Warm Winter

[Brian Elfert]

Minneapolis hit 63 degrees yesterday. I heard that if we had 64 degrees that it would have set the record for highest temperature ever in February.

I have a drainage ditch out front of my house filled with snow melt water that isn't going anywhere. I haven't seen that in the past two winters I lived here.

[Bruce Wrenn]

Global warming!

Ever since the last ice age. I guess mankind didn't cause that.

[Brian W Evans]

Ever since the last ice age. I guess mankind didn't cause that.

You are correct about this. Even without man-made emissions of greenhouse gasses, we would expect the temperature to rise, very gradually, for the foreseeable future. You are also correct that we can't point to a single stretch of warm / strange weather and say that is caused by global warming. (Nor can we bring a snowball to the floor of the Senate and say that it is proof that global warming isn't happening.)

HOWEVER, the question is not, "is the temperature rising?" but "how fast is the temperature rising?" Please look at NASA or NOAA data - straight from the horse's mouth to avoid cherrypicking or manipulating of data. You will see that the Earth's temperature has been increasing much more quickly (and increasingly so) since we started putting massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere about 200 years ago.

Consider also that 194 nations signed the Paris climate agreement over the past two years, agreeing to limit emissions of greenhouse gasses. This requires significant changes to the economies of every country on the planet. Why would they do this, contrary to their own interests, if they didn't believe global warming was happening AND caused in part by human activity?

Finally, here is a video from Bell Labs in 1958(!), explaining how global warming works and how it is related to the burning of fossil fuels. The last five minutes or so is what you want to watch.

With respect,
Brian

[Leo Graywacz]

Up here in the NE I'm routing for global warming. Nice low heating bill, less snow to shovel, not waking up to 5 degrees and having to deice the windshields.

And still we get the occasional 12-15" snowstorm and 3" of ice pellets. Still waiting for that elusive snowless winter.

[Mel Fulks]

They need to go back to the 1970s global cooling for a while. But they didn't use that term ,think it was "the coming ice age".

[Jim Andrew]

If this is global warming, I'm all for it.

[Yonak Hawkins]

Jim, that's funny, but will you say that this summer ?

[Jim Becker]

Professor Dr. SWMBO reported that our honeybees were out gathering pollen yesterday and today...mid-February. Go figure...