It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood…

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?…

Fred M. Rogers

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood folks, just a beautiful day for October. The sky is partly cloudy with those big puffy cumulus clouds you can lay on your back on the lawn and see lions and tigers and bears in. The temperature is 85* as we speak at 2:33 in the afternoon and I should be outside enjoying this bounty.

Instead I’m going to put the buzzkill on all of my readers just as I have on everyone I’ve been talking to all week. Isn’t this wonderful weather we’ve been having all fall? Let’s hear it for Global Warming!

Hurray!

Because you know that the climate in Wisconsin has been changing gradually over the past twenty-five years, don’t you? I mean how could you fail to notice?

How could you not notice that you have to pull your winter coats out of storage later and later every year and take them to the cleaners earlier and earlier? How can you deny that winters aren’t as cold and the snow isn’t as frequent or as deep. How can you deny that the lakes aren’t freezing over hard enough or thick enough to drive a car onto the way they did years a go?

How could you discount the summer droughts in June and July that kill off the crops in the fields? Because the farmers up here have never had to irrigate but they are considering learning how now.  They are going to have to adapt or lose their farms.  It’s a big investment irrigation, but they probably have no choice.

How can you fail to notice that when the rains do come they come in torrents that drown out the spring crops? Then maybe too much for the truck farms so all the vegetable that those farmers who have been irrigating and who depend on taking their to the farmer’s market get ruined?

The question is not IF the climate is changing. The question is how much humans are contributing to that change and to what extent we should make changes to prevent the destruction of our environment. This planet is our home people. This is it, all we have. Our life…

Yep, it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood… An Inconvenient Truth…

B