My View From the cheap seats

Everywhere you look these days, the weather is trying to kill us.

Wildfires are turning whole states into campfire stories. Rivers are popping their banks like they’ve had enough of staying put. Heat waves are making people question whether the sun has moved closer out of spite. Tornadoes are touching down in places that previously only worried about pollen.

Scientists, with their charts and satellites and calm inside voices, tell us this is climate warming. Long-term trends. Carbon emissions. Complex systems pushed out of balance. It’s serious business, and it deserves serious attention.

But I can’t help thinking about an old man I met years ago who had a much simpler explanation.

I was a college student then, working for my hometown weekly newspaper. One of my many duties involved getting the papers ready for mailing in the early morning hours, which meant I was usually tired, underpaid, and standing around waiting for coffee to become effective.

One morning, after a huge thunderstorm had rolled through the night before — the kind with lightning that rattles windows and thunder that makes you reconsider your roof — an older gentleman walked in to buy a copy of the paper.

He looked outside at the soggy street, shook his head knowingly, and said, “You know why we’re having this weather?”

This was not a question.

Before I could offer anything foolish like “No, sir,” he explained.

“It’s all the rockets we’re launching,” he said confidently. “Punching holes in the atmosphere. That’s what’s causing all this crazy weather.”

Then he paid for his paper and left, mission accomplished.

At the time, this struck me as both alarming and impressive. Alarming because if rockets were punching holes in the sky, no one had mentioned it during science class. Impressive because he had delivered his theory with absolute certainty, the kind usually reserved for people who have personally repaired the atmosphere themselves.

Over the years, I’ve thought about him often, especially when the weather gets weird — which now seems to be most days ending in “y.”

Back then, we didn’t talk much about climate change. We talked about bad storms, hot summers, and “this is the worst I can remember,” which everyone has been saying since weather was invented. When something unusual happened, we looked for a cause that fit neatly into a sentence.

Rockets punching holes in the sky fit beautifully.

You could picture it. Somewhere up there, the atmosphere looked like a dartboard. Rain leaked through. Heat escaped. Tornadoes slipped in accidentally. It made sense in the way that duct tape makes sense: not technically correct, but deeply satisfying.

Today, of course, the explanations are longer. They involve greenhouse gases, ocean temperatures, jet streams, and feedback loops. You need graphs. You need patience. You need people to agree on facts, which is where things get tricky.

Because certainty, it turns out, is comforting.

The old man didn’t need peer-reviewed studies. He didn’t need models or projections. He had rockets, holes, and weather gone wild. End of discussion.

And in a strange way, I envy that.

Now when extreme weather hits, we argue. We debate causes, motives, and whether anyone should do anything at all. We scroll, we shout, we sigh. The storms keep coming anyway.

I don’t know what became of that man. I like to think he’s still out there somewhere, looking at a flood or a heat wave and nodding knowingly.

“Shouldn’t have launched so many rockets,” he probably says.

And while scientists continue doing the serious work of explaining what’s really happening to our planet, a small part of me still remembers a time when the sky was simpler — fragile, apparently full of holes, and one good rocket away from another thunderstorm.