Weather or not

OK, this is unnecessary.

The Halloween candy is still fresh and most of the porch pumpkins haven’t collapsed ino on themselves yet. We’re barely done buying bunting for Veterans Day,  the two-for-one turkey sales are just getting a good start and here we are dealing with wind-chill factors and serious applications of ice melt.

It’s November … I really don’t want to hear some millennial broadcast intern telling me to bundle up ‘cuz it’s cold outside.

I’m standing out there in my serious January parka watching the dog poop … I know it’s cold outside.

And after surviving three score and several, I know this kind of cold means just one thing – winter.

That, my friends, is simply unnecessary.

Don’t worry, I’ve already entered a strenuous objection with the divine complaint department, but I have a hunch St. Peter’s filed it next to my most recent requests for a Maserati and world peace.

It’s cold, and about all I can do about it is complain.

So I will.

And you’re welcome to join me. In fact, I believe most of you already have. As I’ve been out and about these last couple of days, my frost-nipped ears haven’t heard one single happy word about this spell of Siberia-come-early.

It’s November. We expect chill. We expect frost. We expect damp, gloom and nasty. We’re back on Standard Time so we’re starting supper at five-dark-thirty and steeling ourselves against the inevitable aural assault of harking angels and  parum-pum-pumming drummer boys. We’ll soon be dealing with alternate-side parking tickets, Black Friday blowouts and pumpkin spice morphing into holiday mint.

Listening to the furnace fight single-digit lows isn’t making the year’s most miserable month even one little bit better.

And if misery loves company, there’s plenty of love to go around,. This little blast from the Arctic has teeth chattering from the Rockies deep into Dixie. It seems if a fellow wants o warm up, he’d best go sit by one of those fires out in California.

Fire and ice. It seems the weather’s weird all over.

Not that that should come as a real surprise. We’ve been warned about it for oh, 50, 60 years.

Still, who hasn’t heard some ever-so-clever soul take note of the cold with the quip, “So much for global warming.”

Of course, we didn’t hear that much this summer. How soon we forget…

But when we do, Mother Nature is quick to remind us, and this little touch of polar heaven is just one more tap on our collective shoulder, a reminder that weather around the world is becoming ever more unsettled and we’d best be doing something about it.

There’s no doubt about it any more. The world we were born into won’t be the world from which we make our final exit. The several billion of us going about our daily business amidst the mess and muddle the billions who came before us left behind has nudged the climate enough off kilter that we don’t know whether what used to be weather will ever be weather again or if we’ll be weathering weather like we’ve never seen before – too cold, too, hot; too dry, too wet; too windy, too…well, you name it.

Sure there are folks who say it ain’t so. There’s a kind word to describe those folks – wrong. We might even be generous and say they’re misguided, mistaken, misinformed, but the bottom line, the no longer disputable fact is that denying  that human activity is directly and drastically altering the earth’s climate is as contrary to reality as claiming that the earth is flat, Elvis is alive and the moon is made of green cheese.

And it shouldn’t take a very stable genius to figure that out.