Summer slightly warmer. Winter temperatures are milder and we get less snow than we use to. Colder temperatures come later in the year and stay later. Seems to have moved about a month forward. We hear talk of of a Wildman they call Stinny running through the northeastern woods and screaming something incoherent.
I seem to remember snow staying for most of the winter when I was a kid. Now it seems the norm is snow, then melt, repeat. What has been interesting around here is the change in Great Lakes water levels. 6 or 7 years ago, the story was the lakes were drying up and were near record lows. Fast forward a few years and they’re at nearly record highs. Nature is definitely cyclical.
Summers aroound me have gotten slightly warmer but the winters are definitely warmer. Almost no snow this season. In the big blizzard in '78 we got more snow than we had this whole season. 6 yrs ago we had the coldest winter on record. The following yr we had a not as cold winter but the 3rd most snow on record. Since then we've hardly had any winter.
Sorry, but one cannot start this thread and say ”I don’t want to start a discussion about ‘global warming’ because that’s exactly what you are doing. So just own it. Like others have posted, I remember the ice age that was coming in the 1970s. I remember the acid rain that was going to destroy all the crops and cause a worldwide hunger crisis. I remember the oil crisis of the 70s and the long gas lines and having to go on a day to get gas depending on whether your license plate was odd or even—all because the world was running out of oil. I remember droughts and conserving water because the rains were going to stop. I remember the hole in the ozone over Antarctica that was going to cause extinction events....none of it happened. From my observations the weather has never been exactly the same year to year. As soon as you think a pattern is established—it changes next time. It varies from year to year. It goes in cycles. One year we get a lot of snow, the next year less, then the next year we get more again, even in May. Some winters are mild, others next year get super cold. One pattern that seems to stay the same: it’s always been different. There are so many infinitely different variables to the weather that for a computer model to accurately predict would have to be easier to predict the winning lottery numbers. So if someone wants to worry about the weather I say knock yourself out. Interesting as someone already posted above that through it all there has always been a way for the government to put a tax on something so THEY can deal with it. And news organizations love to sell bad news and fear. If it’s not the weather it’s some virus outbreak. After awhile one gets tired of being led around by the nose and hearing people cry wolf. One thing I do know: The world is a very dangerous place. JMHO.
It was July of '73. Headed for Alaska. First leg was to climb Mt. Rainer. Pulled into Spokane.....11pm'ish....on fumes. Not an open gas station in site. While getting a late night bite at the local Denny's......gas tanker pulls in. Driver comes in for a cup of jo. I figure what the heck...can't hurt to ask. "Hey, anyway you could sell me a few gallons?" He ponders for a bit... then say's...."I would but all I have is a 4" hose.....it'd make quit a mess."
I will just add this for a bit of Humor, 1988... I am in High school and we are learning about global warming.. the month of December rolls around and most of that month did NOT get above zero not freezing 0.0!! Burlington VT We wanted to know what actions we could take to hurry the warmth
The acid rain scare in the 80s was really pumped here due to being a farming community and downwind of Detroit manufacturing. I remember the hype well.
... yup... weez a gazillion times better off with more heat, than more cold. Won't it be fun when man actually figures out how to seriously control weather. What could possibly go wrong...
I was thinking about that LONG list. Some friends went to Cancun during the middle of the Spanish Flu hype. Stayed at a nice resort dirt cheap. They asked the bartender about the flu, he had seen no signs of it. When asked if the Mayan ruins were worth the trip, his reply was, "Do you mean the ones they built last year or the year before?".
Well said for sure. Communication has gotten so much better we now know what is happening around the world instantly. Back in the 70's during the blizzards, newspapers didn't deliver, didn't know what was happening 50 miles away let alone around the world. Weather happens, hot or cold the intensity is a killer.
I was in Germany in the early 80's. I saw many a mountain that had nothing but dead pine trees due to ACID RAIN. It was real in places, just maybe not in your or my hometown. Our sister remote site up in the Hartz mountains had some pretty bad looking forests around it. Today that area is all a resort and has green lush area of regrowth all around it. We can "fix" issues that we cause. I agree that we are a contributing factor to many issues that are harmful to our planet. Plastic and it's unthoughtful disposal is an example along with global warming (at least the part we are contributing to, I'm a cyclic weather believer also, but we are contributing some bad stuff as well). I don't mind doing my share to assist in making this planet great again, but the direction forward is not an easily selected path. I am a middle of the road kind of guy and want to contribute to solutions to further the planet for our great, great-grandchildren. I'm sure we will find our way through by listening to each other and working together instead of jumping to extremes and fighting. Answers (no matter what they are) always work better when we are all working together instead of fighting over what the answer should be. I'm not sure of the origin of "Divide and Conquer" but it sure is a winning formula in almost all cases. It does no good to argue to prove that I have the right of way in the crosswalk when a semi is barreling at me at 70 mph... DEAD RIGHT is still dead... Sorry, some rambling thoughts there, but... my 2 cents.
Some did happen, some were slowed or stopped by changes in how the human specks did things. One was a political/economic action that acted as a wake up call. And one was a study by a small group that was splashed all of the press before it was vetted by the larger scientific community. Acid rain is a very slow acting poison. When it was realized what the acidity of rain was doing and how it was slowly increasing we started changing how we burned fossil fuels and which fuels we used. High sulfur coal was outlawed, stack scrubbers were added, plants converted to cleaner fuels. A win for the earth. The arab oil embargo of the seventies was not about running out of oil. It was a political/marketing ploy by the oil producing states to increase the price of oil. It provoked the USA to move towards energy independence and reduce oil imports from the middle east. Today the only area of the USA that is still dependent on foreign oil is the Northeast and they are slowly moving to domestic natural gas. Due to changes in the jet stream, El Nino, etc... we now have major droughts in Australia, California, and large swaths of Africa. These are not short term droughts as in the past but multi-year events. They are not small and isolated, but spread over large areas. Are humans the cause? Don't know. Will they end on their own? Don't know. Can we help reverse them? Possibly. All I know is that large areas of this planet are in trouble, including major food producing ones. Some of those areas are burning regularly. Does it hurt to investigate and see if anything can be done? Once again, we changed how we did things. The refrigerant gasses in many devices were reformulated to be less damaging to the atmosphere. Recycling centers began capturing the gasses from older devices to safely destroy them instead of releasing them into the atmosphere. And the ozone hole shrank. This was a scientific paper that got way more press coverage than it deserved before being fully studied. Some people signed on to its ideas, some dismissed it immediately. Maybe the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere helped prevent it. KaptJaq
I realize your post is in jest but this is an example of something many people don't realize, the difference between weather and climate: noun: weather the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc. noun: climate; plural noun: climates the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period, usually years. KaptJaq
