As We Digress: What Warming, Now?

Yes, we all love the rain. It is wonderful, it means we get greener Springs and wet summers, but not when we aren't used to it.

Winters in Jordan used to be a tad drier and less menacing. This winter, though I am enjoying it too much for my own good, does look unusual and scary, simply because this is not what my city is used to. Rain to the extent of rain-flooded streets, the overflowing sewage systems that weren't built to handle that much water and cars that certainly weren't purchased to handle such climate, is menacing and discouraging. Don't be too happy just yet, because what this country has been complaining about for the past decade now has become painfully true: "we want a greener Jordan in 2010", that's what they said in the year 2000, (and by greener they didn't mean more environment-aware, they just meant they wanted more trees and tried to halt urban-crawling) but there are no more trees than there was a decade ago, and Amman is the whitest city on this globe, thanks to its famous white stones and nauseously uniform white buildings with barely enough space to plant tiny bushes on sidewalks that eventually prevents people from walking on pavements and forces them to walk on the street instead.

I write, more alarmed than ever, listening to two things: Jónsi and Alex's Riceboy Sleeps, and the roaring thunder, and you can count me as one of the happiest people on earth, the mother of us all. But as Jordan becomes greener, possibly with mossy streets in Spring, and dam water for swimming in the summer, you should know that elsewhere, where summers were cool and breezy they're now hot and scorching, where countries that have 50 Celsius in the summer are having winters that are flooding their unready infrastructure to support so much rainfall, glaciers are melting away, summer is spring, spring is winter, winter is fall, nothing's the same as before... There... I said it... The huge imbalance of weather around the world is truly a huge deal, and I am no treehugger, but I know when the world around us cries for help and no one is doing anything to save it from certain doom, there's no way we're going to make it. Many people are saying that there's nothing we can do to halt global warming, but there's a lot we can do to hinder it.

Here are some ideas from Carbon Footprint that we all can use, it might serve us well to see less drastic climate change as long as we live, save come a disaster that would sweep us away in one huge frenzy in the form of a volcano-snowstorm-and-tsunami-altogether:

http://www.carbonfootprint.com/minimisecfp.html