Time to start believing in change. Climate change.

There is no snow on top of mount Fuji this time of year. Usually, there are a few traces in the vales on the north side, but not now. It is two degrees centigrade warmer than normal.
This is not the only sign of global warming this year in Japan. Despite Tokyo sweltering in record heat, it is not completely unheard of.  The cold winter, where we had snow for a couple of months, is also not impossible - it has happened before. But not often.
What has not happened before are so many tornadoes. You may have thought the only bad weather we have in Japan are the typhoons, but even though those are stronger and more frequent than usual, they are predictable. That is not the case for tornadoes. When the temperature difference between the air near the ground and the air higher up becomes more than 40 degrees centigrade, tornadoes can happen in the plains of eastern Japan. The mountains push the cold Siberian air on top in spring and autumn, and the ground air gets heated, as well as hot air being pushed in from the China Sea.
This kind of weather is not completely unheard of - but not this frequently, and not all the time. That it happens it is a sure sign of global warming. While Japan is taking great steps towards inreasing the independence from nuclear power, this has unfortunately led to a bigger depenency on fossil fuels. And those generate more greenhouse gases, which generate global warming. That is not a new idea - the first to come up with it was Swedish Nobel prize winner Svante Arrhenius (who went to the same high school and university as me, and - you might think - had the same chemistry teacher). In the beginning of the last century.
The thing is, these are changes on a geological scale, and they take time. Much more time than humans are used to think about. While we are not the first species on Earth with the power to change the environment (grasslands are self-perpetuating), we are the first who are stupid enough to destroy it.