The clock does not cease its ticking, and accompanied with it, tragedies fall into its place. Entering this year, we have already seen the effects of climate change with the recent hurricane that devastated states along the east coast all the way up to North Carolina. Hurricane Helene was its name, reaching up all the way to the mountains of North Carolina, killing over 100, and leaving people in a fatal flood where casualties only rose.

We have entered La Niňa, and what it is consists of the cooling of the ocean’s surface, and in name it sounds like just what we need. However, during La Niňa, wind patterns are different, and a lot of the warm wind is pushed towards Asia. The Pacific pushes the jetstream north, and it leads to bad news for us southerners, because with the addition of La Niňa, our winter wonderland is not looking so wonderful. More likely than not, Oklahoma will experience warmer than normal temperatures in the south, and cooler temperatures up north.

There is a question in the current state of the north east part of our country as well, with Helene’s recent destruction. La Niňa is meant to cool the oceans, but the hurricane’s very existence is the result of warmer than normal seas. La Niňa can be seen as having little importance; no longer does it matter, because the climate is in such shambles that normal weather patterns can no longer be seen.

Have you perhaps noticed it? Take some time to think about the seasons when you first entered high school. You could tell, just by stepping out and feeling the air on your skin, what season it was. Now, we don’t even have an in between, and if we do, it’s a sliver of something that was once so prominent. What we have now is extreme heat, that only gets hotter each year, and extreme winters that only continue to get crazier, and everything that was once normal seemingly becomes meaningless.

So what exactly can we expect in terms of Oklahoma’s weather forecast? It is a bleak reality, actually. For what is meant to be our colder seasons – Autumn and Winter – expect warmer temperatures. For when it rains, expect harsher and more severe flooding. For when it gets dry, expect worse droughts. With such dry temperatures, we may become another hot spot for wildfires, and maybe consider preparing for the extremes of all of our cases.