We all know that the weather can make or break a picnic, but we don’t think about how weather affects a great deal of our lives. We usually think of how weather affects the fun things in life, like picnics, camping and such things. It affects a lot more. It can be the difference between a nasty allergy attack or normal breathing. Severe weather can take out the electricity that most Americans do not like living without it; note that I say we don’t like living without it? That’s because we could live without, we just choose not to. We have become too dependent on it, which is sad when you think about.
Even a simple summer shower can mess up our lives. I had a three-day weekend at the end of May that I had planned to use to mow the grass. Yep, it rained, ruining the plan. So I had to wait to mow the lawn. I ended up waiting two weeks to mow the grass. That’s how it goes.
Now mowing the lawn is not my favorite thing to do, but on that same three-day weekend, my family got together for a picnic. We ended up eating in several places, sheltering from rain, rather than eating together. That’s how it goes.
Weather prediction has come a long way since we were wholly dependent on its changeability. We are closer to getting it right when we forecast, but we are wrong almost as often as we are right. One thing that humankind has always dreamed about was controlling the weather. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. If we could control the weather, what would happen to our climate? Would it be as good as we think it would be? We don’t like it when rain ruins our outdoor activity plans, but we do need rain. It’s how we water our crops.
You might be tempted to state that we don’t need severe weather. We can do without the destruction, that’s true, but what about the cleansing effects a thunderstorm with high winds has on the atmosphere. That’s something we need. Good and bad are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. That’s just how life is. If we could control the weather, we would have to include times when severe weather could be unleashed. That way, we would know when and where it would strike.
We may never understand weather enough to control it, but I think the next best thing is predicting what it will do with a bit more accuracy than we have currently. I don’t think humans are ready for the kind of power that it would take to control the weather. We haven’t done so well with the things that we can control so far, like waste production and such. That’s not to say that we should give up the dream, we just need to take it slow. That’s where most of our current environmental problems came from – rushing in too fast. Sometimes it is better to just take our time and make our way more slowly.
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