This weekend is supposed to be cooler than the previous three weeks of broiling temperatures, but don't let that resurgent marine layer fool you.
Global warming is real, and I don't need temperature charts, drought-stricken plains or pictures of polar bears swimming in search of ice to tell me that.
I know the world is in meltdown because of three simple harbingers of heat we can't beat.
Sign No. 1: My tennis-ball obsessed dog has started to quit on me.
Normally, Louie, the younger of my two Labradors, will retrieve a tennis ball as long as I am willing to throw it. When I sit on my couch watching TV, he drops the ball in my lap over and over again until I relent and take him outside to play.
To Louie, tennis balls are the point of living. They are his bliss and his chi. I do not know what this dog would have done with himself before tennis was invented. Maybe he would have fetched pine cones or small furry animals, but he would have fetched something.
During the heat wave, though, he actually reached his level of tennis ball tolerance. After about 10 minutes, he would go for the ball only if I threw it right at his mouth. If it bounced a few feet from him, he would look at me, tongue hanging out, as if to say, "Maybe I have really overestimated this whole tennis ball thing."
Sign No. 2 of a hotter planet: I need to wear
flip-flops to walk across the beach.I grew up at the beach. I run on the beach. I have always been proud of my tough feet. They are ugly -- with toes in no common agreement about which way they should point -- but they are tough.
Every other summer, by the end of the season, I have been able to walk across the sand without my flip-flops. I would laugh at people sprinting through the sand toward the water. "Tourists!" I would mutter to myself.
But this summer, even flip-flops didn't fully protect me from getting my tootsies tenderized. I ran to the water like a farmer fresh off the plane from Des Moines.
Finally, global warming sign No. 3, and it is the most shocking and undeniable of them all: My wife went in the ocean five times last weekend. That's four times more than she went in the water all last summer.
My wife loves the beach, but primarily for relaxing and tanning purposes. Sometimes I can get her to wade in up to her ankles, but inevitably she compares this experience to "stepping into ice cubes" and hightails it back to her towel.
But on Saturday, she said the second-most unexpected sentence to come out of her mouth. (The first is, "Hey, are there any good Bruce Willis action films we can watch on TV today?")
She raised her head from her beach towel and asked, "Want to go in the water?"
Moments later we were frolicking in the Pacific together. Well, we frolicked as much as we could considering one of us needed to hold onto her nose every time a wave came.
"I don't want to get water up my nose," she said as I teased her about her old-fashioned submersion technique. Clearly she doesn't understand that ocean frolicking should be a full-body experience. If you don't end up with saltwater and sand in every nook and cranny, you're not doing it right.
My wife and I went in the water together four more times, each one at her instigation. The woman who had previously approached the ocean like a cat now took to it like a dolphin.
So there you have it, conclusive proof that global warming is real. I am profoundly worried about that conclusion, but there are some upsides to our climate catastrophe. I won't have to spend as much time throwing the ball for my dog, my feet will look better because I won't be frying them, and my wife can watch my awesome bodysurfing up close.
According to most scientists, it's partly my fault that the planet is heating up. I drive a car and use more energy in one day than people in other countries use in a year. I feel bad about that, but not too bad, because I'm an American. We don't dwell on our outsized impact on the environment, at least not according to the Greendex report, a study released earlier this summer by the National Geographic Society and the research firm GlobeScan.
In the survey, only 21 percent of Americans said they felt guilty about the impact they have on the environment. By comparison, consumers in India, China and Brazil reported "guilt" scores in the high fifties.
According to the Greendex report, our guilt factor should be much higher, considering that the report ranks Americans as having the least environmentally sustainable behavior compared to people in the 17 other countries surveyed.
After reviewing the report's results, I will continue to frolic in the ocean with my wife, but I will enjoy it a little less. Warm water may be nice, but we shouldn't wait for polar bears to swim by before we clean up our act.
Paul Silva writes a weekly column for The Beach Reporter in Manhattan Beach. He can be contacted at psilva@tbrnews.com.
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