IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE

This is not what a desert is supposed to look like!

When George and I moved to Loreto Bay almost four years ago, I packed four umbrellas, never thinking we'd actually use them much or at all, but, hey, I was a Girl Scout and old habits die hard. As it turns out that was a smart move, because the past two summers have delivered a lot of rain and those umbrellas have really come in handy. Well, they did come in handy, but I couldn't find a single one during Monday's latest deluge. We got hammered with another nine+ inches, courtesy of Tropical Storm Octave, which seems an appropriate name for a rain event that produced shrieks from me that became higher pitched as the day and rainfall wore on and on and on. 

Our front courtyard Monday night

Once again the Paseo is flooded with water and once again most of us here ran around with pans and buckets to catch the leaks in our homes. And wouldn't you know it that this rain came up just about the time the mosquitoes from Tropical Storm Ivo were brought under control. So now we'll have to fight the good mosquito fight all over again. Bummer.

Tuesday morning after Octave

I'm pretty sick of the rain and didn't really want to write about it again, but I started thinking about climate change deniers Monday while sopping up water from the floor and changed my mind. What will it take for those ostriches with their heads in the sand to wake up to the reality of the world we live in? What is it about science that instills such fear in them? Why do some people totally reject an almost universally agreed upon scientific conclusion? It's fear, pure and simple. Fear that stems from a changing world and it's this fear that drives the Tea Party to declare that the Environmental Protection Agency is not a necessity and should be trashed. Get rid of the Clean Air Act and forget about greenhouse gases and keeping our rivers, lakes and streams free from toxic chemicals and other pollutants. Who needs clean water! Who needs clean air! Who needs to be a good steward of our lovely planet! Heck, let's just continue to trash it like we've always done. Drill, baby, drill, and don't worry about suffering the consequences cause you'll be dead by the time the consequences roll around. Uh, except not. Right now we are suffering the consequences of very poor stewardship in the form of global warming which in turn causes climate change. 

George and Zoe - no, she's not dead, just wet!

Weather patterns are changing and there's no denying that. Here in Baja we have seen evidence of climate change in the amount of rain that's fallen in the recent past. Baja is a desert, but you'd never know it now.  As we were driving into town today it was hard to even recognize the landscape, because it's been so dramatically altered by the rains this summer. It honestly looks like a tropical jungle. 

All over the world storms are getting stronger, bigger and more ferocious. And there are more of them. Greenland's ice sheet is melting, setting the stage for the forestation of that country, which sounds nice, but Greenland's ice sheet comprises 10 percent of the world's water. The polar ice caps are shrinking, deserts are turning into jungles and when the Pacific Northwest has more than a month of summer (as they did this year), then you know things are changing! I could go on and on, but I won't. Suffice to say we all need to get serious about the environment and what we're doing to it. Wouldn't it be nice to change the world for the better, not for the worse? For more info on global warming and climate change, click here.