The lake

[spinbaby]

Every morning and every evening I drive by a lake on my way to and from work.

Sometime during the week after Christmas, sometimes not until the first week in January, the lake freezes over. Two weeks later, the lake is frozen enough to walk on except for a small open patch where the Canada geese paddle to keep the water open. In late February, the ice starts to break up and by early March, it’s gone for the season.

Tonight, as I drove by the lake on my way home from work, I noticed that the lake was still unfrozen except for a slight skim of ice around the edges. It has never before, in the more than 20 years we’ve lived here, been open at the end of January.

When I pulled in at home, our crazy redneck neighbor was getting the mail. He’s an old-timer—lived here for 60 years, maybe more. So I ask him if he’s ever seen a winter in which the lake didn’t freeze over.

“No, never,” he says. But he knows I’m a crazy socialist liberal, so he knows where I’m going with this, “But that don’t mean global warming is real. It’s just freakish weather, that’s all.”

I agreed that there certainly was a difference between weather and climate and wished him a good evening.

[Quantess]

1. Yes, it's been freakishly warm here, too.

Last year was extremely cold, but not this winter.

However as I understand it (not very deeply), climate change does not always manifest as warming. Sometimes it causes chaotic and unpredictable weather, and very cold spells, as well. That's just what I've read. I'm certainly no expert.

[DCKit]

4. You don't have to be an expert to have noticed that our weather has gone nuts...

over the past decade. It's not the individual severe events, but the number of severe events we're having every year.

[Found in Yonkers]

5. As have too many of our politicians

[Quantess]

6. More hurricanes and tropical storms too.

[DCKit]

10. Tornadoes, droughts and floods. There's no way to predict it. nt

[B Calm]

2. This morning I was driving my truck

in Holland, Mi where they had a 10 & 1/2 inches of snow fall yesterday, I then drove back down to Indiana to 60 degree weather. Crazy weather this winter!

[MineralMan]

3. What state?

[spinbaby]

7. Pennsylvania

Western

[lunatica]

8. Maybe you can point out that climate change means freakish weather

and more of it.

And ask him what he thinks the freakish weather all over the world means, then just listen for a while. Maybe he'll open the creaky, rusty doors to his mind for a nanosecond.

[gristy]

9. The weather map in the paper this morning showed a low pressure over Lake Superior

The map further showed all rain - no snow - from Texas to Wisconsin.

[The Genealogist]

11. This evening, I went out to pick up papers that blew into my yard

I live across the street from a school, and some kid tore up a form describing why he or she had been punished. Lots of trash gets in the yard. But something was odd when I picked up this trash: there was a snail on one scrap, and slugs on a couple of other pieces. Slugs and snails out and about on January 31st? In SW Missouri? I've seen nothing like it. A year ago, we had a blizzard here. I saw someplace that it was the first blizzard warning since 1982! The snow was up over the air conditioning unit in the yard. Hell, the storm even has a wikipedia page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_31_%E2%80%93_February_2,_2011_North_American_blizzard

Today, I had the windows open, it was so warm. It was warm yesterday, too, and will be warm tomorrow. 15-20 degrees above normal highs. The chilly weather we have had so far, the few days with seasonable temperatures, are not unlike those that one finds on occasion in late fall or early spring. We've had, as far as I know, just over one inch of snow since LAST winter. ONE INCH!?! Crazy! It is almost, literally, like there has been no winter so far.