Lions and Lambs

Listening to Vivaldi's Fourth Season on the way to work, I was musing on the piece's appropriateness.   After a week in the sun with the Divine Mrs. M., the weekend was a rude shock.  Three inches of slush on Sunday morning with off and on snow all day with temps in the 30s felt more like a slight thaw in January than the end of March.  If there is a quick turnaround in the weather this week and next, the summer growing season should come off as scheduled.  If this weather hangs on, it will become more dicey as to when planting will start.  By this time last year,  tractors were in the fields and crops were being planted.   Meanwhile, a United Nations committee on climate change is warning in a new report that conditions in coastal areas around the world will become increasingly dire as ice sheets continue to melt and  new atmospheric conditions are exacerbating problems in tropical growing areas.   It is somewhat ironic that climate deniers in the US continue to get positive feedback from the unusually cold conditions in the eastern US, while the impacts of our profligacy are visited on the world's poorest residents.  They did not share in the gains brought by the industrial revolution, but they will certainly get more than their share of the pain caused by the climate fall out from it.