Oklahoma, Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain

A sad day.  Oh, it wasn’t a terrible day for me, the weather was lovely, spent some time sitting and reading in the park, and I’m sure for billions of other people around the world, it was basically on the positive side.  Life goes on. But it’s a sad day, nonetheless.

Manzarek in the 60s

Not so much for Ray Manzarek’s death.  I am saddened by that, he was a great musician.  The Doors were a powerful band, and his keyboard playing was a big part of that.  I enjoyed his post-Doors stuff, too.  It was like coming from the darkness into the light.  But he was 74 years old, he had some kind of cancer, it’s more or less in the natural order of things.  And we will always have his music.  Condolences to friends and family.

The really sad thing today is, of course, the tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma and killed over 20 people (original reports said over 50 – I was really glad to see the initial reports were wrong).  Some of the dead were children in an elementary school.

The really tragic thing is that the weather really is getting worse, and nothing’s being done about it.

Of course, there have always been tornadoes, but this tornado was 3 kilometers wide.  That’s not a tornado, that’s a concentrated Hurricane.  That is a storm that deserves a name, and a place in history.  Locals will come to measure time in terms of “before the tornado” and “since the tornado.”

No meteorologists are saying officially that anthropogenic climate change (you didn’t like the phrase global warming, this is the phrase you get) is definitely the cause of this specific tornado, because they are scientists and don’t make rash statements like that, at least not  in public.

As a blogger, I am under no such restriction.

3 kilometers across is a freakishly huge twister.  If that’s not a sign of climate change, I don’t know what would be.  This is a new, and dangerous thing.  We have changed the sky, and  we can expect more of these.