No Fall and Spring?

           When people talk about global warming or climate change, the usual images that we think of are floods, droughts, thermometers going up to 40 degrees, and so on. However, there are also various effects that are not widely advertised to the public. For instance, in Korea, our climate was one of those climates that had all four seasons and had very distinct changes. This has radically changed after the Industrial Revolution affected our climate.

           To elaborate on this topic, I will recall an anecdote of mine. My school was a place where in winter, it snowed in spring, flowers bloomed all over the campus in summer, the chicadas sang in a loud and sometimes annoying way in fall, all the trees would dye their leaves with reddish colors. For the past few years, however, the process that was shown in the fall and spring phase has disappeared. Instead of the blooming and the change of color, we just go right into the summer or winter phase.

           Visual scenes are not all that indicate this strange change. The temperature, being scorching hot in the summer, suddenly drops almost 10degrees per day in October. This shows how dramatically the temperature changes: it changes from temperatures such as 35 degrees, a typical summer temperature, to 5degrees in one week. With these kinds of changes going on in short intervals, seasons such as fall do not have a time to appear.

           The time between summer and winter is pretty much the same. The temperature escalates too fast for the flowers to bloom resulting in a disaster for the plants that are accustomed to being born in cool weather.

           Although all of the examples are about flowers or such, the same goes for humans. We also have innate systems that adjust slowly according to the weather around us. However, if the climate changes so suddenly, it will become confused causing a malfunction, in this case a trip to the hospital, in our body.