Ah, the joys of autumn. The leaves change to blah brown and fall off the trees because of a general lack of rain. And there's that cooler weather. Oh wait, that's gone, too, about the time fall fell into our laps and whacked us with those temps in the mid to upper nineties that continue for at least the next week.

Sigh.

This seems to be the trend, with summer moving into autumn, and this year on track to be the hottest year on record, with the current strong El Niño weather pattern pushing things along probably well into next year. Of course, the last eight years have been the hottest recorded years, and according to NOAA, we have a ninety-five percent chance of breaking past that.

Climate change, anyone?

Whether man-made or natural, this is looking to be our brave new world. Air conditioners will be taxed more, hurricanes will continue strengthening, and climates will change. Glacier and Antarctic ice melts will continue to raise the sea level worldwide.

How fast?

Who knows, but the Swiss glaciers melted as much in the last two years as in the previous three decades. It's similar to the Columbia Ice fields in Canada, which are also rapidly receding.

We feel it at home, though our local weather may not be indicative of the world as a whole. Our spring was unusually delightful. However, our autumn has...hopefully...not really started and been pushed back. There's hope near the end of our ten-day forecast, assuming it won't hop back up to ten degrees above normal like it did after the last cool front came through with at least a little rain, depending on where you were. There are forecasts for rain,

And that's the thing. Our last two winters have been anomalies, first with Freezageddon and again last December, both dropping our temperatures below ten degrees. It's not unheard of, but unusual, with the last time it happened being over a quarter century before these occurrences.

So where is all of this going?

Is this a call to action?

Not really. There have been so many calls to action for things real and imagined that our knees don't even twitch these days. Consider this a simple request to acknowledge happenings in the world. They affect us, though probably in a much more first-world way than those in many other places around this globe of ours. Barring things unforeseen, we would survive much better than most of the world. We don't live along the coastline like a tenth of the world's population. Any hurricane would be weakened by the time it reached us, and even with a Harvey-like stall, we'd have less flooding than the eastern Texas Gulf Coast experienced. At five hundred foot elevation, we're immune from the rising ocean's direct effects, though most Houstonians would have to relocate...somewhere—same with New Orleans and all of Florida.

On the good side, we would be able to pick a new US capital that would be high and dry. Denver, anyone?

Likewise with most of the major centers of commerce. Chicago and Dallas would most likely become the first and second-largest metropolitan areas since the current locations holding those positions would be swimming with the fishes. Similar would happen throughout the world.

Of course, this is all fictional. Science fantasy. Perhaps it should've started with "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."

Happy autumn.