Climate change, on the other hand . . .

It is December 15, 2008. The Las Vegas valley is a city at the same latitude as San Francisco (naturally mild weather) in the middle of the northern Mojave Desert (little rainfall, extreme temperatures). So we do occasionally get snow – except it only sticks at night and in the dead of winter. Las Vegas should only ever get about half an inch deep in snow in late January.

In North Las Vegas, they’re reporting an inch or more. The photos are foggy, with non-evergreens – trees which normally only start to brown and die around Christmas, because we have no autumn – covered in snow.

We’ve been through fog this winter so thick visibility was limited to feet. I know most of you are probably from temperate climates, so I want you to imagine a climate where it is spring and fall for about two weeks, winter for about a month, and summer for the rest of the year. We get so hot that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in February. We get torrential rain in the early winter that has been taking place in the first weeks of November.

Before the year is out people will have slipped and killed themselves on black ice around the Strip.

I wish there was something funny I could say about this, but the capital of the Mojave is covered in more snow than New York got at any point in 1999. I love snow and all, but I’m actually pretty fucking terrified right now.