Warm Winters are Not Cool
This hot winter—and I do mean hot, not Paris Hilton Hot—is driving me absolutely crazy. I live in the Midwest, where we are used to having sled days, snowman-building, and plenty of cold white dust all over the ground and treetops at this time of year. I can’t remember the last time we had a White Christmas, and my daughter hasn’t had a third of the snow play time that I had by the time I was her age. This planetary warming is affecting us already (if you don’t think this is bad, just ask a polar bear) and all I can hear are people enjoying this uncharacteristically warm weather—and complaining when the weather gets even a little chilly.
Wake up, people! Only my farmer friends seem to be the ones who get it. While you might be enjoying your crocuses popping up in January, we know that this is going to cause chaos with crops, animal behavior, insects, and unbearable heat this year. And god help us if there is a frost after crops do start coming up, as there will surely be shortages after those crops die. This has happened quite a bit in the past few years; I can remember not being able to buy canned pumpkin in the store for my fall cooking, for example, when there were shortages just a couple of years ago. If this keeps up, I can’t imagine what’s going to happen. I guess we could always ask Dennis Quaid or Jake Gyllenhall.
We have become so disassociated with the earth and its changing seasons—as well as the crops that feed us that so depend upon these factors—that we seem to have simply forgotten simple science. I am not the best grower, for example, but we usually have success with simple tomatoes and peppers. Last summer was so damn hot, however, that no matter what we did, our crops died. Do you know what will happen if things continue to heat up and the crops keep dying? We’ll die, too. Don’t even think about cannibalism, by the way, since your food would still have to, you know, eat food to live, too.
So maybe you should stop praising this “wonderful weather” and acknowledge what it really is—worrisome at best, terrifying at worst—and start hoping for some actual winter to help balance out—and sustain—our very existence.