Yer Latest “Global Warming” Update

Well, that could explain why, when I put out birdfood, the only dinner guests that show up are squirrels and mourning doves. The rest of the birds went south, even those that don’t migrate. They got fed up and left.

According to the latest news reports, the Great Lakes are nearing another ice coverage record.

The record low around here for today was -18F set in 1873. When I got up this morning, it was -6F. I don’t know what the big deal is.

It snowed 2″ in Las Vegas. Everyone got cold. In fact, Las Vegas is having colder than usual weather these days.

Oh, yeah, looks like there may be more snow coming, but no one is quite sure. I’ll just add it to the glacier in my front yard.

If we have snow in April again, I’ll send post cards.

Obviously, everyone, including this Rutgers climatologist, is entitled to an opinion.

But she says this kind of weather has almost never happened before. There are east coast records going back to the start of the Farmer’s Almanac and the Old Farmer’s Almanac, and reports about excessive winter snow and cold without the measurements (no instruments) before that.

While she is entitled to her opinion, failing to refer to actual historical records is a big, fat, lazy booboo on her part. The record low for this date in Boston was -7F in 1894.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/how-the-warming-arctic-might-be-behind-bostons-deep-freeze/ar-BBhTRFZ

Seriously, I think people like her would still crank out this stuff even if a mile-thick glacier was approaching her neighborhood at the rate of 10 feet per hour. Yes, they did move that fast.

She refers to increased humidity. This winter, the air has been its normal dryness, about 39%, around here. In Boston, it’s 47%, pretty normal for this time of year. That doesn’t explain the increased precip levels (snow), does it?

Like I said, we’re all entitled to differences of opinion on any subject. I do not think there is a single, simple answer to this weather cycle, but my opinion differs from hers because my references include something besides mere temperature changes, and I will stick to it.

The biggest problem is that the ‘single source’ answer does not work for a system as complicated as planet-wide weather. It concerns me that anyone can be so narrowly focused and ‘blame’ one symptom as the cause of something. That’s like saying your cough means you have a cold, when it could mean you have congestive heart failure.

I hope she enjoys her grant money for as long as she can get it. I also hope that she has costly after-winter repairs to the roof of the expensive house she bought.

This is just tiresome.

Welp – here’s a little of that ‘this just in’ newsy stuff from MSN, about how the Great Lakes are 84% frozen over, or something, which is less than last year.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/it%e2%80%99s-so-cold-you-could-walk-across-lake-erie/ar-BBhXDHi

The satellite image of the Great Lakes is impressive. That dark middle in Lake Michigan is open water, with the bulk of ice on the Michigan/Indiana side of the lake and less on the Wisconsin/Illinois shores.

What’s really impressive is the photos that the article links to, of people visiting ice caves in the Apostle Islands park. Stunning photography, especially the time exposures.

My response to this article is ‘it’s winter, it’s cold, we have snow, some places don’t, and some places are getting heavy rain.’ It is not unusual for snow and cold to hit the Deep South. Houses used to be built with keeping rooms, located off the kitchen, with their own fireplace, where the household would gather in cold weather to keep warm – hence the term, ‘keeping room’. That’s sensible homebuilding, if you ask me, and you can still do that with a house now, if you think about it. Victorian houses in the North had parlors and sitting rooms, basically the same thing.