2120 Hindsight: Funky Weather

22Aug09

In the last five or six years, the weather has been really strange.  It used to be that a person could pretty much count on the weather to do as it pleased, depending on the current state of disputes and negotiations in the International Climate Control Conference.  Usually at least one major nation would be manufacturing warm, rainy weather while another one, somewhere, would be fabricating cooler and/or drier weather, or some daytime or nighttime or seasonal variation on such themes.  They would obviously be trying to get their preferred conditions in place over their own territories, but there was the inevitable lagging effect on into neighboring countries and even across oceans; and often those effects could mix from several sources and produce fairly extreme weather conditions.  So for the ordinary person, anything could happen in weather conditions, from one day to the next.  So a person would normally just put on some Adapta-khakis and an Adapta-vest, before heading out the door in the morning, and that would generally be good enough for almost anything that Daughter Nature would throw your way.

Oh, but then fashion reared its ugly head.  Or at least that’s what some people say.  The theory is, women got sick of dressing the same as each other, every day.  Adaptafashions may have sprung out of the burka; there may have been an era when many women wanted the experience of Common Dress; but those days were gone long before I was born.  Ever since I can remember, women (and, sure, some men) have wanted to dress diversely, like they did back in olden times.  This was not an easy sell – not in a culture that had long ceased to accommodate such tastes, nor in the laws and ordinary ways of living that had grown up around the Common Dress philosophy.

What really turned things around was the Weather Scare of the late 2090s.  Some say it was a hoax, or an artificial setup intended to bring about a change in leadership.  The weather would have returned to its normal unpredictability, they say; it was just going through a cyclical period of extreme stability.  Such cycles were said to recur every couple of decades – every 50 or 100 years, in varying degrees of intensity.  But, you know, when there’s no food, people panic.

It probably had to happen sooner or later anyway.  The ICCC was one of the last international bodies relying significantly on male leadership.  When climate became the big arena for potential warfare and national security in the early decades of the 21st century, the men and the money gravitated in that direction.  There had been other scares and missteps before the 2090s, though.  Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly obvious that new leadership, provided especially by women but also by some members of the elame, had been substantially improving cooperation and reducing warfare in a variety of international collaborations.  So at last, starting especially in 2093, the Weather Scare provided the big global push that women needed.  It was finally feasible to throw out those dinosaurs – that male leadership of the ICCC – wholesale, around the world.

Changes followed swiftly.  By the turn of the century, the ICCC had been reformed and restructured into a vastly more collaborative and interactive body. Fifteen years after that, what was once hard to imagine and hard for the public to accept – a return to a non-engineered climate – became the standard assumption and goal of future climate planning.  So, as I say, the weather started to change.  Relatively predictable seasons returned and, with them, we began to experience the constant and obligatory changes in fashion that people had endured a hundred years ago.

We may never know if this all came about because of deliberate efforts by female leaders.  Nor does anyone seem very interested in finding out.  The thinking seems to be, As long as things go smoothly, who cares who’s in charge?  But I, unfortunately, now have a dozen perfectly good pieces of Adaptafashion, gathering dust in my closet.  Instead of using them and enjoying their lifetime warranty, I find that I am now almost expected to join the women, and now a number of men as well, in this unnecessary and repetitive exercise of buying and wearing new clothing.

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Tags: adaptafashion, climate change, funky weather, iccc, internaional climate control conference, manufactured climate, manufactured weather