Ice World

Welcome to Ice World, day three. For the third day I wake to a frozen landscape, with the fog hanging low over the mountain and icicle beads fringing our eaves and patio railings. The trees look sad from bearing the weight of their iced leaves, many of which have not dropped since winter came so late and they felt no need to shed them.

It is easy to imagine the ice fog never lifting, the world forever enveloped in a blanket of mist – cold in the winter and oppressively hot in the summer. It is easy to imagine this world of global warming we’ve been promised: the chilly Southern California winters and the balmier, yet foggy ones in the Northeast.

We have become Seattle.

For years, though, I’d been trained that my environment evolves in predictable patterns. In the winter, it snows, with a brief warm spell in the middle of January. By the end of March the winds die down and the air fills with the smell of warming earth. The first blast of real summer heat doesn’t hit until Memorial Day weekend, then returns in July. Muggy buggy snuffly August ends with a cool snap in the air. September begins with cloudless, endlessly blue skies and ends with the first taste of autumn. After the first frost comes glorious Indian Summer, which for most of my life had come around the third week in October, and during college, timed most cruelly to correspond with midterms. The first snow often comes during Thanksgiving weekend, and most certainly by Christmas. And we start the wheel again.

But if you live in the Northeast, you probably know all this.

Yet everything is being tilted on its ear.

Yes, August was as obnoxious as ever, and September was a dome of blue stretching on forever, but I don’t think we even had Indian Summer this year. Just a string of days hovering in the same 20 degree temperature range – maybe a day when it hit 60, but never a span of them long enough to actually call it a season. And winter? A couple days of freezing rain in the middle of January? Don’t make me laugh (of course, this taunt will bring down all sorts of bad karma and mark my words, we’ll be buried in snow come next week).

This kind of vacillation is troubling. Mild weather one year, extreme the next…now, I’m not a scientist nor even someone who has done much reading on the subject or even seen Al Gore’s movie, but even to the casual observer, this just doesn’t seem right. Yes, this atmosphere’s weather patterns naturally cycle. Husband tells me that there was a kind of Ice Age in North America in the late 1700s into the early 1800s, with hideous winters that seemed to last forever. The Hudson River froze so solid you could walk across it. (Of course, this might have more to do with the northern progression of the salt line than any other factor…although we do live in a giant terrarium of sorts, and one event effects another) And we’ve all heard about El Ninos and La Ninas causing havoc with the jet stream and the severity of hurricanes.

But even without the contributions of our greenhouse gases (yes, I do believe that we are contributing, please don’t get on my ass about being “one of those people” who drank the Kool-Aid and don’t believe in global warming), our planet’s weather is constantly on the move.

And I don’t think I like the direction in which it’s going.

My writerly imagination can see a world where the fog never lifts – icy chilled in winter, oppressively humid in summer. Spring and fall will be nothing more than a few mere days of transition. When the earth warms, ravenous predators will emerge and eat every frog and snake in site, leaving the insect population to reproduce unchecked.

Bugs and ragweed will rule the planet. Ticks and mosquitoes will spread diseases that will defy all of our attempts to treat with ever-resistant antibiotics. Grasshoppers will mutate to mammoth proportions and might actually be able to crush a car if they had enough momentum in their leap (now, remember that I’m not a scientist and barely passed physics in high school and have no idea of the length and trajectory of a ridiculously large grasshopper’s hop) Birds, the few species that don’t die out, will evolve (or devolve?) back into pterodactyl proportions and nobody will leave their pets outside overnight. Camping as recreation might also disappear, because who wants to be peacefully wheezing away under the smothering fog and be stomped to death by a giant grasshopper? All those annoying outdoor stores will disappear, except for a few which will specialize in Kevlar suits, helmets and exoskeleton-piercing bullets.

Of course, maybe I exaggerate.

It’s just something to think about when you buy your next tank of gas.