Weather in the last couple of months has not performed as expected. After a prediction of the most active hurricane season in years, it has been quiet, even as the Surface Sea Temperatures (SST) climb to near-record levels. Russia has experienced a month-long hottest period on record, and that has produced a great many wildfires and a drought that has destroyed much of the country's wheat harvest. Pakistan and India and China have received record rainfalls from the monsoons that has left huge areas flooded. Even the eastern part of the USA did not escape the hot spell.
Weather, however strange and unexpected, is not climate change. However, strange and unexpected weather can be a consequence of climate change. We just don't have a good enough theory of weather and climate to be able to say for sure what the relationship is.
The theories of climatology that are being developed are becoming stronger and stronger in their ability to predict what the longer-term affects on weather will be. For instance, there is enough evidence to reliably say that the intensity of Atlantic storms will become stronger as the SST rises, and there is increasing evidence that these rising SSTs may create blocking patterns in the jet stream that may be associated with the Russian and Indian sub-continent extreme weather.
Everything I read and hear indicates that we should expect the weather to become more extreme, whether it is rain or storms, floods or drought, heat or cold, gales or calm. Just expect the weather to be more violent. But how should we respond?
Learn to live with it. I suggest you work at making yourself less dependent on the "grid" of our civilization. Conserve, use less power, adopt a sustainable lifestyle, don't stay in areas that are at risk from weather (like flood plains). Plan ahead. And I always suggest, use LED lighting, like found at www.prudentrver.com. What you do does make a difference.
Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer
