We’ve had four severe winters in the past decade in North America and this one is shaping up as a repeat performance. Not that you’d know that from paying attention to the Non-Fox news media or reading the dictator’s club’s annual crock on global warming.
But the good Joe D’Aleo at Weather Bell Analytics has a interesting take on those winters that began in 2002/03: “Most of the media seem to be obsessed with extremes of heat, completely ignoring cold weather extremes, despite these apparently being on the rise and despite the IPCC’s science failing to offer an explanation for them. In fact, the IPCC extreme weather events table projects ‘fewer cold days and frost in future’.”
I remember 2002/03 because we lived in a drafty old shiplap house on a ridgeline in Travis Heights where the windows rattled when the wind blew. And it blew hard that winter. This year, our tenth in the stone-and-siding rancho in a small valley in Northwest Hills, is starting out to be just as frigid and windy. Unusually cold for this time of year, but it was last year and the year before also.
Purely anecdotally, our Central Tejas winters do seem to be getting colder. Used to be November and December were mild with only the occasional cold front passage of a few days. January was our only killer cold month and February was the warmup. I’m getting nostalgic just writing that.
Let’s all hope the future is nothing like Larry Niven’s Fallen Angels. We don’t need a glacier whose leading edge is 400-feet high and moving, well, glacially, through what was once called Missouri.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 