Don’t Slander Mother Nature

* Weather happens. Whether we like it or not.

Amusingly, we use terms like “nasty,” “foul” and “dreary” when we have a spell of rainy days to deal with. Living in a semiarid land dependent upon northern snowpacks for our drinking water, why is this called inclement?

Defined as “unmerciful” by Webster’s Dictionary, without “inclement” weather we’d dry up, die of thirst and blow away.

Stop being so grumpy, Southern California. Without these brief series of Pacific storms every year, there would be “no here here.”

Humans have gone from living within Mother Nature to the perceived adversarial qualities of her personality. There are no disasters for Earth, just a growing, changing planet that harbors an ungrateful species of bipeds--us!

What’s worse, if global warming is attributable to our mistakes, then it’s our fault. Now who’s the weatherman going to blame?

ROGER VON BOTOW

Laguna Beach