Fall is here!

I’ve been worried these last few days of summer and now fall is here! The maple and birch leaves have been falling. Swirls of leaves follow me as I walk along the trail. But the leaves are green and spotted! Where are the fall colors? May I just be anxious for cooler climes. Perhaps but with the wind and rain being so plentiful as of late I fear the fall colors nature brings with the changing seasons may be compromise.

AS I look out my window, the leaves seem to be talking to each other; they sway back and forth in the wind. Last night I heard numerous conversations of chattering leaves. What does one leaf say to another? Maybe they are pleading with one another to hold on to their branches or maybe they are encouraging each other to fly away with the wind.

Miraculously I found a yellow rose in my rose bush recently. I swear it is pink now. Do roses change color? Whatever, it is a wonderful sight. The rain has brought all sorts of colorful mushrooms up from the ground – orange, purple and of course white. Plenty of tiny little toads hopping about too and slender long snakes slithering about the driveway. No bloodsucking gnats like last year. I couldn’t even open doors to enjoy the wonderful cool weather as the gnats were so tiny that they could squeeze through the screens! The plague of gnats, inside and out, were annoying to say the least. No bloodsucking attacks – at least as of yet.

As I ramble on steadied with glee of autumnal comings, my mind goes to all the things that need to be completed before winter gets here. I’ll make a list but for now I am going to enjoy the blissfulness of fall’s arrival. I think I will go crunch some fallen foliage beneath my feet, dogs in tow!

Reliably unpredictable

Extreme weather patterns merit action on a micro & macro scale. 2013 had tge coldest Easter on record in England/UK. Droughts, floods in USA are more frequent and severe. Treaties address these problems by focusing on ways country states can reduce their carbon emissions (CE). As with Kyoto signatories, we have seen drops in carbon production, e.g., in UK and elsewhere. However, a pattern is emerging, i.e., decreased emissions are often followed by decreases in domestic manufacturing. As with the case of Britain, this decrease has happened along side the building up of financial, banking sectors in their economy. This strategy is emerging as a pattern along with austerity, high unemployment and debt. When looking at spending trends we see carbon emission increases shift to developing countries, a decrease in CE from UK is accompanied by increased in carbon footprint by consumers importing products once made locally. So what appears to be positive results in reducing CE are actually increases in CE elsewhere. Here is an excerpt from The Guardian on climate change (or if you dislike that term rather call it – “increases in weather patterns producing droughts and floods as well as extreme temperatures and rising seas and lower lake levels. “:
Our weather, always unpredictable, is now  becoming increasingly harder to forecast short term. The challenge for meteorologists is to explain these unexpected outbreaks of climatic unpleasantness. “There is no doubt that the recent weather has been highly changeable – on both sides of the Atlantic,” said meteorologist Nicholas Klingaman of Reading University. “We have blizzards and flooding. America has had droughts and scorching temperatures.” Nor is it difficult to pinpoint the immediate cause, Klingaman said. The problem lies with the jet stream, a narrow band of strong winds that sweeps round the planet between the tropics and the Arctic. “Its behaviour has changed dramatically in the past few years and has produced these lengthy bouts of extreme weather. The real question, of course, is an obvious one: why has the jet stream changed its behaviour?” The answer is very worrying, for it transpires that meteorologists may find it increasingly hard to make long-term assessments of future weather with their former confidence. The planet’s weather systems are being stirred and shaken and the cause is closely linked to climate change, the result of the trillions of tonnes of carbon that we have been pumping into our atmosphere…” Read on @: http://m.guardiannews.com/uk/2013/apr/07/science-behind-britain-coldest-easter