“When I was a boy, I used to love rainbows, and they took that. Then, when I became a man, I liked Bud—now that’s gay too!”

-Big Ron, 5/17/2023

…

Over the weekend, down in the Tennessee hills, I slept in the boxing ring of the open gym with two sleeping bags, fully clothed, and did not sweat.

Last night, Dove from Portland, Oregon called and said it was a cool night.

Major Golden from Denver reminded me in a text that unusual rainfall in Colorado was keeping the normally brown hills green.

For two years now there has been no snow accumulation in Maryland or southeastern portions of Pennsylvania or Jersey. Yet, every night in Maryland, PA, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and now Jersey, in the dying days of May, sees me shivering if I neglect a jacket.

Will we have a hot summer night in The Mid Atlantic this year?

We did not last year, or the year before that.

The Groes seem to sense in their simian bones that something is not right: since May 7 to May 17, use of masks outside and on buses, in Baltimore city, tripled from 5% to 15%. I trust the instincts of those bred, born and trained to hate and hunt me.

Unusually high temps, unusually low temps, and precipitation above or below the median, with greater variations of temperature in the same day, week, month and season than normal has marked every location I have lived in over this past first, nearly half, of the year.

Last night, Mary Biscotti reminded me, “We’ve never waited this late in May to open the pool.”

Well, I’d say then that we need some plump eye candy this year. My ghostly person will be hiding from the sun.

Is this Solar Minimum the world just entered going to be a minor change like the cold snaps in the mid 1600s, around 1700 and in the mid 1700s and early 1800s, that served as an ebb-and-flow, people-moving pulse of the last Little Ice Age, now heralding another?

Or, might we be in a period like the late A.D. 1200s when volcanoes and storms set the stage for a plunge into a 500 year long minor ice age marked by dreadful internal downturns like the Maunder and Dalton Minimums?

I think that the best science-fiction writers now work for think tanks and ply their wizardry for government planners, rather than to dazzle our mind’s eye. We will not be given official warning. We will be lied to baldly and boldly from the flickering oracles of social declaration and moral regulation.

For most of us TV is real. So, for the minority, let us reverse the proclamations of the TV clergy.

There is one clue to look for, and it is not the 300 inches of snow in the Rockies this winter, an all time historical record. It would be a thing described in the lives of Utnapishtun, Noah and Decalon: Deluge.

From 1316 to 1321 [might be off a year here] it rained and did little else, beating down most grain crops, starving people and animals, and heralding the Black Death. An entire growing season that sees rain beating down grain in the northern hemisphere from Russia to Canada, this would be the thing to fear, a warning that a great and lasting shift is in the making.

Even if so, what kind of Ice Age might it bring:

-The Bronze Age Collapse circa 1300 to 800 B.C. [1]

-The Dark Ages, circa A.D 300 to 900. [2]

-The Little Ice Age, circa A.D. 1300 to 1820 [3]

Or something terrible like the Younger Dryas Event about 11,000 years ago or the great glaciation from 40,000 to 18,000 years ago?

The big ones seem to relate to solar impact or extra solar magnetic events.

The little ones seem to go for about 500 years and leave us 200 to 300 years to bask in the sun.

Whatever the case may be, I suspect that our nefarious Plutocrats know and will mislead us until the last possible moment. We are, after all, ultimately, their food.

I muse over these things as the sun of late spring sleeps and considers waking from a hangover to bronze some bikini bodies by this pool. By the time this posts, I’ll be, most likely, coughing up some remaining lung in the Pacific Northwest, wondering what factory made plague our masters have hatched to experiment on us for their immortality drugs and if I will have enough horse de-wormer and black market antibiotics to see the next summer dawn.

Here’s hoping for the best winter that might befall us.

…

Notes on Climate Social Change

-1. The Bronze Age empires were evil people farming schemes that were very fragile and featured less than 1% of people living lives we would regard as human.

-2. Rome was terribly rotten and in many respects the Dark Ages were an improvement for the human soul, bringing most of the faiths we now cling to into prominence.

-3. Despite the terrible plagues, abuses of lower class folk and life spans shorter and more miserable than antiquity and the Dark Ages for the poor, the Little Ice Age literally was the stage upon which Modernity was planted and throve.