Fun facts to know about me:
I like following the weather.
I fret about global warming.
Somewhere along the line — around Earth Day 1990, perhaps — I became something of a conservationist. I don’t like to waste. I store my almost-empty shampoo bottles upside down; I squeeze from the bottom and flatten as I go up. I recycle junk-mail flyers and consider fuel mileage when car shopping.
I am of the gentle mindset that while humans may be slowly destroying the planet, myself included, I may as well pitch in to try and slow down the process, however minimally, because I happen to like when seasons change on time and tornadoes stay away from the east coast.
The weatherman said we’d be warm today, but I had not anticipated 77 degrees at 4 p.m. (79 according to The New York Times). That’s hot — record-breakingly hot. And the fun is just starting: tomorrow evening the temperature is supposed to plummet, touching down in the mid-40s by Friday morning.
Extreme weather isn’t fun. I don’t like the headaches I get or the disruptive severity of storms when they hit in patterns like this, fast furious rain wind sleet snow hail, events that can completely stall a city. It’s nice heading to work without a jacket in late October, but it’s unsettling, too. No one knows how much worse the weather will get, or how much civilization is to blame.
I look at the weather page of the newspaper every day, for fun. I like following the trends and, lately, tracking the fall foliage. But I also glance at the “deviation from normal” meter, which reports how much hotter New York has been on average compared to historical readings. And every day I root for it to fall, for that 0.5 to turn to a 0.4, for cool weather to dominate for a long enough stretch that the weather seems more normal this year than last, so global warming slows down, so we have one less worry in an overstressed world.