DESPITE some hot, muggy afternoons, we had a pretty normal Central Virginia summer.

If we get average rainfall during the last four months of the year, we will finish with about 45 inches, which is what we tend to expect annually in our region.

How does all this translate into weather for the coming winter, as our thoughts move from hot July afternoons to Christmas-card snowfalls and January blizzards.

Snow lovers are already hoping this will be a frigid, snowy winter, while snow haters are praying that it will be mild and relatively dry like last year.

Europe is plagued with an energy crisis, and the cold season is coming ahead of schedule. 

The stability of the EU's natural gas reserves now depends on a mild winter. But new weather forecasts for next week indicate that "Arctic chill will blow across western Europe through next week will be the first test of how willing people are to delay switching on the heating in a bid to save energy and ease household budgets," according to Bloomberg. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been booed on stage during a surprise appearance at a New York City climate change music festival.

Pelosi, 82, was attending the Global Citizen's music festival in Central Park on Saturday night with husband Paul when Indian actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas invited the Democrat on stage.

Pope Francis has joined forces with population control activist Jeffrey Sachs in the Pope’s youth initiative the “Economy of Francesco,” promoting “a process of inclusive dialogue and young, vibrant, global change, moving towards a new economy,” and addressing “climate change.”

Taking place September 22 through 24 in Assisi, “The Economy of Francesco” (EoF) conference is now in its third year, with this event being the first to be held in-person.

The California Air Resources Board voted to end the sale of natural gas heaters by 2030.

The goal is to replace all gas-powered furnaces and water heaters with electric appliances.

California can’t even keep the lights on as it is.

What could possibly go wrong? 

During a recent interview with CNBC, West explained where his deal with Gap started to go south. 

“There’s a lot of stuff where they have a lot of commitments to China,” the rapper said. “We wanted to do localized manufacturing which is completely possible with some of the factories that I’m buying here in California. We can actually bring industry back to America.”

Check out his full comments on this in the video below.

In recent years, governments have been demonstrating their subservience to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, BlackRock and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial-industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term is used to disguise the crisis and current restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.

We usually don’t think about the wonderful service fossil fuels provide in terms of being a store of heat energy for winter, the time when there is a greater need for heat energy. Figure 1 shows dramatically how, in the US, the residential usage of heating fuels spikes during the winter months.