I wanted to be with you alone ...

This week, we got both hail and snow in Southern California.  I’ve written about this whole climate change thing before ... about six years ago, now that I look back on it.  For my first ten years in California, it rained about twice a year—granted, it rained for a week solid every time, but still: pretty much twice in a given year, every year.  And, as near as I could tell, everyone else in SoCal considered this perfectly normal.  Then, about six years ago, the rain began coming more often and lasting longer.  And now suddenly L.A. county has gotten its first blizzard warning in 34 years.  Only for the mountains, true, but ... I mean, multiple co-workers posted pictures on our Slack this week of hail.  Hail!  When was the last time it hailed in L.A.?  Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw hail when I lived on the East Coast.

Typically, I use these types of opportunities to make fun of the climate change deniers.  But, honestly, I’m not even sure who’s still on that train: with more massive wildfires burning in increasingly unlikely places, so many hurricanes in a season that the National Weather Service now routinely has to start over at the beginning of the alphabet, so much flooding that it’s carrying away cars ... is there anyone who claims climate change is a hoax for anything other than performative reasons?  While I was marveling at the reports of snow and hail, one of my old friends from the East Coast was telling me that the temperature hit 80° for them: a new record for February.  I’m pretty sure everyone knows that it’s real at this point, primarily from personal experience.

The only question is, much like with the pandemic: are all these changes permanent? is this just the new normal now?  I don’t know ... I’d like to say I don’t believe it, or at the very least that I hope it’s not so.  But hope is a precious resource these days.  So I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.