Waterworld

So it’s starting to get eerie, all this blue sky and sunlight. All through December, all through January and now we’re poised to enter March and just a handful of rainy days. My winter puffy is still languishing in the back of the closet and from the window above the computer screen I can see that single palm tree in the distance, the long skinny trunk stamped onto the Berkeley hills, and the emblematic palm fronds teasing a cloudless, 70 degree sky.

Not that I’m complaining; I’m a warm weather girl, born and raised in L.A. I’ve never known snow for more than a week at a time, on various childhood ski trips or the post-college journey backpacking through Europe that unexpectedly extended into snow banks and wintry wind.

I woke up to the radio this morning and a story about alpine chipmunks in Yosemite. Over the last few decades they’ve been forced to move into ever higher altitudes to find comfortably arctic climes. And the genetic diversity of the species has steeply declined leading to a drop in their collective immune systems. All because of mercury rising.

At the same time, a friend in Prague writes that she’s shivering in her apartment, one of the coldest winters on record. The irrational logic of her building grants either hot water or central heat, not both. So she has to choose as the thermometer reads minus degrees.

Tropical cyclones and middle latitudes and arctic oscillation – the language is almost poetic. And an article I came across today: a link found between global warming and the diminishing size of all mammals. It seems scientists have followed the evolution of horses from 56 million years ago and found that as temperatures went up, their size went down – at times as small as a medium-sized dog: picture a Jack Russell Terrier.

If all this keeps up, in a few million years we could find ourselves living in a world of wee people. That is, if the polar ice caps don’t all melt first and plunge us into an underwater nightmare akin to Waterworld.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll go for a walk in the sunshine.