It’s been raining in DC…

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Posted on June 26, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Missed posting today.  Crazy day around here.  The DC area is a mess.  We are approaching 13 inches of rain in the month of June, much of that in the past 3-4 days.  Just heard one of our local meteorologists say that in his 28 years reporting weather in DC, he has never seen anything like it.  We are breaking records, to say the least.

Have family visiting and so we thought we’d go inside for the day.  Went down to the Smithsonian museums to find most of them shut down with flood damage.  So we went over to the National Archives to find them pumping water out of the building.  Security guards said the building was a mess and they didn’t know when it would reopen.  They were preparing to move our most precious national documents, like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, out of the building to safer places.  Humidity was rising in the building since it had no power, and our weather has been accompanied by DC’s usual summer humidity — very bad for precious fragile paper.

The morning rush hour was a commuter’s nightmare, with trains unable to operate, some Metro rail stations dealing with flooding, roads covered with flowing waters, mud piling up on major thoroughfares.

They say there is more to come tomorrow, though hopefully less intense than the past couple of days.  We had 6-7 inches of rain in a few hours last night.

It was 106 degrees in Portland, Oregon, today.

The extreme drought in the southwest continues.

Just some weather to talk about.  None of these specific events say anything about climate change; one just notices that weather seems to be in the news all the time now.

End times?  Just some crazy weather due to nothing in particular?  Signs of changes in climate patterns because the earth is out of balance because of how we have altered the atmosphere?

Who knows?  But it does give one pause to consider what it would mean if we did alter the earth’s atmosphere with our way of life, if such calamities became permanent fixtures of our lives.  Imagine the disruptions, the chaos.

Do we want to keep running this experiment on our planet’s delicate atmosphere?

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