For anyone who's over 40, there's simply no debate about climate change. It's happening, and it's completely obvious that it's happening from your own personal experience.
And I'm not talking about how things were in the good old days, when I was a kid and I had to walk uphill to school both ways. This is just since 1990.
I've been playing volleyball for more than 30 years. I play both indoors and out, and I've also been attending University of Minnesota volleyball matches.
When I started, the outdoor volleyball season started in May and ended in September or October. Now we regularly play from April to November, and several years we've been able to play from early March until early December. I usually stop playing outdoors in November not because it's too cold, but because the sun is so low I can't see the ball when it's served from south side of the court.
The women's NCAA volleyball season runs from August through December. When we started attending matches we had to drive through snow storms to get to half the matches. In the past 10 or 15 years there's barely any snow on the ground during the last two matches.
Since milder winters are perceived as a "good thing," a lot of people rationalize that climate change is not so bad and pretend it isn't happening. But just last week a flock of tornadoes killed people across the south. Tornadoes in Louisiana and Alabama in January! And this is becoming a regular thing. Come on, people, this is not normal!
My personal experience jibes with what scientists have been telling us: spring is arriving almost a month earlier, screwing up all sorts of natural cycles. The melting permafrost in Alaska and Russia is destroying entire towns because the very ground they're built on is melting because of global warming.
There's no debate about climate change. It's happening, right here, right now, and it's having drastic effects on our infrastructure, plants, animals, and human beings.
Anyone who says different is just lying.
But that's par for the Republican course.
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