esrosedotblog

MINICLIMATECHANGE

We are just back from the Sunday walk.

Fun.

Incredible light as the sun "moved down the mountain". Very clear.

We wait now for the sun because, for us, it is quite cold. Low 50s today.

And colder still before.

We are headed toward a ten degree warming trend, the usual January jump. All week, afternoon highs in the 70's. Good for business.

Normal enough.

But in the night, patches of frost. Killing for a lot of plants and trees.

Each year for the last three there has been increasingly more frost.

When we first came here in the 80s we had hoar frost on our car one morning and the innkeepers did not believe it. We took them out and showed it. They claimed they had never seen it before.

Now this is an old reaction of innkeepers everywhere. "It never happened before". A week of rain? "Never saw it before". And so on.

Now, I can say that in our first twelve years here we "never" had frost during the last hours but now it is routine.

I have a pretty good memory about frost in our old house, the plumbing was on the roof and so the pipes up there would freeze.

It happened the first year actually. But only once.

Another year we had snow and a lot of ground fog as it immediately sublimated to fog.

Each year there would be some dramatic cold day. And over the years, the frequency of these has increased. Now, since the first of December, it is routine for Booker and I to have "crunchy" grass when we go out to pee at 3AM.

And many days there is some new bush or plant that has had frost kill.

I know all the arguments for and against and if or whether there is fast moving climate change but I can see it very clearly here because of the extremes we normally experience day and night. Dramatic. Heightened reality.

Weather observations from the desert.

Not very scientific but still.

I know. It is supposed to be global "warming" but that is a bad description. The real description is worse: "climate change". In which everything gets more extreme, hots turn cold, colds turn hot, rain comes, rain goes. Winds howl. Frogs fall out of the sky. And faster than anyone thought.

Labels: climate change, weather