Weather Rant

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I don’t pay for heat and AC, it’s included in my very reasonable rent. Unfortunately the building management decide when it’s time for AC and when it’s time for heat. About a week ago it became time for heat. I’m not a meteorologist, but I know weather. When you have a week of very warm weather and then it suddenly cools off, it does not mean that the warm weather is over. Weather patterns towards the end of seasons seem to move in a sort of wave that decreases it’s amplitude towards the season change. When you have one week with 4 warm days and 3 cool days you can expect that the next week will have 2 or 3 warm days and the next 1 or 2 and then finally the trend moves towards cool. I can’t turn on my AC because the air has been changed from cool to hot in the buildings and it’s currently 71 degrees outside with 90% humidity. According to the AWS it still “feels like” 71 degrees, but I grew up in New England and one thing we know is humidity; 71 degree and 90% humidity feels more like 80 degrees, not to mention, everything is damp.

I have a fan on in my bedroom at full blast and the temperature in there is 74.5 degrees. The sheets on my bed feel like damp towels. Like I said, I can’t complain because for what I have, I pay very little. But for fucks sake leave the AC on a little longer!

It is extreme!

If you watch CNN then you’re familiar with the term “Extreme Weather”. Everyday there is a flood or a wild fire, high winds or a drought, and CNN is there to hype it up as “Extreme Weather”. The problem with getting news from an outlet like CNN is that there are built in memory holes in broadcast news. The way they report the news today is the way they have always reported the news, or at least you have to assume it is because you’re given no frame of reference. As far as I know, the weather has always been “Extreme”, but I doubt it; or rather I doubt that this is the way it’s been reported up until recently. Honestly I think it’s all due to the Global Warming scare, which while not something that intelligent individuals haven’t been aware of for decades, is something that made it’s way into the public consciousness due to two factors recently: a warmer than average winter across the US recently and the growing willingness of the public to disbelieve the rhetoric of the Bush administration. So all of a sudden Global Warming became an accepted reality and because of the memory holes inherrent in television news CNN was concerned about Gloabl Warming, had always been concerned about Global Warming. And because news ratings thrive on a cycle of scaring and then reassuring people, Extreme Weather became the new thing, but is the weather actually extreme? I have no doubt in my mind that Global Warming is happening, but is the weather we’re experiencing, the weather that CNN is calling Extreme, actually anymore extreme than the weather we experience every year? When you look at it in that light and try to answer the question yourself, you can’t because there is no frame of reference. I don’t know whether what CNN reports as Extreme today would have been common last year, there is virtually no way to tell. It’s bad weather, but is it Extreme? Yes, because it always has been and it always will be, until CNN says differently.