Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.
If you’ve lived in Pittsburgh through a full season cycle, whether as a certified Yinzer or as a Carnegie Mellon student (sorry first-years, you’re not included), you know the weather gets a bit quirky as the seasons change. Actually, let’s be real, it’s always unpredictable. More than once you’ve left the safety and comfort of your dorm or apartment or house, ready to face the day when it’s nice and sunny out. Then, after you’ve left what was undoubtedly the worst 15-112 lecture you’ve suffered through so far this semester, all of a sudden it’s pouring. You stand under the turtle shell at the entrance of Wean five and wonder if it’s worth getting soaked or if you should try to find a way through the numerous secret connections between buildings so you can get to your next mind-numbingly boring lecture.
As Carnegie Mellon students, it’s a rite of passage to get soaked in a sudden Pittsburgh rainstorm. (You should try it sometime.) However, we don’t recommend getting soaked right before you have to sit in a packed lecture hall; no one wants the humidity to follow them in from the storm. More often than not, the sudden downpour will clear in a few minutes. Our local Mother Nature loves edging a good storm, leaving campus humid and gray for hours on end.
Now, as we move into October, it becomes harder to ignore just how much weather patterns have been skewing towards some concerning extremes. As of the production of this issue on Oct. 6, the forecast high is 83 degrees Fahrenheit and the low is 53 degrees Fahrenheit, according to The Weather Channel. This broad range is sure to leave you sweating in your hoodie at midday or shivering in your t-shirt after picking up your Sunday-night-dinner. Right now, these conditions are frustrating for us to live through, and we hope that our campus buildings will continue to shelter us and not blast heaters on days with crazy midday highs. But moving forward, we hope to see some efforts by our government to help with climate change.
If you’re curious or want a tangible representation of just how imminent climate change impacts are beyond a crazy forecast, check out the Climate Clock. Although, it won’t tell you if the Pittsburgh skies will rain all over your next midterm completion celebration.
The Climate Clock on July 1, 2022, read seven years, 20 days and 23 hours left before climate change reaches a point of no return. Now, the clock reads just under five years.
Leave a Reply