Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.
I believe the earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons and I think mankind has been adapting to climate as long as man has walked the earth.
As you get more global warming, you should see an increase in the extremes of the hydrological cycle - droughts and floods and heavy precipitation.
There was no roof where we trained, so it used to get very hot during the day and the mud used to feel very cold during the evening.
Global warming is actually a misnomer. It should be global extremes and global swings, because you add - as you add more energy into the atmosphere, it sloshes around. Energy doesn't simply uniformly warm up the planet. And that means droughts in one area, enormous snowstorms in another area, 100-year floods here, 100-year forest fires there.
Our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change. The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year [2011] can each be attributed to climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.
The climate is changing; I don't think you can deny that. But climate has always changed.
We were just covered in dirt the whole time. It was so hot - and that was in winter. I can not imagine what it's like in summer and how the people who actually live out there survive.
Western Nebraska is the only place in all my travels where I have seen the dust blowing and the rain falling at the same time.
The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.
I grew up in Texas, but that was 20 years ago. Last year, in Fort Worth, they had hail the size of softballs. We're seeing more and more powerful storms, of all types, almost on a biblical level.
California is the only state in the union where you can fall asleep under a rose bush in full bloom and freeze to death.
I think we do have cyclic changes in weather, and I think that's been throughout the course of history.
August in sub-Saharan Los Angeles is one of the great and awful tests of one's endurance, sanity and stamina.
I've been up in the Arctic Circle where they have hockey rinks that don't have any heating. So it's - 40 C outside, it's - 55 inside. Or there's a social centre but no budget for anybody to run any programs. Stuff we wouldn't accept in Winnipeg, but we let it go on and on and on.
When I'm traveling, I like extremes. It's nice for me to go to Canada in the mountains where it's snowing or to Cambodia where it's stifling.
Our climate is always changing.
They always say to Californians that we don't have seasons. Of course, that is not true. We have fire, flood, mud and drought.
We shot 'Mudbound' in the South in the summer, which meant we were working in extreme heat and humidity at all times and that it could go from glaring sun to overcast skies to pouring rain in a matter of minutes, often shifting multiple times a day.
It was cold out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors, happy as lambs in the spring.
I believe that human beings shouldn't live in climates that they cannot survive naked... and New York, although full of energy and heart, does not fall within that rubric.
As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.
here in the summer desert, winter found my blood
Life is fragile: it thrives only in a narrow range of temperatures between freezing and boiling. How lucky that our planet is just the right distance from the sun: a little farther, and the death of the perpetual Antarctic winter - or worse - would prevail; a little closer, and the surface would truly fry anything that touched it.
Riding the trail of ancient nomad societies from Mongolia across the Eurasian steppe to the still-distant Danube River in Hungary, I had grappled with the harsh realities of Central Asia - where seasonal temperatures range from -52C to the mid-40s - and come to appreciate the ancient and symbiotic relationship nomads share with their environment.
