That's Hot

The obsession with the climate change theory seems to never stop.  Everything that is warm or hot gets blamed on humans, who the climate change crowd say can control climate. I am not sure mother nature would agree on that theory, but the rhetoric, hyperbolic or real, is interesting because it gets us talking about the weather. Is there any more spoken subject than that. I think most of us use the line, "It sure is hot/cold today." That or some variation is a good conversation started for casual talk.

We never can be satisfied with our climate. Mark Twain once wrote that , "Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it." Clever of Mark to say it so simply. Because no one, especially those climate change proponents, really understands climate. Scientists have some grasp on, short term weather tends and can make predictions about the weather, as to temperature, rain, sun etc. but that understanding is limited as to accuracy to a few weeks ahead of time. So we just try to make the best of the weather we currently experience. The poet John Ruskin said it best,  "Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."

Well John! have you ever spent a summer in my former home of New Orleans? It's extremely hot and humid there. If John were still alive he might edit the "there is no such thing as bad weather" part of that quote. I compare the uncomfortable heat and humidity of New Orleans to most if not all Se Asian cities I have visited in summer. If you have been to Bangkok, for instance, you would understand. The climate in summer in both places is almost identically miserable. But wait! does a place have to be near the equator to have an extremely hot period of climate? Not according to Honeywell Fans and Environmental Health & Engineering. That company makes a list of the top ten sweatiest cities in the U.S. New Orleans made number ten, an insult to those sweating there right now. And number one is a shock. It's a northern  city most would not tie to sweating, New York City.

Honeywell analyzed a number of factors unrelated to weather that might make a city sweat, such as population density. "We looked at data in a number of national records to determine the percentage of homes without central air conditioning, the popularity of public transportation and citywide bike sharing programs, as well as the cities with the 'hottest' professions," he said in a statement. New York won the top spot partly because it is home to some of the “hottest” professions per capita, thai is those high stress jobs that might make you sweat, including air traffic controller and personal financial adviser.

This leads us back to the impossibility of defining weather. It seems we can't even agree what hot weather is. I think I'll  forget this climate thing and instead have a glass of ice tea and dream of the first cold front of fall.