Posts Tagged → weather
A breezy summer day
One of my most enduring happy memories is actually not just one distinct moment, it is the aggregated beautiful summer days of my central Pennsylvania farm country youth.
As far as I can recall, Happy Valley did not get much sunshine throughout the year. Our glum, overcast days stretched from Fall through Spring. Instead, we saved up every drop of sun for June, July and August. These summers were sunny, usually gently breezy days, with mostly blue skies and flitting clouds, occasional sun showers, temperatures in the 70s and maybe 80s.
A trip to Whipple Dam State Park or a local swimming hole would cure the worst of the heat.
Perhaps youthful memories are clouded by adult cynicism, or more likely, by adult rose-tinted glasses. We prefer in our old age to recall only the good times and bury the rest. That is possible here when it comes to recalling the perfect summer weather of my youth.
However, it is also a scientific fact that Planet Earth is getting really close to having its polarities flip. Very close. As those polarities get close to switching (magnetically speaking, the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa), Planet Earth’s magnetic shield gets weak. So weak that a lot of ultraviolet rays get through to the surface, and our skin, thereby heating things up.
It is one of the reasons for sun burns worse than usual and for really hot, windy weather over the past twenty-five years. It is a fact that some plant and animal species have been moving northward, too, as northern climes warm up, even ever so slightly.
Earth’s magnetic field acts as a filter for harmful UV and other cosmic rays. Our magnetic field is one of the reasons Planet Earth has life on it. When it gets weak, our own experience outside changes.
After a very wet and rainy Spring, we are now experiencing some easy-sleeping cool evenings, and breezy, gently sunny days. The kind we have not seen in decades.
What a wonderful feeling.
If I go in the back yard and work in the garden, and close my eyes, I am transported back to the wondrous summer days of my childhood. They were colored by the ultra-green environment that surrounded me, too, I admit that.
It is doubtful these perfect days in the 70s, with a refreshingly gentle breeze, will last much longer. After all, the poles have not yet fully flipped and returned Earth to where its magnetic shield was much earlier in my life. But I am reminded of how it used to be, and how pleasant it was.
Aaaahhh…summer time, central PA style.
Has anyone considered unplugging Spring and plugging it back in to see if it will work right?
Not my creative headline, unfortunately, but a good one nonetheless, and well put in terms of how odd this Spring has been.
Except that this Spring has not been odd, if my memory serves me right. Not in the context of Spring happening over millennia and even over decades. Spring used to be a lot like the on-again-off-again odd weather we have experienced the past month.
When I was a kid, lo these many decades ago, Spring was a process. It was not a moment in time.
Spring took time to become Spring. It was the spaced-out staging of leaves and buds emerging, green poking up through the soil a bit at a time.
“April showers bring May flowers” went the old adage. Meaning that as a precursor to the warm weather with flowers was a sustained period of rain and cool or cold weather. That was Spring, spanning cold, rain, cold rain, and the gradual emergence of green things and then the crowning sign – flowers!
Showers, heck, I recall a snow blizzard in early April as I was casting a small dry fly on the lower reaches of Big Fishing Creek in Clinton County, near the Lamar trout hatchery. In my early twenties, in fact I might have been just twenty years old, I was stubbornly casting to “rising” trout despite a white-out snow storm blanketing the air and the stream’s surface with big white snowflakes. That a trout could tell the difference between a huge plump snowflake and a measly morsel of a vague-looking aquatic insect landing briefly on the surface was a leap of faith I was fully committed to taking, and making with every cast.
My youth’s crowning moment arrived when a much older man, probably someone my age now, stopped to watch me casting the dry fly amidst the snow storm.
“Pretty ambitious, dontcha think?,” he humorously called out from up above.
And right then a big fish whacked my drifting fly, and I hauled in one of the most colorful symbols of Spring, an iridescent rainbow trout. The guy looked at me slack-jawed, eyes wide in amazement, like I was some kind of fishing genius, and I looked up at the snowing heavens and mouthed a “Thank You.” One of the more memorable fish and fishing moments in a lifetime of fishing.
That day the air temperature was still spring-like, but the obvious above-ground temperatures were cold enough to generate snow. It was a classic symbol of the kind of gradual and slowly shifting, two steps forward one step back warming change that Spring used to be.
But that was thirty, forty years ago. A different world, a different climate.
Apparently the earth’s switching magnetic polarity is now playing a big role in the Winter-to-Summer “Spring” times we have experienced for a long time now. This switch happens naturally every 200,000 to 300,000 years.
Because the earth’s polarity is switching, which means the North Pole becoming the South Pole and vice-versa (but what we arbitrarily call North and South remain the same) the earth’s magnetic field-cum-shield is at its weakest. Earth’s magnetic shield is at its weakest because the poles are swapping positions and the magnetic field strung up between the two poles is stretched to its thinnest. The earth’s magnetic field-cum-shield is one of the reasons our planet has so much life on it; a great deal of harmful cosmic rays and powerful solar ultraviolet (UV) light are caught in the magnetic “net” and they are blocked from reaching the earth’s surface.
Therefore, a lot more solar radiation has penetrated to the earth’s surface over the past few decades, with the kinds of unusual heat, warming, and strong winds that we have witnessed. As well as a lot more quick sunburns under what appear to be pretty normal sunny conditions. The sun is not necessarily stronger, but a lot more of its energy is reaching us. For now.
And that takes me back to that unplugging Spring. For about 35 years Spring has been kind of unplugged, in a way, and it will remain so for about another decade, until the polar switch is complete. And then these gradual Springtimes, like the one we just had, will become normal again.
I can’t wait for that to happen, because I enjoy a real Spring so very much, the change from one season to the next. Normally temperate climes like Pennsylvania appeal to me for that very reason.
Everything hinges on the nickel-iron core inside the earth. And we won’t be unplugging THAT any time soon.
Chapped hands? Recondition your winter boots
My hands have been badly chapped for weeks now. Outdoor work and play, and cold weather have chewed up the thumbs and finger tips on both my hands. You’d think I actually worked for a living to look at them.
This morning I was reminded about the best way to fix that chapped skin: Recondition leather work boots and hunting boots. Whether it’s Sno-Seal, Danner Boot Cream, or some other natural salve for dry leather, it also works healing wonders on the hands that apply it. And sitting by the warm fire helps, too.
Seasonal weather changes are natural, welcome
Seasonal changes are natural tick-tocks on the world’s clock.
Following a natural cycle keeps us in tune with nature, even if the conditions aren’t always to our liking.
Cold arrived today.
Driving north on Friday, I photographed the “polar vortex” front as it closed in on central Pennsylvania. It was a dramatic sight, indeed, and heralded the coming of winter.
Right away, I spoke out loud to myself about the need to buy new knobby tires for the truck. A long, cold, snowy winter is ahead, and I need to be as prepared as possible. Winter isn’t too challenging, if I’ve prepared for it.
Tonight we got our first wood fire going, after cleaning out the wood stove and adding new fire bricks. About a cord of last year’s split oak remains before we begin burning the oak that Viv, Isaac and I split this past spring. By the time we burn through the left over wood, the new wood should be completely dry. We will burn between three and four-and-a-half cords this winter at home.
Wood is a natural, sustainable, renewable heat source whose carbon is part of the planet’s natural cycle. We plant a lot of trees, and they absorb carbon to grow big. It’s a closed loop, which is appealing.
Living life according to the planet’s rhythms is natural and healthy. Will you get cold? Sure. That’s part of living. And if you think it’s cold here, check out Minnesota or Wisconsin or Idaho. Not to mention Alaska.
Just put on long undies and get some Filson wool jackets and vests. You might end up enjoying the cold weather. I certainly do.
You call this global warming?
Not only is the northern hemisphere in a deep freeze, a bunch of “climate change scientists” looking for evidence to support their religion … Oops … I mean their theory, got frozen in the Antarctic ice. Their ship is immobilized because so much ice is not only not melting, but actually increasing. Rescue ships also got frozen.
Members of the crew said it was the most ice they’d seen in years.
Guess what? Planet Earth is a dynamic place, with dynamic weather patterns and a multitude of factors simultaneously influencing climate.
Trying to ascribe cause-and-effect to these factors, or even worse, claiming to know what’s really happening with all these factors, is not science.
It’s politics, for sure. We know how clean that is.
Its adherents behave as though they’re in a cult, or at least in some charismatic religion.
Too many environmental groups use crisis to whip up support for their causes and to fund raise. Climate change appears to be one more scare tactic. The evidence just isn’t there to support the claims. Today’s zero temperature is classic.
But if you want to talk about overfishing the oceans, loss of farmland, loss of critical wildlife habitat, good wildlife management, why then reasonable people are interested.
In the mean time, I’m shoveling loads of carbon…oops, sorry, I mean firewood, into our wood stove as we trade yesterday’s carbon for today’s heat. Seems like a good and sustainable trade to me.
Challenging modern sensibilities
Yesterday, the distant father of one of our bear hunters texted his cell phone, urging him to retreat from the cold descending upon central Pennsylvania.
“Too cold! Go home!” read the text, which included several other adjectives supposedly describing hunting conditions.
The dad is not a hunter. He’s a very nice man, a hard worker, a veteran of Vietnam War infantry battles that earned him two Purple Heart medals. He’s no wimp. He is, however, a member of a materially comfortable society that increasingly believes food comes from the market, heat from the switch, and clothes from China.
Luxury is the standard for most Americans. By international standards, our ubiquitous cell phones, big screen televisions, cars, and expensive clothes are unimaginable expenses in days filled with constant quests for food and shelter around the planet.
Hunting for us makes us human, and quintessentially American. Hunting connects us to a human tradition predating anything surrounding Americans today. Cold weather is part and parcel of hunting. It challenges our artificially padded modern sensibilities for a few days, something that everyone needs. Couch potato nation, arise!
Just About to Find that Skunk in the Wood Pile
A skunk is living in our wood pile, and it has gone from four and a half cords down to a few days of supply remaining. Somewhere in that last bit of wood stacked in a back corner is a cold and unhappy skunk. I am not looking forward to meeting it in the coming few days.
Freak snow. Does it mean global climate change?
Global climate change, caused exclusively by humans and especially Western democracies, has been a cornerstone article of faith among the most outspoken environmental advocates.
No matter what the weather is, it’s always too extreme, too variable, too much of an outlier for the activists. Wild and even moderate swings in weather are proof of global warming, they constantly say.
If it’s unusually hot for a day, a week, a year, why that is obvious proof of global warming, they say.
If the weather turns prematurely cold or snowy, then that unusual deviation becomes yet another proof of global warming. After all, goes the thinking of the advocates, all unusual weather is evidence. Their first baseline is the past 100 years since weather data has been collected. Their second baseline is the past few hundred years of relatively stable weather patterns around the planet. The past couple of thousand years have seen several long periods of drought and wet, long before human populations either grew significantly or developed modern technology and industrial processes.
Their third baseline is the past ten thousand years, a period of relative calm when compared to the hundred-foot-thick glaciers that covered huge portions of Earth for thousands of years.
Yesterday we had an unusual October snow storm that left an inch or two of wet, heavy snow clinging to trees, buildings, light poles, and lawns. Could this be more evidence of global warming?
Let’s compare this snow to a mid-April snow storm I experienced on the first day of trout season in 1986, in central Pennsylvania. That day I was casting flies on Big Fishing Creek to hungry trout while enveloped in a white-out fog of swirling, blowing snow flakes. At that time, experts claimed the freak snowstorm was evidence of the mini ice age the planet was entering. Not global warming, but global cooling.
Twenty-five years later the global climate change claim is the opposite.
The problem with all this talk of global warming and cooling is that no matter what the weather is, unusually hot or unusually cold, certain advocates claim it is more proof for their current pet end-of-the-world issue. With all weather types and the full spectrum of weather now used to bolster the claim of global warming or climate change, it becomes an un-disprovable claim. All weather is “evidence.”. There is no weather that can be used to prove the opposite claim.
The biggest problem with “global climate change/warming/cooling” is that its advocates steer limited resources away from solving real environmental issues, like water pollution and profligate land development patterns.
I’m going to enjoy this unusual, pretty snow laying out on my lawn, because although it felt like the sky was falling, I rest happily knowing that it really isn’t.