Yesterday –April 17, 2006– the recorded high temperature was 101 degrees.

April Seventeenth.

Today, I believe the high was one hundred…or ninety-nine…or some other ridiculously high number. It doesn’t really matter one degree or another…it was insanely hot.

Mind you, we’re used to this kind of thing later in the year. A couple of months from now a string of, say, fourteen straight 100-plus days won’t cause us to blink around here. And, for those us who’ve been here our whole lives, we kinda like our summers that way.

But April Seventeenth?!!!…

You know the really strange thing? The local news –tv, newspaper, take your pick– they reported the high temps of the past few days, but none of them gave any context for them. Not ONE media source, that I saw, stopped to ask the question, “Gee, could this be related to global warming?”

Those same stations will probably do a story on global warming sometime in the next week or so (Earth Day’s coming, so it will be obligatory)

Will they bother to remind us how high the temps have been when they run that story?
Will they connect the dots enough to show the facts: that we’ve already had eight record high temperature days this calendar year?
Or, will they just run a story about how to put your recycling in the blue plastic bag by the curb?

My bet’s on the blue plastic bags. And that’ll be a shame. Because I promise you: yesterday everyone in Dallas became a believer in global warming.

Now, we just need the media and our politicians to name it, and help to us find ways to do something about it.