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Maui Connections

Mark Twain usually gets the credit for saying, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Turns out there’s some debate about whether he or his good friend, Hartford, Conn., newspaper editor Charles Dudley Warner, was the first to make the observation.

No matter. Warner was destined to become a footnote in history while Twain — who, incidentally, developed a fondness for Maui when he visited the Sandwich Islands in 1866 — went on to immortalize the line on his lecture tours. He was the prototype for a TV weatherman almost a century before there was any such thing.

In our millennium, just mentioning the weather has evolved from a safe, frequently practiced form of small talk to a subject of profound, often terrifying, implications. Especially when it comes to little matters like the healthy survival of this planet we call home.

Everybody’s talking about the weather on Maui these days, although I’m hearing it long distance. I’m still 2,500 miles away in Tucson, Ariz., but everybody’s talking about the weather here, too, and at several spots in between.

I have to depend on the lenses of Matthew Thayer, Sherry Llanes, Tony Novak-Clifford and other social media friends since I can’t just look out the window to see Haleakala’s white crown. Photos from the summit are covered with icicles. Looking out the window here, I see gorgeous mountains, too, but they’re covered with cactus.

Our home in Kula is 2,500 feet up the mountain — not quite high enough to make good on Brian Kohne’s suggestion to build a snowman in the front yard — if we were there. Instead, we find ourselves at the other end of the Hawaiian jet stream known as the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric “river” bringing precipitation from the middle of the Pacific to North America’s West Coast and points inland.

Last week, Facebook friends sent shots of record-setting, traffic-snarling snows in Lake Tahoe in Northern California, and golf courses under water in Southern California. The same system dumped prodigious amounts of rain on the scenic foothills surrounding Tucson, turning the normally bone dry Rillito riverbed into an actual river, scenically meandering from one bank to another.

Forecasts call for more rain, possible snow and unseasonably cold temperatures here all week.

I guess it’s a little redundant to utter the words, “climate change.”

The funny thing is, unlike Mark Twain’s times, we are now in a place where we can actually do something about the weather, according to scientists who study the subject. Googling “What can you do about global warming?” produces plenty of lists from advocacy groups. These range from becoming a vegetarian or vegan (fewer cows means less methane gas from their farts and burps) to reusing rather than recycling plastic products.

The most recent poll I can find — from NBC in December — says 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is happening, and 57 percent think it’s caused by humans. Despite the claim that this constitutes a consensus, those large majorities of humans apparently don’t include too many CEOs of fossil fuel companies, or lawmakers who receive campaign contributions from them.

Indeed, the poll goes on to say whether you think climate change is a significant problem, or even real, has everything to do with which political party you belong to. Weather is no longer something you observe by stepping outside, or looking out the window — what you see depends on what you believe.

It’s always been that way — we just never had Doppler radar weather maps before.

But good luck trying to get our political parties to even agree on which way the wind is blowing.

Mark Twain might get a chuckle from a visit to today’s world, where most people actually do want to do something about the weather — but can’t because we can’t just all sit down and talk about it.

If it didn’t make him cry instead.

*****

Speaking of some humans’ efforts to alter the planet in a positive way, coral reef ecologist David Gulko will give a free presentation at the Maui Nui Marine Resources Council meeting at 5:30 p.m. March 6 in Pacific Whale Foundation’s classrooms in the Maui Harbor Shops in Maalaea. Doors open at 5 p.m.

Among his other environmental jobs, Gulko directs the state’s land-based Coral Restoration Nursery, which is developing fast-growing massive coral species to replenish ocean reefs degraded by bleaching and other stress from rising ocean temperatures.

“This program can replace large corals that are normally found in Hawaii in one year instead of decades,” says Gulko.

That is, of course, if you believe coral reef destruction is a problem.

* Rick Chatenever, award-winning columnist and former entertainment and features editor of The Maui News, is a freelance journalist and documentary scriptwriter/producer. Contact him at rickchatenever@gmail.com.

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