Looking ahead

I predict next year will be called two thousand and seven

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
January 2nd, 2006
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/holyshitday.htm

Happy Holy Shit Day.

January 1st is Holy Shit Day. Locally, our weather can be a little rambunctious this time of year, and that means that if you look outside you are likely to see something like a large inland sea where the town’s main intersection should be, or you can’t see anything at all because you got fourteen feet of snow.

Yeah. Holy Shit.

I went out and peered around at first light, filled with dread and loathing, which is generally a good way to greet the new year. All the houses, trees and hills were all pretty much where I left them last night, but it was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock, which was bad news for folks downhill from me. Here, the porous volcanic ground seems to have an infinite capacity to absorb water. We’ve had nearly 30 inches of rain over the past two weeks, and there’s nary a puddle to be seen.

There was no sign of Mt. Shasta, which caused me mild alarm until I remembered that you usually can’t see the mountain in bad weather. One time a friend drove through. He explained that he didn’t stop because the weather was really bad (a wise choice – we had a major blizzard going on at my house) but it was his first time along the I-5 corridor, and he finally got to see Mt. Shasta. “I was surprised,” he said. “I thought it would be bigger.” I thought for a minute. You can’t see the mountain from the highway in bad weather. But you -can- see Black Butte, a volcanic cone that rises 1,200 feet immediately east of I-5. My friend had seen that modest little protuberance and jumped to a conclusion. I figure I should make a T-shirt that says “Mt. Shasta, California” at the top, has a picture of Black Butte, and the quote, “I was surprised. It looked much bigger in the brochure.”

The sad thing is that I was a good boy last night, and didn’t even stay up ‘till midnight. But during the night, the rain would sometimes roar, and that meant I kept getting woken up. I used to have New Years’ mornings like that when I was in college, mornings where I would watch the Rose Parade on TV while trying to remember if the set was color or black and white, and reflecting that my tongue needed a shave. But at least I would go out and do things that would EARN me that sort of morning. S’not fair. Shit. Time to fire up the espresso maker.

This is one of those years where New Year’s morning, which always feels like a Sunday, actually falls on a Sunday. So I cranked up the CBC on the net, and listened to “Vinyl Café” on CBC Halifax. That’s the Canadian equivalent of “Prairie Home Companion.” I pick Halifax because they are four hours ahead of us, and the show is over early enough to not interfere with Sunday morning chores. Part of it is Schadenfreude; Halifax can reliably provide a weather report that’s even worse than what’s happening outside my window. There are places that are worse that have CBC outlets, but Iqaluit doesn’t carry “Vinyl Café.” Stuart MacLean resolved to not have New Years Resolutions that were aimed at self-improvement, but instead to have ones that he can enjoy for once and won’t feel guilty if he doesn’t make them. Smart man.

I thought about doing a recap of 2005, but hell, if you read me, then you read other things, and you’ve probably already seen a half-dozen recaps, mostly focusing on politics. Dave Barry’s annual recap will probably turn out to be the best of the bunch. I also thought about doing a piece on what to expect in 2006, but when you get right down to it, I don’t have a clue. Back in the America that existed before the coup of 2000, a president who admitted to the things Putsch admitted to would be impeached, but that was back when there were two political parties, and both of them were only moderately corrupt. The media still reported on what the government was up to, and reporters sometimes wound up in court defending their sources against government retaliation, instead of protecting the government against public retaliation. Abramoff alone could destroy half the Republicans in Congress, and he’s certainly going to destroy a half dozen of them. But with sleazy, anti-American outfits like Diebold controlling parts of the election tabulation on behalf of the GOP, that isn’t the foregone conclusion it once was, even if dozens of Republicans, including Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, end up in jail.

Of course, people are getting fed up, and even Republicans are breaking ranks. Former Reagan advisor Paul Craig Roberts openly compared the Putsch junta to Hitler’s regime the other day, and Republicans as well as Democrats are demanding an investigation into Putsch’s illegal domestic spying scandal.

But the biggest story in 2005 was the climate, and I see no reason why that shouldn’t continue next year. The first day of the year, and I’m reading about ferocious blizzards in England, floods here in California and Oregon, and temperatures of 122 Fahrenheit (49 C) in Sydney, Australia. Tropical Storm Zeta is banging around the Eastern Atlantic, and meteorologists are at a loss to explain how it can exist at all. Meanwhile, Texas bakes in summer-like heat, and brush fires roar across what would normally be snow-covered plains in Oklahoma.

There’s nothing unusual about wild weather, of course. But it’s getting wilder and more destructive with each passing year, and this year was a median year as far as the Eastern Pacific Oscillation Cycle goes. Things usually get really hairy when an El Niño or La Niña occur. In other words, this was supposed to have been a comparatively tranquil year.

Three of the biggest stories last year – and they didn’t generally make anyone’s top ten list – were the finding that the flow of the Gulf Steam has been reduced by 30% over the past 50 years, and the ice-core samples from Antarctica which show CO2 levels are a full 27% higher than at any point in the past 800,000 years, including cycles during which Greenland had a subtropical climate and Canada was tropical. What’s now the southern US was unfit for human habitation, and there are those who would argue that it still is.

The third story was the melting of the peat bogs of Siberia. An area about the size of France and Germany is melting, after being hard frozen for at least 25,000 years, and the amount of greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere as a result is doubling.

So it’s going to get hot, and soon. Very hot, very soon. Except for northern Europe and Britain, which will end up with Siberia’s climate (the good news there is that Siberia might be temperate by twenty years from now).

Now, the good news is that in a few thousand years, earth’s climate will stabilize, and there will probably be more varied life forms than there are today.

The bad news is that human civilization may not be a part of that scenario.

So what’s the weather doing in your neighborhood this New Year’s?