday primaries in early February 2008. The television weather anchors make excuses for their climate’s worsening behavior day to day just like sympathetic family members protecting an alcoholic parent from public embarrassment.

The weather is sometimes not itself. Yes, right now it is under a lot of high pressure and suffering more deep low depressions than usual. It happens in the life age of every earth climate, you know. The weather’s occasional bouts of wild instability are just a momentary lapse in meteorological sobriety, only a 500-year flood. A cyclical funk of hurricanes at the office. The weather will get back on the wagon again. It rehabs back to normal temperature and temperament too.

I wonder when the weather watchers will stop making excuses, or stop denying that drunken binges of 500-year floods around the world happening a half dozen times in the last ten years bodes a serious pattern in the weather’s green house gas abuse.

The meek meteorologists are like children of an alcoholic Mother Nature, overcompensating for her bad behavior. They need to tell the public at large, daily, that Mother Nature is flushed in her H2O cups. She is made more querulous than normal because her hot flashing climate is besotted, holding more of its evaporated water vapor than it used to.

It is time for the weather anchors to call upon you, the public, for your intervention to stop Mother Nature’s windy, weepy and wild drinking problem. You can intervene by ballot support of Earth-friendly legislators you send into political power, or vote with the economic influence of the pocket book your consumer support for green collar capitalism while boycotting the bartender businessmen of fossil fuel abuse.

A word of prophetic advice. It would be good in the year 2008 to err on the side of anticipating more energy released by what the weather stations report are “normal” storms.

I am still getting over the windy binge of the Pacific Northwest winter ending in 2007. If I were writing this bulletin back then, I would hope to shake it out of my fingers through the keyboard into my Mac before yet another windstorm started pulling at the electric tail of an extension cable, strung on wires from the mainland down the long length of Whidbey Island to my home.

I would write on, stealing nervous glances out my rain beaded and lashed office window at the sullen stand of pine to the south reeling like dizzy Ents in the first punch of 60-mph gusts. The power begins to wink and wince. At any moment, the wind will pull the tail off the line of the electric power lizard escaping. Lights out! Surge protectors squeak like R2D2 droids afraid of the dark.

When the perky boys and girls at the Weather Channel said winds from the weather’s next drunk would be 35-45 mph sustained with gusts of 50 mph, I correctly added another 10 to 15 mph to their prediction and wrote like there was no light at the end of the oncoming wind tunnel.

Today as then, the happy-faced TV meteorologists read the same isobars and pressure gradients but remain at least “officially” in denial of the greater energy given to these by a warming atmosphere that absorbs more moisture than it used to just a few years before. They do not willingly report trends that might disturb the body corporate handlers who are not ready to see their media outlets propagate changing the fundamental habits that bring bang to their buck by means of wetter aired, and ever more sultry fossil flatulence.

John Hogue
(7 June 2008)

http://www.hogueprophecy.com/2011/05/climate-change-is-a-drinking-problem/