Nothing New Under the Sun

I'm willing to admit that there might be something to this climate change thing, mostly because I don't have the ability to disprove it but, in a larger sense, the climate has always been changing. They have only been keeping accurate records for about a century and a half, but geological and historical evidence suggests that the climate of the Earth has gone through some pretty dramatic changes in the past. Then there's the anecdotal evidence.

Old people have been regaling young people with tales of climatic extremes since forever. I think some of that may be attributed to selective memory. Nobody remembers the average winters or summers, but everybody remembers the Blizzard of '78 or the Year Without a Summer. I remember one time in the '50s when my grandparents went to Florida to get a break from the Chicago winter, and it was warmer in Chicago than it was in Florida while they were gone. That was shortly after O'Hare Airport was opened but the Interstate connections hadn't been built yet. It took my grandparents longer to drive home from the airport than it took them to fly in from Florida. After that, they started taking their winter vacations in Arizona, and they even went to Hawaii once, but they never went back to Florida again.

That windstorm last week was all over Michigan, but the worst damage was in the southern part of the state. I think there was considerable damage in Indiana as well. Thousands of households lost their electricity in our tri-county area and, last I heard, the statewide total was over a million.

I remember having a set of those army men. I think that I mostly used them to attack and lay waste to my sister's farm set. It was like a doll house, open in the back, but it was a barn, well stocked with various livestock pieces. She would set all those animals up, and my army men would come knock them down. I also had a set of presidential figures, from George Washington to Dwight D. Eisenhower. I don't remember ever attacking them with my soldiers, maybe I should have.