It's January in New England. Everybody knows what that means - lock your doors, turn up the heat and watch the snowfall through your window over a mug of hot chocolate.
Not this year. This year you bring out the summer clothes and head over to the golf course.
Yesterday the temperature here was a positively blistering 71 degrees F (21.7 C), shattering the previous record high for the day easily (60 F, 1928). 71F is probably higher than the average highs in May. The average high in normal Januarys, you ask? 31 F (-0.5 C). People were in tshirts yesterday. On the news they said the golf courses were packed. In January.
Experiencing temperatures 40 degrees above normal is not the only freakish thing happening this winter. Remember snow? Well, this is the longest we've ever waited in any winter ever on record for the first half inch of snow. Over here in Albany there's been light dustings exactly twice. New York City just nearby has yet to see a single snowflake. Welcome to bizarro January.
Our local news, trying hard to remain "apolitical", practically celebrated yesterday's record high. They were all laughing and saying what a wonderful day it was (cloudy and dank and gloomy as hell, sure it's wonderful), they brought in a new expert meteorologist to talk about the warmth, they interviewed people on the streets who all said what a great time they were having. Nobody even breathed the word on everyone's minds: global warming.
In the print news, they at least are allowing that it might not be such a great thing to have warm days in January. But they blame the usual suspect: El Nino.
Sure, El Nine the warm Pacific current is causing this warmup, but how dumb (or Republican, same thing) are these meteorologists if they can't look one step further: why is there an El Nino at all? Suddenly? Why no El Ninos in the 1890s? Or the 1910s? Why now? Dumbasses.
It's the weather *shrug*. What the hell can I do about it? Well, one thing: I can tell you guys to watch An Inconvenient Truth, if you haven't already. Pay close attention to the part where Gore describes how global warming causes small, puny currents to pick up extra warmth and spiral out of control as they blow over oceans superheated by atmospheric CO2.
That's all.
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And Colorado with its 50 feet of snow falling every week? And Austria, where the headlines are saying, "Winter Cancelled"?
ReplyDeleteIt's safe to say this has been a crazy winter for *everybody*.