contemplativeI've been working at home the past couple of days, and of course, getting more work done than if I were in the office...funny how that works, isn't it?
I successfully avoided the 4 and a half hour commute in Chicagoland last night by doing so. I live 37 miles from my official office...and it would have taken that long or longer. It took 4.5 hours to get from my office to downtown Chicago last night (for one of my co-workers) and that's only 16 miles.
The snow removal folks have now finally got most of the streets plowed. My daughter promised me she'd go out and shovel the other half of the driveway I didn't do last night...but me no see-um movement there.
Ah weel. Back to the grind.
But a question. Are we having global warming?
Global Warming? WHAT global warming? those people are all fruitloops..and thats an insult to my favorite childhood cereal to call them that.
Depends on one's perspective, I suppose. From our viewpoint, this has been a fairly cool year. From the perspective of the generation who started keeping daily weather records in the 1850s, it's been an unbelievable scorcher.
Of course, in their parents day, they could build raging bonfires on the Thames, let them burn all night, and it wouldn't melt all the way through the ice. Last I heard, it's been several years since the Thames has frozen solidly enough for a toddler to walk across without falling through.
While anecdote is not the singular of data, this seems to indicate something has changed.
It's global climate change, yes. Nothing frootloopish about it. Warmer summers, colder winters, more severe storms, more severe droughts -- all exacerbated by the normal cycling in weather and environmental conditions.
Consider the hurricane, after all. It's an engine, created by differentials in heat -- warm water is the fuel for the hurricane. Once a hurricane leaves warm water, it rapidly drops in power. While over warm water, it gains power. More heat in the environment leads to more energy in the system -- heat is energy. More energy in the system leads to more unbalanced weather.