After a scorching April and May, global warming took a European summer holiday. The London Independent reports France’s “Cold Summer Forces Earliest French Wine Harvest on Record.” 

 

The London Daily Mail reports “Halloween Goes Green After Cold Summer Fails to Ripen Pumpkins.”  There apparently wasn’t enough sunshine and warmth in the UK this year to turn pumpkins orange.

 

Chalk it up to “climate change.” The Independent declares that “Unpredictable Weather ‘Means Seasonal Fashion Obsolete’”  It says temperatures are increasingly “out of kilter.”

 

That’s a myopic view of weather history. But myopia has become a defining characteristic of the Baby Boom generation (of which I am a part).

Climates changes. The Roman historian Tacitus records that northern Europe, what is today Germany and Poland, used to look more like northern Scandinavia, complete with reindeer. The Rhine and Danube froze solid. In 1779, during "Little Ice Age" in America, the southern Chesapeake Bay froze solid and the ice on the coast of Virginia Beach was piled 20 feet high and didn't melt until mid-May; an astounding weather event by the standard of today’s temperatures in the mid-Atlantic. 

 

Meanwhile, here are the warmest years on record, according to NASA:

 

 

See a pattern? Me neither. Climate changes. "Out of kilter" is what it does. Get over it.

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