Brrrrrrrr! It's winter. Happens every year.<\/p>\n
It’s been every cold in Minnesota, the U.S. as a whole, and Europe this last month.\u00a0 Meanwhile, human-caused CO2 is still driving climate change.\u00a0 (Discussing that is a very detailed article in the second half of this article.)<\/p>\n
Yes — it’s the coldest part of winter, exactly when we expect the coldest weather.\u00a0 Remember last winter?\u00a0 Same thing happened.\u00a0 That’s because of “seasons” which at least half of Americans experience or are aware of.\u00a0 The people who don’t are apparently the climate change deniers, who keep forgetting there’s a thing called “winter”.\u00a0 Winter cold is caused by the less-intense solar power here in the Northern hemisphere, due to the tilt of the earth this time of year as we travel around the Sun.\u00a0\u00a0 Funny thing though, in winter we are actually closer to the Sun, as a planet.\u00a0 So solar activity and proximity does not cause winter.\u00a0 In addition, much of our cold and warm winter fluctuations depend on occasional el Ninos and La Ninas.\u00a0 Sometimes they even combine to really screw things up.\u00a0 Solar variations only have a mild influence on weather and climate.<\/p>\n
I’d be worried if it wasn’t very cold in January, like I was worried 4-5 years ago, when it wasn’t.\u00a0 About five years ago my memory tells me that January was still cold, but not nearly as cold, and for less of an amount of time than in the past.\u00a0 This seemed to be a trend, which\u00a0 I noticed all on my own.\u00a0 But, I realize people have to be careful “recognizing” trends that only last a couple of years because the time period is not long enough to indicate a true trend.\u00a0 Then last year and this one, the weather seems again to be colder, longer, than during the trend I thought I had observed of a warming January over several years.<\/p>\n
Weather is only weather, and trends in climate are only observable over decades and centuries.\u00a0 Even then, they may not hold true every year because there are fluctuation years.\u00a0 I learned only recently that the “Little Ice Age” lasted into the 1800s.\u00a0 Since then, people claim we are still coming out of the Little Ice age, but were were well out of it by the time of my memories of my earliest winters in Minnesota, where the snow came up to the roof of my house every December and it was brutally cold.\u00a0 So the end of that cold trend did not affect the cold weather years I remember. Memories are also tricky things, especially memories of weather. You always remember the most severe more than the typical.\u00a0 Even so, I remember winters much colder, that lasted longer, than they are today — even this year.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So while the last few weeks have been painfully cold in my area, they are not unusual or strangely cold at all.<\/p>\n
The skeptics and climate change deniers I see spreading their disinformation all over the place online, who maybe don’t even realize [...]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brrrrrrrr! It's winter. Happens every year. It’s been every cold in Minnesota, the U.S. as a whole, and Europe this last month.\u00a0 Meanwhile, human-caused CO2 is still driving climate change.\u00a0 (Discussing that is a very detailed article in the second … Continue reading