Some like it hot
Today is a perfect day. It was a tad brisk in the morning, with some light marine cloud cover, followed by brilliant sun and blue sky, reaching a high in the afternoon of maybe 24 °C. If you want to lay on the beach you can, if you want to jog the seawall you can, if you want to stroll through downtown to a fancy dinner you can, all with complete comfort. Most importantly, you will be able to sleep like a happy little teddy bear as the temperature drops down below 18 before 11pm. This is perfection in Nature.
Now I'll admit that I tend to prefer things cool, being a descendant of Welsh or Irish fishermen. Other white folks prefer it a bit warmer, say 26 or even 28 during the day. And if you are of Spanish, Middle-Eastern, Asian or African ancestry, I can understand that your body, unlike mine, may be quite content at 30 with a breeze. But I just can't understand the love of extreme, unrelenting heat. What is it that drives us in North America to believe that we must pretend to enjoy the most damning infernos of Hades? There are millions living in the southern US (take Atlanta or Phoenix or Sacramento) who spend all day in the "beautiful" weather, completely shielded from that "beauty" by their air-conditioned homes, offices, shopping malls and Cadillac Escalades. Too bad the Wal-Mart parking lot isn't air-conditioned! My suggestion: Don't try to change the desert; leave the desert.
For the last few weeks here in Vancouver, I have watched with disbelief as the television weather forecasters say things like:
"Today will be absolutely GORGEOUS. Another scorcher on the lower mainland. Expect 29 near the water, and a good 3 or 4 degrees higher in the Valley! No sleep in the Valley tonight, ensuring 20% more car accidents tomorrow morning - don't you just LOVE it? People in Kelowna and Kamloops will enjoy a positively DIVINE 36 degrees, rendering engine-overheat and pet-death all the more likely. Watch your grandma now, she may wither up and burn to ash if she goes in the garden - what fun! And for you lucky folks in Osoyoos, get ready for a celestial 42 degrees - a new record for this day of the year and a shining beacon of hope that we may yet see climate change annihilate our planet and all who live upon it. Hurray for summer!!"
It was much the same when I lived in Ottawa: People would come in to work having had no sleep because of the laughably high humidex, yet they would go out for a walk at lunch (in suits) to "enjoy" the summer sun. It always amused me to hear people from India or the Philippines say that Ottawa was "too hot". At least someone has some sense.
I guess that Canada gets so much cold weather in the winter (and for most provinces, the spring and fall) that they must learn to thrive on any and all heat that dear old Sol provides, even if they are suffocating to death. And I suppose that bright warm weather improves mood, so one is likely to praise such weather even if one is hiding behind windows in air-conditioned comfort. But I think part of the reason must be pretense.
I will go on the record as being quite apprehensive about climate change (i.e. human-induced global warming). Suggestions that global temperatures on land and sea have increased by about 1 °C relative to the late 1800's, and that global temperatures may increase by between 1.5 and 6.0 °C between now and 2100, are disturbing. I don't know how much faith to place in the data, since a comparison between the 1960-2005 period and the 1860-1905 period is really a comparison of miniscule dots in our planet's history, and people tend to forget that ours is a brief moment in time ... but I am not one to doubt the overwhelming majority of scientists who've spent far more time and effort looking at this than I ever will. We have spewed an incredible amount of smoke/exhaust/junk into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, and it stands to reason that this would have some effect on the atmosphere. It's hard to know the truth because the problem is politicized. I haven't seen Al Gore's climate-change-rant An Inconvenient Truth, but I suspect that it will be unsettling. As for the global warming doubters, these seem to be the same pseudo-libertarian dudes who relish Ayn Rand novels and Reason Magazine, forgetting that rational thought does not always have to be counter-intuitive and controversial (e.g. arguing that second-hand cigarette smoke is innocuous despite the gigantic evidence of the negative effects on health is neither rational nor clever; it's idiotic). So I don't discount global warming. How much should we worry?
Given that I love a sweet summer's day at 24 °C and breezy, I guess that I should worry a lot. As for you Mugatron devotees, enjoy!
posted by Gned the Gnome @ 11:29 pm
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Well said, Gned. Extreme heat sucks. Oh man, total swelter-box!
I like sunshine but do enjoy when the temperature dives back below twenty in the evening so as to reduce the risk of my being carried off the edge of the bed in a river of my own sweat.
I also suspect that the climate is changing but find I can't get overly excited about it. The earth has experienced Ice Ages and long swelters in the past. It will do so again in the future. Ours is but a brief daliance on the surface and then we're gone, best to not spend too much of that time wondering what the place will look like in a hundred years. Not to say I don't give a crap - I sincerely hope that Emma and her offspring will have trees and rainforest and am all for doing what we can to beat back the onslought of world-wide desert. I'm just not overly vexed yet.
I thoroughly enjoyed this post and hurt myself nodding in agreement at most of it. I agree with Gned that 25-26 degrees is OK and anything hotter than that is just too hot. I laugh at people pretending to enjoy colossal swelter.
Of course, we may be experiencing a heat wave in Vancouver but you wouldn't know it in my apartment as it is sweater weather here, even today as the outside temperature hit 30. I suppose this is the benefit of a squalid sunless basement apartment.
As for global warming? It is an enormously real threat to the planet, with only two countries likely to benefit: Canada and Russia (Northern Europe won't benefit because substantial glacial melting will mess up the Gulf Stream). The real concern will be not so much a gradual warming (which we could adapt to) but bizarre changes in precipitation and climate that can lead to interesting feedback loops (like drying the Amazon, for example).
Global warming doubters have no clue, by the way. Yes - the earth had huge climate swings in the past, far bigger than the current climate changes will ever be. But this fact does not change the fact that global warming is occurring and that this is not a good thing.
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