In the Weather app on my iPhone, I have about a dozen cities around the world bookmarked.
Most of them are either places I have lived or places people I care about live, from Tunis to Tahoe and other points that I check nearly every day.
It’s 58 degrees in Tunis right now — late afternoon — without any precipitation and none expected till Tuesday.
Boston, on the other hand …
Boston is being clobbered by the winter storm that is probably the biggest news story of the day. It’s 17 degrees in Beantown, and they have had 7.2 inches of “wintry mix” in the last six hours with 18 inches more expected in the next 24 hours. Heavy snow is falling and will keep falling until late this evening.
Here in Georgia it’s 28 degrees and sunny, the coldest day so far this winter.
Are you channeling Willard Scott this morning?
The big storm only seems to be going as far south as North Carolina, a couple hundred miles away from us. But I have a sister and a nephew in Boston and another nephew in New York City. They will all be affected by this.
The storm is hitting much harder in the four hours since I started writing this. I mentioned earlier that Boston had been hit by 7.2 inches of wintry mix, but I just checked and it’s now 16.1 inches.
Wow.
My old stomping grounds in Northern Virginia are very cold, but almost no snow and none is expected.
I’m sure the great unwashed politically will be making some stupid remarks about how this proves there’s no global warming, but it was just the other day we were informed 2021 had been the hottest year on record, a trend that has been true for the last six years.
That doesn’t mean it’s going to be hot every day, but it certainly means — and this is getting borne out all the time — that we’re have having more and more extreme weather events.
And of course it will get worse. Not only are we pretty much unwilling to give up our lifestyle for the good of mankind, we can’t really expect other countries just moving into a modern lifestyle to scale it back.
We just aren’t good at sacrificing in the present while hoping for a better future.
Once sea levels rise enough to threaten coastal Florida, maybe we’ll do something.
Maybe.