Environment - What Global Warming?

As any gardener worth their salt knows, the world is changing. Weather patterns are changing. Normally, anise swallowtails come in late March through early May. I saw my second anise swallowtail of the year in my garden two days ago. What happened to the rest? I'm happy that this was an egg-laying female, but usually I get a few dozen several months earlier. And the bees have finally started showing up. All I had during the echium bloom season (which normally lasts into late June, but ended in May this year) was a couple of stray bumblebees, a handful of natives, and a very occasional honeybee, Apis mellifera. But I still have it better than the denizens of western China:

Westernmost China's Xinjiang region was under a blistering heatwave Sunday, with the mercury hitting as high as 44.8 degrees Celsius (112.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Turpan city, a local official said.

Turpan is usually regarded as the hottest place in China, but in June temperatures normally average about 31 degrees Celsius, a meteorologist at the Urumqi meteorological bureau said of the desert region.

I'm not complaining, I swear. I've only experienced anything over 110 F once, and I was lying on the porch with a bundle of ice cubes wrapped in a towel leaking cold water over my head as my eyelids slowly turned crispy and every cell in my body began leaking its precious nutrient fluids. I wanted to die, and my only regret was, there was no handy walk-in freezer for me to walk into.

But that was before Chimptard von Idiotski announced that there was no such thing as global warming. It's a mild, sweet evening here, cool but comfortably so. How many more of such evenings shall we have, I wonder?

Stumble It!