New Orleans The National Climate Assessment, a report written by a crew of scientists overseen by the White House, is coming out, and it’s a scorcher. The takeaway is that climate change isn’t coming, it’s already here. On an average we’re two degrees hotter throughout the United States. In some areas people need to start worrying about food and water. Ok, in fact they say it’s not in “some areas,” but most areas.
True to our John Wayne, pioneer spirit, we’re Americans, and by god, we’re not panicking. Only 40% of us think this is much to break a sweat about. On the other hand more than half of those polled in Australia, Canada, France, and Germany think this is a major issue, and more than 60% say so in Spain and Italy. Living on their island of Japan, 70% of the Japanese think this is a huge issue.
But, why be negative? Let’s look on the good side, where those that would always be last, might finally be first. In the next couple of decades we could see a land rush in much of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and might do better than you would imagine in Louisiana and the Smokey Mountain and Appalachian areas of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and even being an Okie from Muskogee might do nicely in those areas of the Ozarks. Yes, indeed, as terrible as the news was just about everywhere, these hardscrabble, often dirt poor areas, largely in the Middle South area of the country, are looking good.
What am I really saying here? Well, temperature stayed pretty much the same for a century or in the range of hardly a half-degree warmer throughout virtually all of Alabama and Mississippi, southern and northwestern Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, western Georgia, and eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Now, the coastal area of Louisiana and some of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi around Gulfport and Biloxi might not be the places for any of you to move, but, hey, you can’t have everything can you? But, if you want to get some property for a second home now and to relocate your whole tribe over the next fifty years, Hot Springs, Arkansas could be the place for you, buddy! Or McComb and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, or anywhere around where the Tombigbee River runs through Alabama and Mississippi. These are going to be, how should I say it, not “hot” spots, but nice cool zones for living and working, based on the last 100 years anyway. The coolest places in the country on average over the century were Troy, Alabama and Okmulgee, Oklahoma. No kidding!
And, seriously, since most Americans don’t seem to think we need to worry much about this whole climate change thing and that we can just cowboy our way through another hundred, that leaves the rest of us looking at the map to try to jump in and grab a few acres somewhere in the great middle south of the United States before all of the darned one-percenters corner the market and relocate from New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and other hot spots because they want food and water.
Now’s the time to be living in the South if you have a vision for the future, and a couple of dollars to put down on some land that might be left, high and dry, cool and collected. Go South, young man, go south!
***
As Station Manager of Kabf, I get emailed new music releases. Please enjoy Willie Nelson’s The Wall.