A few days ago I heard our local TV weatherman announce the following: "Hurricane Sandra, rising in the Pacific Ocean, is the first recorded November hurricane for North America." Sandra was making landfall near Mazatlan, Mexico and would be moving towards us in Texas.
November hurricane? I wondered.. hmmm, is that something to worry about...?
Then I watched the Baylor- TCU football game played in the early evening Friday night, November 27, in Fort Worth, Texas. Baylor had hopes of winning the game and the Big 12 Championship-- and being considered for the NCAA championship playoffs. "We're Number One!" That's the chant college football fans fondly anticipate as a great season comes to a close.
But the game got completely overshadowed by the weather event-- a downpour of rain for more than four hours uninterrupted. The ferocity of the downpour, sheets of rain slamming the players, the field and the fans, turned the game into a curiosity.
Mother Nature rendered the game a preposterous mess. But the football masters-- and their television gods-- would not halt the game. Not on your life. The tradition-- games will be played in any kind of weather, unless the safety of the players is put at risk-- was sorely tested by the realities of global climate change.
Never saw anything like this my 40 years in Texas. I live about 200 miles from where this deluge of Biblical proportions took place. A hurricane parked over the middle of Texas at the end of November. Ark anybody?
A football game became something bigger-- a contest of Man vs. Nature. Humankind, in the form of a college football crowd, turned into the canary in the coal mine for global climate change. Dystopia... rising waters and driving wind and rain, brought to you this time... not by Hollywood, but by ESPN!
I know the counter-argument-- weird weather has always been with us. But I had heard about Pacific Ocean water temperatures of 80-85 degrees. Maybe this stuff is for real? You just never know where the next global experiment will be conducted, with mankind as the guinea pigs, will take place.
Man refuses to relent. "I don't care about no climate change..." Want to see what climate insanity looks like? We do almost daily. Don't mess with Texas... goes the anti-littering campaign slogan. Mess with nature and be forewarned. Nature will always win that contest.
"Nature always bats last," said a famous poet. Oh wait, that's baseball.
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