Late Weather Update

For Thawback Thaturday, how about we check the weather aftcast?

Folks in my neck of the woods may end up snowed in today, but we have had some unusually warm weather around here the past several weeks. By which I mean several days have been above freezing, but not enough that I've been tempted to join the Polar Bear Plunge. Apparently much of the United States enjoyed some balmy weather in January 100 years ago, too.

"The Wrong Pew" by Cyrus Hungerford in Pittsburgh Sun, January, 1920

It has been said that the surest way to tell whether a church is as welcoming as it claims to be is to see what happens when a visitor sits in a pew a longtime member considers private property. Hungerford hits on this phenomenon to comment on spring-like weather visiting a couple months ahead of schedule.

Archibald Chapin compares the weather instead to the many labor strikes shaking up the established order at the time.

"All In Favor of This Strike..." by Archibald Chapin in St. Louis Republic, January, 1920

It's important whenever this sort of thing comes up to distinguish between weather and climate. Every time it snows these days, there are cartoonists who dredge up tired old jokes about how the day's weather disproves global warming.

"Ol' January Thaw" by Magnus Kettner for Western Newspaper Union, January, 1920 

Weather changes all the time, sometimes drastically from day to day, week to week, or year to year. I recall an extraordinarily balmy winter my senior year in college; we were partying outside in Minnesota in our shirtsleeves in January and February. Two years earlier, and again three years later, we had record-breaking cold.

But if you look at long-term records, you can't help but observe that the general trend over the decades has been that the mean global temperature is rising. The Arctic ice cap is melting, and so are glaciers all over the world, to an extent completely unprecedented in recorded history. Australia is not on fire because of a conspiracy of 200 arsonists; but time will tell whether the continent will now suffer an annual fire season that dwarfs the ones we now see every year in California.

"And This!" by William Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, January, 1920

Individual heat waves and cold snaps come and go. So the fact that I'll be starting up the old snowblower later today in no way disproves the theory of global climate change any more than the 50F temperatures earlier this week prove it.

Meanwhile...