So here we are one week from the kick off of summer – Memorial Day weekend! We are also a week past the traditional “end of frost” – Mother’s Day.

These past two weekends mark the highlight of the suburbia outdoor art festival. It’s a time when people flock to their local garden centers like over anxious teens trying to get their Miley Cyrus tickets. You wade through oceans of people to carefully chose your ultimate outdoor palette and begin transforming your yard into something you hope can make the cover of Homes and Gardens.

But wait.

That “all clear” from frost traditionally marked by Mother’s Day was a false alarm this year. Last night the greater Cincinnati area had a return visit from an old winter foe – the frost warning. With T minus 7 days to go before the opening of swimming pools and the start of festivities that mark the summer time we are seeing temperatures 10-15 degrees below the average. The whole irony is that only a month ago this was flip-flopped. During April we were seeing temperatures pushing the mercury up 10-20 degrees above normal, which even sparked the local news outlets to ponder the question “did we skip spring and go straight to summer?”

So here I am after a night of hearing that old rumble of my furnace and having to close the house up like a hermetically sealed vault wondering if I shouldn’t go out and start disposing my old cans of Freon into the air in hopes of warming the globe back to a level that is customary for this time of year.

Of course this synopsis all sounds good if you are on the right side of the political spectrum. I am honestly shocked that Matt Drudge doesn’t have the flashing beacon out proclaiming: “Global Warming? Mid-West Wakes To Frost In May”.

But this has been a constant problem with the whole global warming debate. Warm is usually synonymous to things like comfort and cuddly. It’s what happens when you have scientists frame the debate instead of wordsmiths like Frank Luntz.

Luckily we are starting to hear more prominent figures use better terms like “global climate change”, but that isn’t even hard-hitting enough. We need a stronger term to describe the forthcoming demise of our planet. Something like “horrendous death to us all”.

Watching these influxes of our normally stable climate should make the biggest skeptic wonder what’s going on, but instead the terminology has failed to scare us into action. We need to start fighting the climate change with much darker terminology. That isn’t enough though. We must also start taking serious action. Political debate should long be over on this issue and we should already be into serious action. Sadly our lack of fearfully strung words to incense a vision of death and destruction upon the place we all call home has left us in a dire position. We are seeing major climate change happening already. Don’t believe me? Just go outside on this frosty morning and remember – in 5 days the swimming pools will be open.