Youth: Hey, old guy, what was it like before global warming? No matter what the weather these days, they blame it on global warming. Has it always been like this?

Old guy: Why, when I was a young whippersnapper there was no such thing as global warming, so generally we didn’t have any weather. All those tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, deluges and unseasonable temperatures that today are blamed on global warming didn’t exist.

Youth: No weather? That must have been interesting.

Old guy: Just the opposite. It was never doing anything and that got pretty boring. You’d go outside and find it was just another day of nothin’.

Youth: Nothin’?

Old guy. Yup, nothin’. Neither cold nor warm, sunny nor cloudy, windy nor windless. Nothin’.

Youth. The TV weather reports must have been boring.

Old guy. We didn’t have weather reports. We had nothin’ reports. The nothin’ man would show a bunch of maps and point to all the places where nothin’ was happening. Harry Wappler Sr., in his younger days, always reported nothin’. That’s why he and the other nothin’ men got so excited about global warming. It gave them something to report. Before long they became known as weathermen.

Youth: What was it like outside, when the weather was always nothin’?

Old guy. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. On the golf course the sun never shined, the rain never fell and the wind never blew. It was tough on the commentators. Nothin’ to talk about, except golf, which is boring so nobody watched. Tiger Woods came along about the same time as global warming and the game has never been the same.

Youth: How did it affect family life?

Old guy: Nothin’ wasn’t so bad. Camping and fishing trips were never rained out and you could go to the beach without getting burned. Sunscreen was unheard of in those days, and sales of nothin’ screen were low. Nobody wanted to spend money to prevent nothin’ burn, although sales perked up a little when some ad agency came up with the Nothin’tone Girl. Cute kid, and before long it was cool to have skin the color of nothin’. It did wonders for race relations.

Youth: What were the main benefits of having nothin’ for weather every day, before global warming?

Old guy: Safety was the number one benefit. Airplanes never experienced turbulence and shipping was simply a matter of going from point to point. There weren’t any sailboats of course, because there wasn’t any wind. Rich people with fancy yachts either motored or hired a crew of rowers. They’d brag about the number of rowers they had. Paul Allen owned a 100-rower rig that was the envy of the upper class. They never had to row through waves as there was no wind, so it wasn’t a bad job. Too bad he outsourced them all.

Youth: When did global warming kick in?

Old guy: It happened instantly. One day we walked outside and saw this bright yellow object in the sky, and everything changed. It warmed up the water and atmosphere, which caused all kinds of havoc, particularly for those who lived in trailer parks. On the plus side whole new industries sprang up to protect people from the weather, and TV news got a lot more interesting. The Nothin’ Channel became the Weather Channel almost overnight and the rest is history.

Youth: I wish I could experience nothin’, where it’s never too cold, nor too hot, and you never had to worry about hurricanes or tornadoes.

Old guy: You can still experience all that if you move to a place called Whidbey Island. It’s weather is still nothin’ most of the time. Just don’t go in August, when there’s a chance of seeing that yellow thing in the sky.