For 16 years, I lived in Oswego, New York, affectionately known as the lake effect snow capital of the United States.

When I was there, Oswego averaged 151 inches a snow a year (compared to 25 to 30 inches in Carbon, Schuylkill, Lehigh and Northampton and 50 inches a year in Monroe). Today, Oswego’s annual average is “only” 113 inches - many saying that this is another example of the effects of climate change.

While I was in Oswego between 1992 and 2008, there were three years when the annual snowfall amount topped 200 inches. The year before I left, we had a whopper of a storm that dropped 96 inches over a three-day period. Oswego still holds the record for most snowfall in a single storm, 102.4 inches in 1966. In that storm, then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller mobilized the National Guard to help clear the highways and streets and rescue people from their homes. People reported needing to exit their homes through second-floor windows because of the huge amount of fallen and drifting snow.

Since returning to my native Pennsylvania, I am at times amused at the sheer panic that sets in among residents when the forecast is for a half-foot of snow. That’s all that people will talk about for days leading up to the storm. During this period, their entire life seems to revolve around preparing for the coming Armageddon by stripping supermarket shelves of staples such as bread, milk and toilet paper. Finding a super rare coin is easier during these times than finding ice melt. The weather services go crazy warning us of the impending storms. The news media go into panic overdrive alerting us to potential dangers, our phones receive shrill alerts, and periodic updates remind us of what’s coming in case we might have forgotten what was already top of mind awareness.

I am sure my Oswego experience has made me a smug observer of this obsession with weather. Of course, being a native of Summit Hill, I experienced some big snowfalls during my youth. We always seemed to get harsher winter weather than our Panther Valley neighbors. I can remember one, in particular, when I walked down the middle of Hazard Street with snow up to my waist.

I can’t brag to my kids and grandkids that I used to walk 3 miles to school with snow up to my knees, because I always lived just two to three blocks away from the three schools I attended in Summit Hill.

There’s a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain in 1897, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” It’s true that a lot of people talk about the weather. In some cases it represents a genuine concern about how disruptive an impending storm might be, but in other cases it represents an icebreaker to start a conversation. “Nice weather we’re having,” “Looks like a storm is brewing,” “Did you hear that we’re supposed to get 5 inches of snow?”

I am sure we have all been in awkward social events where we may have not known many attendees, so the weather becomes a way to initiate a conversation or to steer the conversation away from uncomfortable topics.

What I find truly curious is that although our obsession with weather typically centers on an upcoming event, such as a heavy rainstorm or more than a few inches of snow, we seem to be much less concerned about the bigger weather picture and how it is already impacting our planet and our way of life.

The urgency of what we are facing and will continue to face in the coming decades has been laid out in the starkest of terms by scientists who have been studying climate change for several generations, and things do not look good.

Just last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that climatological game-changers are already causing “widespread disruption” to human society and the natural world. In its warning, the panel said that failure to curb pollution from fossil fuels and other human activities will condemn the world to a future that is universally dangerous and deeply unequal. The developing nations and vulnerable communities that contributed the least to warming will suffer the most from its consequences, the panel concluded, but the 2,000-page report offers a glimmer of hope: “Humanity still has time to shift Earth’s warming trajectory,” scientists say.

This warming trend affects not only the weather, but also produces the more alarming and destructive companion impacts that these events cause.

Those who live along some of the major rivers in our area, such as the Schuylkill, Lehigh and Delaware, are scared to death every time there is a rainstorm. Not that many years ago, 1 to 2 inches of rain was a lot; today, we are more routinely seeing rainfall of 4, 5 or more inches several times a year, and each time that we get this volume of water, residences and businesses which are in flood-prone areas of Schuylkill, Carbon, Northampton, Monroe and Lehigh counties are impacted by minor to severe flooding.

It seems to me that if we transition our obsession about a coming storm to the destructive potential of erratic weather fueled by climate change, we would be on a better track for passing the torch to a safer future to our children and grandchildren.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.