July 30, 2025
Climate is a State of Mind
Dana Mathewson
As regular readers of this site are aware, I never tire of pointing out that I live in the crazy-ass (at least politically) state of Minnesota, which contains the city of International Falls, home of the regularly seasonal coldest temperatures in the continental U.S. (New Hampshirites will carp that Mount Washington beats us, but that's not a city and people don't live on it.) And yet we often get summer temperatures in the high 90's, and it has more than once cracked 100 on my indoor/outdoor thermometer -- something that has happened only once in Tampa, FL (just the other day, in fact) since records began to be kept.
But the thing is, we (or at least my wife and I) don't look at those readings and say "Oh golly gee, that's two degrees hotter than last year on this day, the world must be heating up." We are more apt to say "It's a couple degrees hotter than yesterday." But the actual temperature may be a couple degrees cooler than yesterday. Indeed, last week the temperatures were in the 60's for three or four days.
We are more apt to pay attention to the humidity, especially if we're spending much time outside; and "global warming" isn't causing that. Air quality is another thing: Canuckistan is still generating forest fire smoke on many days, cutting off sunshine and stinking up the air badly, causing us to grumble about Manitoba's lousy forestry practices -- are they run by a bunch of retired Californians?
The upshot of this is that we don't believe the Global Warmiacs and never have. We see a lot of people driving Teslas, including a couple of people in our group of town homes, and if that's what floats their boats, fine, but they're polluting the earth more than the air, considering the mining of materials to make those batteries. Same thing for batteries of hybrids.
Summer quandary? Get out of town! Same with winter quandary. For three years we lived just north of New York City, where they never got any snow, and my wife hated it. That's one reason we moved here, to get four seasons, only we didn't know that they'd be Almost winter, Winter, Still winter, and Road-repair. That last CAN be a quandary!
Tim adds:
Yawp. Everywhere there is warm to hot summer temperatures. Heck; even the polar regions get them occasionally. But people just remember two days out at most.
I remember about ten years ago here in Missouri we were getting temps between 98 and 110 for almost two weeks. Nothing remotely like that since. That is the difference between weather and climate.
Dana, you guys have seasons that depend on which coat you will wear outside. And when it DOEs get warm you need to wear mosquito netting!
As regular readers of this site are aware, I never tire of pointing out that I live in the crazy-ass (at least politically) state of Minnesota, which contains the city of International Falls, home of the regularly seasonal coldest temperatures in the continental U.S. (New Hampshirites will carp that Mount Washington beats us, but that's not a city and people don't live on it.) And yet we often get summer temperatures in the high 90's, and it has more than once cracked 100 on my indoor/outdoor thermometer -- something that has happened only once in Tampa, FL (just the other day, in fact) since records began to be kept.
But the thing is, we (or at least my wife and I) don't look at those readings and say "Oh golly gee, that's two degrees hotter than last year on this day, the world must be heating up." We are more apt to say "It's a couple degrees hotter than yesterday." But the actual temperature may be a couple degrees cooler than yesterday. Indeed, last week the temperatures were in the 60's for three or four days.
We are more apt to pay attention to the humidity, especially if we're spending much time outside; and "global warming" isn't causing that. Air quality is another thing: Canuckistan is still generating forest fire smoke on many days, cutting off sunshine and stinking up the air badly, causing us to grumble about Manitoba's lousy forestry practices -- are they run by a bunch of retired Californians?
The upshot of this is that we don't believe the Global Warmiacs and never have. We see a lot of people driving Teslas, including a couple of people in our group of town homes, and if that's what floats their boats, fine, but they're polluting the earth more than the air, considering the mining of materials to make those batteries. Same thing for batteries of hybrids.
Summer quandary? Get out of town! Same with winter quandary. For three years we lived just north of New York City, where they never got any snow, and my wife hated it. That's one reason we moved here, to get four seasons, only we didn't know that they'd be Almost winter, Winter, Still winter, and Road-repair. That last CAN be a quandary!
Tim adds:
Yawp. Everywhere there is warm to hot summer temperatures. Heck; even the polar regions get them occasionally. But people just remember two days out at most.
I remember about ten years ago here in Missouri we were getting temps between 98 and 110 for almost two weeks. Nothing remotely like that since. That is the difference between weather and climate.
Dana, you guys have seasons that depend on which coat you will wear outside. And when it DOEs get warm you need to wear mosquito netting!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
06:25 AM
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I'll probably be sorry I said this, but here we are at the end of July and I don't believe we've seen a single mosquito this year, despite having ample areas of standing water. I can only chalk it up to a very early spate of warm weather that apparently discombobulated the little buggers, followed by a long bout of unseasonably cool temperatures, and by the time things evened out to where they should have been, well, the mosquitos we would have seen just never appeared.
Neither did the cottonwood that normally coats our lawns and everything else for a three to four week period in late spring to early summer.
Neither did the cottonwood that normally coats our lawns and everything else for a three to four week period in late spring to early summer.
Posted by: Dana Mathewson at July 31, 2025 12:42 AM (/DT7Z)
2
Hmm...interesting observattion. I wonder what caused that mosquito trick; hopefully it will be repeated there every year - and elsewhere.
Of course the Gang Green will bemoan the disappearance of the mosquito and wax poetic about the virtues of the vampiric monsters. Some people can find a dark cloud around every silver lining.
Of course the Gang Green will bemoan the disappearance of the mosquito and wax poetic about the virtues of the vampiric monsters. Some people can find a dark cloud around every silver lining.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at July 31, 2025 06:30 AM (AauBe)
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