Thank you for editorial, reporting
Thank you for reporting on Dr. Michael Mann’s climate change lecture on Sept. 23 (“PSU professor: Climate change is greatest challenge”), and also for your excellent Friday editorial on the various ways that Nature is feeling different this autumn (“Change of seasons”). I was particularly appreciative of your mentioning that this year’s fuzzy worms are all black suggesting, based on folklore, a milder winter.
I decided this year, for the first time, to plant fall crops. This is unusual for an amateur “farmer” in Boston, and it’s especially unusual because I live in an apartment building. I grow vegetables in containers on the roof where they are typically exposed to strong cold autumn winds and driving rains. But it seemed to me that our unusually mild spring and very warm summer weather could quite likely continue into the fall. So, at the end of August, I planted beets, peas and spinach. What did I have to lose?
Like Pennsylvania, we still haven’t approached frost conditions, and I’ve already harvested a round of beet greens, and pea shoots are also ready to harvest. These crops will keep producing as long as the fall stays mild. The only problem is that New England has been suffering from a terrible drought, making it hard to keep plants adequately watered. I’d be happier if our temperatures were “normal” and our rain returned to its former plentiful and sustaining patterns.
Your editorial emphasized that it seems harder to talk about politics or display political signs because of a more hostile partisan atmosphere. Many members of Congress are similarly afraid to express publicly what they think about climate change because of threats of retribution, and because of the extremely hostile partisan atmosphere. However, one nonpartisan group of volunteers, Citizens’ Climate Lobby, meets regularly with every member of Congress to try to make it safe for them to enact climate legislation.
Judy Weiss
Brookline, Mass.