It’s chilly here in North Carolina this morning.

I think that the computer program that tells me how to feel (temperature wise, at least) says that it’s 37 degrees outside this morning.

So I feel kind of chilly.

My relatives in the Pacific Northwest would laugh at me…or at least question whether or not I was serious in my whining.

I visited my cousin and his family in Idaho this summer and we were wearing sweatshirts at the end of June.  I suspect that they know what chilly means this time of year.

It does get quite a bit colder here in the NC mountains.  This temperature is pretty moderate for this time of year.  I like moderate…it’s a lot easier than being socked in with snow.

When friends from the beach would relay how cold the winter was…temperatures down into the FORTIES (!!!!), I’d secretly be laughing at them…”they don’t know what cold is…” I’d be thinking.

I guess that what I’m saying is that it’s all relative.

Anything less than what we’re used to can produce discomfort.

Genius.

It’s figuring out what we’re used to that’s the trick.

The weather is something that’s been fairly consistent through the years…it’s hot in the Summer, cold in the Winter…we know what to expect to the point of not paying a whole lot of attention to it.  In the Fall we split the wood we’ll burn in the Winter…in the Spring we start wearing shorts.  It’s not rocket science…it’s just the weather.

Now they say that there’s “climate change” in the air…that consistency might not be something we should count on anymore.  I’ve heard politically charged conversations that seemed to raise the temperature in the room a couple of degrees….both supporters and detractors of the theory of global warming can get pretty heated when discussing it.

To politicize an environmental issue is to be expected…there’s too much riding on what slowing or stopping the causes of global warming might affect.  It is sad to listen to conversations that seem locked in to an idea just because of the political party of choice, though.

It’s strange to think that we have to wait until it’s so late in the game that everyone agrees that “hey…that’s a pretty good idea!  We should do something about how the weather’s been screwing around!”.  I’ve seen ideas that were dismissed suddenly become adopted when something couldn’t be ignored anymore.  I’ve seen ideas get “re-framed” to make them more palatable…”no…this is what we’ve been talking about all along…”.

I guess that if we really want to debate and debunk when it feels like the temperature is climbing enough to foster “global warming” discussion, we should just turn up the air conditioner and go at it.