Climate change is just warming up

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

                                                                                                                  — Rachel Carson

AUBURN, Maine — The searing, summer heat and intolerable humidity that you’ve been experiencing in the Pine Tree State is a frightening preview of global warming.

Nature sent us another movie trailer featuring the cataclysmic repercussions of climate change. From California to the Mid West and as far as Maine and Quebec, the high temperatures are killing some of us.

You won’t have to wait for the movie when it premieres. It will be an Oscar winner, but we won’t be around to enjoy this horror film with a harrowing end for generations to come.

The heat wave claimed the lives of 70 people in Quebec and most of Maine feels like Miami at noon in July. In the coming years, certain areas around the globe will become unlivable and rising oceans will gobble up coastlines around the world. Everett, Mass., will end up becoming the new Revere Beach. 

Just ask the good citizens of low-lying south Florida during King Tides. The water gets higher during each event and no pump in the world will keep that part of the state afloat.

The next generation depends on us for their survival! It will be your children who will wake up to a world with no clean water to drink. Food will become scarce because humans have polluted the soil. 

A lack of resources means more wars.

According to a National Public Radio report, the western part of the United States is two degrees hotter and that means the snowpack in the mountains melts quicker leading to longer and more intense fires. 

If you dismiss these dire warnings from Mother Nature, you do so at your own peril. Expect serious consequences from an overpopulated planet that is beginning to look like one giant garbage scow.

The earth is ailing and we are the cancer ravaging our fragile home. We are the most destructive force on the planet and, well, the earth will pay us all back by whittling down the herd through starvation, crop failures, intense heat and polluted air, water and land.

“In nature, nothing exists alone. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” said.

Too bad we ignored her when her book was published in 1962. Many tried to silence her even though she was ahead of her time.

One of the latest headlines is from the Washington Post: 

"Temperatures near or pass all-time records in Europe as another heat wave blasts the continent."

A really terrifying report came from CNN about a California fire said: 

Carr Fire in California is so hot it's creating its own weather system

Your children will suffer in the coming decades because the naysayers and uninformed leaders in governments across the globe didn’t act to find cleaner fuels and end the polluting of our drinking water and food-providing oceans.

There is no deity to rescue us from catastrophe or another celestial body that is habitable in the Solar System — unless you have the cash to pay for a space suit, a ticket and a rocket that can ferry you to Mars.

Good luck with that.

Man has yet to step foot on Mars, but if we do, we will probably soil the Red Planet, too. We are indeed a destructive species — and large nations like the United States and China, — two industrial powerhouses — are responsible for most of the pollution.

“There is no Planet B,” French president Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron said several months ago. Our U.S. president just brushed off Macron’s remark, but that’s not surprising from a another careless leader.

As far back as 2014, the Portland Press Herald reported that climate change was indeed hurting the population and its animal life:

“The climate has warmed in Maine and Vermont more than in every other state in the past 30 years, a shift that scientists say is evident in the species of birds and fish that are moving into or out of northern New England.

“The six New England states, along with three of their neighbors in the Northeast, accounted for nine of the 10 states that have had the largest increase in annual average temperature since 1984, according to an Associated Press analysis of temperature records from the federal government’s National Climatic Data Center.”

I was listening to Maine Public Broadcasting the other day about climate change and how this seemingly endless heat is affecting Mainers. Experts agree that heat waves come and go, but this scorcher has intensified due to global warming.

One caller said his tomatoes were not turning quickly because of the hot temperatures at night.

This is true because my tomatoes remain green despite the warm sun. I have been gardening for nearly 20 years and I have noticed that frogs have disappeared and bees are scarce. 

Our planet is being stripped of its natural resources by greed, ignorance and neglect.

Think about that every time you refuse to put out a recycle bin or look your child in the eye.

NPR’s reporting shines a light in the Upside Down

"Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated." 

— Eli Roth

AUBURN — For two and half days, it felt like we were out of the loop after a nasty Nor’easter sideswiped Maine and left thousands of the state’s denizens groping in the dark the past week.

Just before I watched the lights fade from every room (thank you, Moody Blues), the annoying radio alarm sounded revelry at 6 a.m.

I bounded out of bed and told my annoyed wife that we still had power.

I should have kept my mouth shut.

Five minutes later, I saw a flash of light outside the bedroom window and watched the radio clock and night light go out.

Silence filled the room. 

The neighborhood went dark and I was drowning in anxiety, not knowing where my next cup of coffee would come from in these perilous and dark times.

We felt like we stumbled upon the portal to the Upside Down. I also realized I didn’t possess No. 11’s power turn the frigging electricity back on. 

“Oh damn it,” I said as I reached for the flashlight. More four-letter words followed when I bumped into objects along the way to a pitch-black kitchen.

Cable and Internet were out of action and a dormant coffee maker denied me my morning jolt of caffeine. 

The power was gone. I was unhappy, cold and the sudden quietness was already getting on my nerves.

My wife and I would snipe at each other by candlelight for the next two days. We hung out anywhere we could to get the Internet. We visited the Lewiston Library and drank coffee at Dunkin just for the WiFi. We were like wandering, energy vampires looking to suck up free Internet on somebody else’s dime.

We weren’t overreacting. News stories were breaking that Mueller and his team of lawyers started making arrests in the Russian controversy. We were gleeful that Mueller’s band of merry men were making headway, but we were still on the sidelines with no TV or Internet. 

That’s when we turned to National Public Radio for our news and a chance to cheer on Mueller for getting to the bottom of this mess that our president appears to ignore.

We commandeered our son’s ancient radio, stuck some batteries in the back and listened to “All Things Considered” and an endless stream of NPR stories about Mueller’s fearless exploits.

NPR was like another flashlight in our dark home.

For 60 hours, I lived in the murkiness of the Upside Down. I missed taking a warm shower and brewing a cup of that black gold that jump-started my mornings.

When the sun rose, I got the camera and took pictures of downed trees and power lines. Auburn was a mess and its inhabitants were in a bad mood.

So we waited impatiently as hoards of linemen descended on the Pine Tree State to help put lights back on in New England.

My tour of our wind-swept state was startling. The telephone pole near the end of my street had snapped in two and wires still were connected to the top half of the pole that was resting in the middle of the street.

Mother Nature had done a number on us.

But there was hope — if you believe in hope. Linemen were working on the broken pole for two days. By Wednesday, they were mounting the relays on the top half, and wouldn’t you know it, the power returned in the morning and all was well in my neighborhood by evening.

The TV and Internet came back to life in our home and there was warm water running in the sink to wash the damn dishes.

We were fortunate. There are still over 5,000 people wandering in the dark in Maine. I am sure the level frustration for those Mainers is in the red. 

For us, life was good again and we were grateful to those men who work with electricity and brave danger to put the state of Maine back on line.

And shout-out to NPR for keeping two people informed after two dark days. And with power on, the portal to Upside Down has been closed — for the moment.

A tale of the macabre that jars a loving memory loose

The Blasi family gets spooked by a lurid tale told by Ira Glassman on National Public Radio's "This American Life."

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

AUBURN — A spooky story told over a radio is more terrifying than a slice-and-dice movie on the big screen.

Don’t believe me!

Orson Welles' broadcast of H.G. Wells’ "War of the Worlds,” which is a tale of a Martian invasion on Earth, drove the residents of New Jersey mad with fear on Oct. 30, 1938.

Listen to a story of the macabre over the radio and your mind wanders when an adept narrator scares the living crap out of you. Weird and horrifying images pop into to your mind when you hear about two kids who were nearly kidnapped by a bunch of psychos near a cemetery — or the guy who used foxhole humor to describe his working environment in a morgue. The narrator cracked jokes about mangled corpses and organs kept in glass jars. 

I couldn’t stop laughing.

TV just doesn’t cut it when it makes a sorry attempt to frighten us with ridiculous images of a guy with chain saw dissecting another human being. It’s all fake or worse — computer generated crap.

The mind is a scary place to be when tales of terror are spun over the radio. There are more horrible thoughts or weird incidents stored in a human mind than can be recreated on television. Real-life horror stories abound in the deep recesses of our fragile brain.

The three of us gathered around the dinner table as dark skies gave way to a warm sun on a quiet, chilly, autumn Sunday afternoon.

I tuned into WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio station, on my Mac. I love radio, and my MacBook Air offers dozens of radio stations. I really hate TV where pathetic reality shows or 24-hour news stations like FOX, which features unfair and unbalanced reporting about all the crazies from the Republican Party, permeate the air waves.

We got lucky and found Ira Glassman, the host of NPR’s “This American Life,” airing a bunch of old horror stores. After all, the devil’s night is upon us — Halloween — which is a bunch of bull, but Beelzebub's favorite holiday gives retailers a chance to fatten their wallets.

I don’t believe in ghosts, and when you die, you are dead as door nail, to quote Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” You are not coming back to haunt a house or scare some poor bastard in a cemetery. You are worm food unless you decide to be cremated.

We sat like the “The Waltons” as we listened to one horror story after another, but instead of an old Philco radio, we listened to a computer. I wonder what Johnboy would think?

The first story was about a woman who was attacked by a rabid raccoon outside her home, and her nightmares when she tried to get treatment for rabies.

But the next vignette of horror was a story I heard before with my 10-year-old son in 2006.

Ten years ago, Anthony and I sat on the bed to listen to Glassman’s tales of horror. The story was about two brothers who hitched a ride with people who resembled members of “The Adams Family.” All I could think about a group of drugged-out, disfigured, dastardly people in the front seat.

It is a true story

As the two boys traveled with the occupants of the car, they began to realize these adults were up to no good and they wanted out. The boys plotted their escape and bailed out of a running car as as those crazies drove up and down a cemetery in the dead of the night looking for their escaped prey.

My son would leave the room as this tale of an abduction grew more terrifying by the minute. The boys in the car opened the door and leaped out and ran for their lives. They raced to a house lit up in the distance where somebody was having a keg party. The car and its ghoulish occupants followed in hot pursuit through the graveyard.

When they got to the home, partygoers heard the boys’ story and saw the spooky car off in the distance in the cemetery. A few brave souls from the party tried to get the car’s license number before the ghouls disappeared into the darkness.

Anthony is now a 19-year-old college freshman who sat at the table to hear the entire story. He was amused and no longer afraid.

But what is more frightening to me than this lurid tale of abduction was where did nine wonderful years with my son go.

Now that’s terrifying to parents who adore their son.