First post on something I’ve been thinking about for a while. To put it bluntly, the weather has been weird around here lately. ‘Here’ is Rochester, NY on the shores of Lake Ontario. For those who haven’t seen the Great Lakes, they’re not lakes in the common understanding of the word. Technically they are inland seas, in fact one fifth of all the fresh water on the planet is concentrated in the lakes.

I grew up with Lake Ontario a few hundred feet from my front yard. The lake is 65 miles across at its shortest point from here to Canada. Its over 650 feet deep just offshore and it can get stormy fast. As kids we watched storms ome in across the lake and it helped turn me into a weather freak, which in turn got me interested in climate change. And the climate, IMHO, is definitely changing, fast.

This January we had practically no snow and many days in the fifties. Contrast this with our normal snowfall of 100 inches plus. Last week we went from one day with 3.5" of rainfall to 95 degree heat, both abnormal. Thunderstorms have been increasingly violent and occur almost daily. Last month Binghamton, which is about 150 miles southeast from here, got 12 inches of rain and 8000 houses were flooded. 150 miles of the NYS Thruway were closed for flooding. Today in France, hundreds are dying from excessive heatwaves (AC is very uncommon in Europe). The West Coast is experiencing heatwave after heatwave and fires are raging, fed by dead timber killed by infestations from insects that have migrated because of warming conditions.

I could go on with these horror stories. Instead I intend to provide a personal view of how climate change is affecting my personal and world views. In spite of the out of control situation in the MIddle East and North Korea, I believe that climate change is the biggest story in our lives going forward.