I basked in the warm sunlight, the afternoon rays illuminating the sky and casting a glare across the cars in the school parking lot. Heat waves emanated from the asphalt, and puffy clouds dotted the brilliant blue sky. A perfect summer day, it seemed…but it was in the winter month of February!

An anomaly, perhaps? Surely the sun would not dare to shine so brightly in winter. But no, a mere three days later, the temperatures rose again, the clouds parted, and I baked under my winter layers.

I’m sure we’ve all noticed the turbulent changes in weather over the past couple of years. Winter has started sprinkling snow on our San Diego mountaintops, while spring and autumn have really just become summer 0.5 and summer 2.0, respectively. And I have to say, I’m a huge fan. Who needs predictable autumn breezes or mild spring temperatures? Back-to-back thunderstorms and heat waves are so in.

I’d personally like to thank ExxonMobil, Nestlé, and their other corporate buddies for making the weather forecast look like a sine wave. Thanks to them, I can now expect our SoCal “winters” to last from December to January at most, leaving me with 10 out of 12 months to bask in obscene heat — interrupted every three–to–four weeks by violent rain spells and cold snaps.

Nowadays my favorite pastime is looking at the weather app, watching the temperature forecast for the next week rise and fall like a wave: a sunny high-70s day dropping to a stormy 55° the next day. I never know what to expect, and that only adds to the fun. When I step outside in March, will there be a downpour or blazing heat? Do I need sweaters or tank tops in November? I certainly don’t know, and the weatherman probably doesn’t either.

We’ve broken records with our weather, and at the rate we’re going, it’s only going to continue. I think it’s a beautiful achievement: our temperatures soar to blistering heights in the dead of summer and plummet to bitter lows a scant few months later. It’s a testament to human ingenuity — but mostly the ingenuity of my aforementioned favorite companies. Isn’t that great? Survival of the fittest will always prevail, and soon we’ll weed out all of those weak species that can’t handle a measly fifteen-degree temperature change.

Every night before I go to sleep, I think about the amazing changes that humans are forcibly bringing to our planet, and I can only wonder what will come next. Flowers in Antarctica? No, wait, that’s happened already. A tornado in California? Oh…we saw that a couple months ago. Well, there’s bound to be some new, exciting changes coming to our climate, and I can’t wait to watch them in real time.