Last summer the world felt hot and sick. An unnatural heat made Pennsylvania feel like the inside of a coke bottle lying along the road. The air was thick and heavy with moisture. I worked in an old warehouse loading boxes of paper for minimum wage. I tried not to think about the heat while my skin stung with dust and sweat.

This is summer, I thought. It’s supposed to be hot.

The warmth continued until the autumn trees turned mostly brown instead the brilliant oranges and reds brought out by cold October nights. The warmth persisted and I watched a football game under a warm November sun. I cut evergreen branches from hemlocks for our Christmas decorations wearing a tee-shirt.

Early this January I walked to class in cool rains and with warm winds blowing in my face.

“What has happened to my home,” I said to myself as I looked at daffodils budding though the moist winter dirt outside Smith Hall. This wasn’t right. It still isn’t.

“This weather is freaking me out,” I said to my girlfriend, Jillian, as I looked out the pantry window at the rain falling on the cemetery. It was early January and around 50 degrees out.

She pointed a finger at global warming, and she’s right — the planet is getting warmer. I’m just not convinced of the reason.

I do know it felt colder in the ’90s. The decade was peaceful and fuzzy for me. Winter days were cold and gray. We had regular snow storms that canceled school. My friends and I would slide around on Madera’s frozen creek or sled ride on steep winding paths cut through the woods by four-wheelers.

Our house is heated with a coal furnace. The mornings were cold because the fire would burn out overnight. I would dress while still lying in bed. During this developmental period in my life, I learned something.

Winters are to be cold.

Tom Casey is the weatherman back home. He’s a graying man with a raspy smoker’s voice. He’s always happy when the weather is warm in the winter.

“It’s hug-the-weatherman day because the weather is going to beautiful throughout the week.” Casey says, standing in front of the Storm Tracker 10 weather map. The other news people make light-hearted banter with him about the great weather.

“Great forecast, Case” Carolyn Donaldson says with that forced smile. I don’t like her either.

I don’t want to hug Tom Casey in his cheap suit. I want to wipe that smug grin off his face. Not everyone loves unseasonably warm weather. I value the cold. It has a cleansing effect. The cold makes me love my clothes and my house in a way I can’t in the summertime.

A cold winter makes hot soup better. It makes spring a good thing and summer a better one. Our seasons perpetuate one another; they are dependant on one another. The air feels cool and fresh in the autumn because the air felt hot and stale in the summer.

But the air has been staying stale longer. Al Gore and a great majority of the scientific community say it’s because carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have caused the atmosphere to retain heat at an unnatural level.

Natural processes can also explain the current warming: cosmic-ray flux, for instance. After unbiased research, it’s reasonable to believe global warming is our fault; it’s reasonable to believe it isn’t. It’s not reasonable to think it’s the end of the world.

If this warming continues, it won’t kill everything. It will change things. This is a changing planet; always has been. Pennsylvania was once a tropical swampland. It’s why we have the coal my family uses to heat our house. The earth may turn it back into a swamp all on its own. If it does, we can move.

This state is my home and part of my home is the cold. I don’t wish for it to change. A warm winter is ugly. It’s brown and stark. The cold winter months have always reminded me of my place here.

The seasons are familiar; change is familiar. I want the summers to stay warm and winters to stay cold. Autumns should be a graceful slide from one to the other. And like the ice ages of century’s ago, our planet might be shifting into a new season.

Fortunately, this planet has taught me what to do. It is my place to adapt.