You can’t watch a news cycle these days and not see some news story about weather extremes – both here in the US and around the world.  There have been record high temperatures in London, with daytime highs well over 100 degrees.  Extreme drought in the American Southwest has caused the water level in Lake Mead to drop to its lowest levels since 1937, revealing dead bodies (stuffed in oil drums) and long lost hulls of boats that were disposed of years ago. 

Meanwhile, Argentina and Chile have seen record rainfall and flooding.  Flash floods have wreaked havoc in Colorado and Virginia.  Another record hurricane season is being forecast for 2022, with somewhere between 14-21 named storms being predicted – 3 to 6 of which are expected to be major events (with winds over 111 MPH).

Beach erosion continues at seaside communities and extreme temperature shifts in winter (up to 50 degrees in 24 hours) are becoming commonplace.

Now, I’m no climatologist, but it’s not hard to figure out that things are happening that folks aren’t used to seeing – or dealing with – weather-wise.

Here in my own community, we’ve had a 100-year rainfall (with subsequent flooding) twice in the past five years.  Twice.  I’ve had my basement flooded – and I live on the highest point in town.   In the last two weeks we’ve had major thunderstorms push through my community with wind gusts of over 70 MPH – uprooting trees, knocking down power lines, and just causing general havoc.  My poor apple tree out back was tossed around so hard this past Saturday that it lost 90% of its crop for the year in five minutes.  My next-door neighbor’s 10 foot inflatable wading pool was laying over my fence like a dead soldier trying to escape the trenches of the Somme in 1916.

And it’s only July.

One of the reasons I moved from Florida back to Maryland fifteen years ago was to get away from weather like this, yet here we are.

Hang on tight folks, the second half of 2022 could be a wild ride.