When I was growing up, it seemed like the weather was usually pretty predictable; rain would start coming in late September or in October, then be off an on until April. It would fill the reservoirs in the area and leave plenty of snow pack in the Sierras. The spring and fall would be mild with warm to hot days in the summer. What I really liked in the summer was the morning fog that had been pulled in from the ocean by the heat of the previous day. That heat was usually farther inland so that our farm was right in between the breezy coastline and the hot inner valleys of California. The fog would linger until around 10 or so in the morning and then quickly burn off to a wonderfully pleasant day.
Now, it's a completely different picture. The rain frequently doesn't come until December and then it is very unpredictable through out the rest of the winter. Sometime there is so much rain, various areas have flooding problems. But more often, we can't get enough rain and snow in the state and we have drought conditions. And with the every-growing human population here, the demand for water just keeps expanding.
Our summers now are also totally weird; some have long periods of heat while others never seem to warm up.
Whether the earth is going through a normal cycle or if some human activities have spurred this difference, mankind certainly has some major challenges ahead. Ice will melt, oceans will rise, the air will become more acidic, humans will have less land to farm, more species will disappear.
I hope we acknowledge all this soon enough to make the hard choices we inevitably need to make so that we still have an environment hospitable to our future generations and the rest of life on earth.
Or..... maybe the Mayans know something we don't?
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