Enemy of the People

 When my brother sold his condo in Jersey and headed south to Florida, I never thought I would come to envy him.  My three brothers and I are all in our seventies now, though, and men of our age begin to feel a chill.  When the temperature in our apartments falls below 75 degrees or so, we begin looking through our closets for a cardigan sweater, typically a grey or beige affair that buttons up the front and will help keep our cold, brittle bones from rattling.  New York dwellings had a reputation for being overheated during cold winter months, so much so that steamed over windows have long been icons of our fair city.  With rising fuel costs, however, building managers began to adhere to strict legal guidelines.  If the outside temperature goes below 55 degrees, the heat will click on; otherwise, you're on your own, Nanook afloat on an urban iceberg.  The truth of the matter is indoor temperatures from 56 to the low 70s  leave most New Yorkers, (to borrow their word) "freezing."

And this past winter, though far from the coldest we, (especially us old codgers), have ever experienced, seemed grim, grey and endless.  We seemed stuck in a zone of cold just maddeningly around that 55 degree mark.  It was never quite cold enough for janitors to turn on the boilers, but it was never warm enough to be comfortable in one's home, and it never ended.

What could account for this strange weather phenomenon?  Most of us New Yorkers knew that climate change, often called global
warming by the careless, could actually give us colder weather under certain conditions.  After all, we had seen The Day After Tomorrow the movie which shows New Yorkers forced to take refuge in the library on 42nd Street and burn books to keep from freezing to death.  We knew that climate change could freeze us before it grilled us to death.  But why weren't our local weather forecasters talking about this?  Why particularly wasn't Lonnie Quinn, CBS' matinee idol forecaster, admired as much for his sterling character and devoted work ethic as for his good looks, coming clean, giving us the low down?

I decided to do my own research.  I just knew they weren't telling us the truth in the media.  What else was new?  Lots of corporate types don't like to acknowledge climate change in the first place--whether the gods are responsible or irresponsible human beings.  Weather forecasters have been lying about the weather forever.  It's bad for business so their bosses instruct them to lie.  Henrik Ibsen laid it all out for us over a hundred years ago in his gripping play on the subject, An Enemy of the People.  I began by turning to Google Maps.  The result was truly shocking.  Where one expected to find a large island of ice at the geographic pole, there was nothing but a large expanse of blue ocean.  I began clicking on the zoom slider, trying to get a closer view, but no matter, the screen stayed blue.  I had heard predictions that the Arctic ice would soon melt entirely, but the map indicated that it was already gone.  No ice.  No barber pole.  No Santa.  No reindeer harnessed to a sleigh.  Nothing but blue water.  The unthinkable had already occurred and no one had bothered to tell us.  (Closer reading reveals that the amount of ice at the North Pole is a matter of some debate.  I will leave it to the reader to do further research on this.)

Well, I thought as winter was drawing to a close, with the onset of spring I will be warm; I will open the windows and enjoy the balmy and sweet-scented breezes of spring, the joy of living in a temperate zone.  It is now May 10th as I put down these thoughts, and, though the thermometer is no longer stuck in the 55 degree range, plus or minus a few points, it is now stuck in the 60 degree range plus or minus a few points.  It must be those calving glaciers.  You can't keep dropping chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island into the sea and not expect it to have consequences, I muttered to myself.  I thought back to years in New York City's public school classrooms lacking air conditioning when temperatures in early May might be in excess of 90 degrees and teachers and students alike studied their calendars, counting the days until summer recess. 55 degrees or 65 degrees seemed to make little difference to my old bones.  I was still cold, and, beyond cold, anxious for a whole series of days in which the sun would show itself as it once did in the old times before the climate had changed.