Saturday, January 06, 2007

An Inconvenient Warmth

I just walked down the street in a short-sleeve t-shirt.

Some cherry trees are in bloom at the Botanic Garden.

The current temperature: 70 degrees.

It is January 6.

SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG HERE.

5 comments:

  1. I've been watching the weather too. I read about the crocus trying to push their way through the ground in New Jersey. Freaky!
    I'm sure it will be winterly soon. I live in Florida so it's never really winter!

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  2. I lived in Ithaca , NY for three years about 30 years ago.

    One Christmas we had two feet of snow.

    About 2 weeks later we had weather close to 65-70 degrees. The "January Thaw" is not so new.

    Try not to worry about it.

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  3. It was 68° in Atlanta yesterday - also not right. I have plenty of winter clothes and have yet to wear many of them this year. I kept putting on my sweaters thinking, "this is what I wear in January," only to change into something cooler later. It's all very wierd.
    e

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  4. I worked outside as the Parks and Rec horticulturist for six years. Every summer I'd be driving the water truck all over the place to try to keep the plants alive. Every year we'd start at a deficit in the rainfall, and every year we'd end up another 11 to 16 inches behind.

    The new norm in August is 95 degrees daily. One year I recorded 95 degree temps for the entire month of August (except for a few 100-degree days). The last day of August, it mercifully fell to 68 degrees.

    Think back to winter when you were a kid. Big piles of snow to build snow houses that you could crawl into and even live in. These days, when we do get a snowfall, I can't scrape enough together to build a decent snowman for my daughter. Most of the time, all I can manage are these pathetic five-inch-tall guys.

    The National Arbor Day Foundation has amended the weather zoning charts that you generally see in the back pages of your seed catalogues. My area has moved from zone 5a to 5b.

    Crepe myrtles and mimosa trees, zone 6 trees, are becoming more and more common here in zone 5.

    The problem is that a lot of people don't follow rainfall totals because they work in offices. They don't see the differences, year by year, in temperature, in the drought conditions. I don't follow rainfall totals like I used to, but I still hear about another small town having to conserve water because another reservior is getting too low.

    I'd just like to know, what the heck would it hurt anybody if we cleaned up our air and pollutants and made our big businesses act more responsibly?

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  5. January 8th = According to my car thermometer it was 88 degrees outside, dry and windy.

    I think the recorded all time high for this day here was 86 degrees on 01/11/1983.

    I wish it would rain,

    Marilyn

    In baking Costa Mesa, CA

    ReplyDelete