Opinion

Several months ago I noticed that container ships were stacking up in the harbor outside of Los Angeles. The administration did nothing about it then. Now, however, less than two months before Christmas, President Joe Biden has decreed that the union will work 24 hours a day to unload the 60 ships that are waiting there (plus the additional number that will arrive next week). He has no idea, however, where workers will put the contents of those thousands of containers, since the warehouse space is over 99 percent full already. Nor has he come up with a plan that will give truckers what they need to haul away the booty. It looks like some soldiers will have to take a crash course in truck driving in order to get a few toys into stores before Christmas. Some retailers have already leased ships in an attempt to bypass the bottleneck.

Few things unite Texans like the shared experience of Texas weather. We can all agree that Texas summers are hot, our droughts are frequent, and Texas-sized storms can pack a punch. And we have all learned to pay close attention to flood and hurricane warnings.

The state climatologist recently predicted that Texas will continue to get hotter and for longer periods of time during the next 15 years. In “Assessment of Historic and Future Trends of Extreme Weather in Texas, 1900-2036,” John Nielsen-Gammon predicted the average annual temperature in Texas will be three degrees warmer than the average from 1950-1999, and the number of 100-degree days could nearly double compared to 2000-2018.