Weather or not

I walked home last night from the subway -- it’s about a mile up a quiet road with Woodlawn Cemetery on one side and Van Cortlandt Park on the other. In a beautiful green borough -- the Bronx has more parkland than any of the others -- this may be one of the most beautiful and most green spots. In both the park and the cemetary, there were many, many big branches and a lot of trees down -- big, old, substantial trees, some of which may have been there since the 17th century, when Jonas Bronck, a Swedish sea captain, became the first European to settle in the area. Some of the park trees had fallen across the road, blown down in the unusually powerful windstorm the night before, and had still been partially blocking traffic that morning, but the city had come and moved them into the woods during the day. And those were only the trees visible from the road -- surely more fell in the depths of both the cemetery (400 acres) and the park (1146 acres).

One windstorm cannot, most likely, be entirely responsible for such damage -- it wasn’t a Cat 5 hurricane or an F5 tornado that hit -- but the trees had probably been weakened by years of too little rain, too much rain, too much heat, too much cold... wild fluctuations in temperature and precipitation, sometimes within not only a single season but a single week or a single day. When I was in Boston last weekend, the weather swung from gorgeous and springlike to downright arctic within a matter of hours. Last night, back in NYC, it was so warm that at 8:15pm on a January night -- long after sunset in what typically has been the coldest week of the year here -- kids were out playing in the street.

I know, I know: anecdotal. But the anecdotes keep piling up...

I talk about a lot of silly stuff here -- movies and TV and goofy Web sites and so on -- or at least stuff that’s silly compared to the fate of the planet. But things like this are geek issues, too: If we’re gonna fix them, if there’s a solution to be found at all, it’ll be geeks who find the answers and a way to implement them, people who are smart and passionate and dedicated and just plain obsessive enough to focus on a seemingly intractable problem until it starts to unravel.

And maybe one simple place to start, at least for us geeks who aren’t climatologists or geologists or meterologists but are still fascinated -- as people interested in all things science-y -- and horrified -- as people who plan to live on planet Earth for more than the next few years -- is with semantics. Let’s make sure everyone who talks about this stuff knows it’s time to start calling it “global climate change” instead of “global warming,” so that unintentional ignoramuses will understand that a rise in global mean temperature can indeed be responsible for things like people dying from abnormal cold in a place -- Russia -- where people are used to it being damn cold. And so that those who would deny that something strange indeed is happening with our planet will have a harder time scoffing for the benefit of those unintentional ignoramuses. (One late or early blizzard -- a symptom of the wetter atmosphere that global warming global climate change predicts -- and the scoffers are all, “Global warming? Ha!”)

And it’s time to stop talking about “the fate of the planet” -- hell, I’m guilty of using that phrase just two paragraphs up; it comes so easily. The planet is going to be fine. It’s “the fate of the humans and our technological civilization” that’s in doubt. The scoffers again say things like, The climate has been through all sorts of wild changes and humans have adapted. The truth is, though: not so much. Is it a coincidence that humans have been hanging around planet Earth for about 100,000 years, give or take, with all the intellectual resources and creativity that we have today, but that what would we consider “civilization” -- agriculture that allowed for settled cities -- didn’t spring up until the glaciers receded? It’s as if for 90 percent of our history, we were just sitting around waiting for the right time to come into our own, and we took advantage of the opportunity to do so immediately after it became available.

Of course some people think the development of agriculture may be humanity’s worst mistake -- and I’m not sure I entirely disagree with them. The point is, though, we are where we are now, and we got here thanks to a relative calming of the planet’s weather. It sure as hell looks like the climate may be uncalming again, and whether we and our agricultural, city-dwelling, natural-resource-using civilization are the cause of it or not, we’re gonna have to deal with it. Cuz I don’t think there will be much time for blogging or ripping songs to our iPods or watching Sci Fi Friday when the glaciers roll in again or the sea levels rise and the wars over fresh water and ariable land erupt.