Getting Used to It

Historically, normal early September daily high temperatures where I live, at 6,600’ altitude in southwest Colorado, are in the high seventies or low eighties. Nice. But the forecast for this week is for the high to reach 90 five days in a row. That doesn’t prove there’s global warming going on, but maybe the New York Times online video map does. You can check every day to see how smoke mostly from the California fires spreads across western United States. Of course it’s much worse near where the fires are.

You know about the frog in the pot of water that slowly gets hotter and hotter, but the frog doesn’t jump out because the pot’s heating up so slowly that the frog doesn’t notice. This may be just a story and not really true for frogs, but it does seem to be true for humans. I’ve gotten to take it for granted –– it seems perfectly normal –– that I should check the smoke forecast every morning, just the way I used to check whether it might rain today.