Weather: It’s silly to say Friday was the coldest day of the year and decade, when each was only three days old at the time. However, -3 was as cold as I remember here, certainly the coldest since I had an outdoor thermometer.
The day after New Year’s it snowed. Because the temperatures only rose above freezing for a few hours, it lingered. The frigid temperature came the day after the snow when nothing had melted into humidity and no clouds existed to hold in what little heat was generated.
That morning, around 8:45, the air was so cold the moisture condensed on the bare twigs of trees into frost. This wasn’t a snowfall, which lays flat, even when piled in a jumble of large flakes. Each droplet of water was turned into a separate flake that stood erect on the boughs, turning everything into a classic winter scene.
Last snow: 1/2. Week’s low: -3 degrees F. Week’s high: 51 degrees F in the shade.
What’s green: Everything is under snow.
Tasks: I’ve begun the annual task of creating templates for the new year’s record keeping. I begin with the checkbook, then move on to plant records. Each year I’m forced to work around whatever changes Microsoft introduced during the year into my database software. If my computer was capable of responding to my voice commands, it probably would have shut itself down and refused to come back up.
Animal sightings: No animal tracks in the snow yet.
Weekly update: I had a stitch in my side Monday evening, a sharp cramp on the left side of my chest. Of course, one immediately wonders if one should get to the emergency room. The location didn’t seem right, so I took an aspirin and rubbed an herbal ointment over the area. Within an hour, everything was relaxed.
By chance, I had an appointment for a message the next morning. After the therapist found the offended intercostal muscle and asked the usual questions, he said one function of those muscles was to expand the space between the ribs when the lungs needed more space to operate.
That made sense to a mind that quickly slipped from scientific fact to speculation.
Earlier in 2019, I had replaced my undergarments because the elastic had gotten so tight that it made it difficult to breathe. I assumed I had just added a layer of fat there, to match the other layers that were replacing muscles. Somehow, I get fatter without gaining weight as I age.
In the past month or so I started having problems again. It didn’t make sense that I had added that many extra cells in so short a time. Besides, I had no problems in the morning. I only had to shed in the late afternoon and early evening, often when I was doing my nightly hour of walking.
Tuesday I reasoned the problem wasn’t me, but bad air that was causing my lungs to work harder for air. The question was: why was the air worse this year?
I talked to a man in line at the post office before Christmas who said he hoped it would snow, because there was so much pollen in the air that it needed to be cleared. My therapist said he’d been suffering and would blame his juniper allergy, only he knew it was the wrong time of the year. He also estimated some 90% of the people he saw were complaining of some kind of respiratory problem.
A sudden flash of enlightenment. That morning I’d seen a news story about the 4,000 people trapped on a beach in Australia who were driven there by wildfires.
Those fires have been raging since October, which was before I started having problems with elastic encircling my rib cage.
Lord knows what’s in the air. The heat is so intense in Australia, it’s creating its own weather systems. Those storms and fire tornadoes are localized. [1]
All I know is that it is burning scrub and grasslands, not forests. I don’t know if any of those plants are like Russian thistles and contain noxious chemicals that protect them from predators. [2] Many of the local animals have been incinerated [3] and sucked into the atmosphere’s dust.
It’s easy to get a false sense of security in this country. The common weather maps only show the United States. They don’t include the oceans were storms begin, except during hurricanes. Then, it’s usually the Atlantic.
Last week I considered the possibility our recent storms were related to one that affected the Philippines about the time I was talking to that man in the post office about the possibility of our getting snow.
One wonders how something so far away can reach us here in the Española valley. In 1883, a volcano in Indonesia’s Sundra straight erupted. Krakatoa sent a sulfur-rich cloud into the atmosphere that effected the ability of people everywhere on the planet to see the sun for five years. [4]
The winter of 1887–1888 was so severe it wiped out the open range cattle industry on the great plains, and ended the era of the cowboy and drives along the great trails to Kansas railheads in places like Abilene and Dodge. [5]
Scientists have problems moving from hypothesis to fact because the weather is not a simple phenomenon. They need to factor out concurring events to establish clear causality. And, of course, the mere presence of alternative events provides the evidence used by their critics to discredit their work.
With Krakatoa, the weather turned cold before the eruption, and the weather was warm immediately after. Record rains were recorded in Los Angeles. [6] Then the cold set in, and lasted until 1888, with the most severe storm occurring in mid-January.
Weather forecasting was then in the portfolio of the army. Thomas Woodruff issued no warnings for the January 1888 blizzard. Climatic data collection was in its infancy. Possible omens existed, but were outside the scope of his instructions. David Laskin concluded his
"failure, if one can speak of human failure in the face of a storm of this force and scale, is that he lacked imagination. A common failing in a person trained and drilled all his adult life in military discipline."
No imagination is as bad as too much. When one removes all the competing theories, one is still left with facts that need explaining: the death of cattle on the Great Plains, the fires in Australia, and people’s breathing problems this winter. They exist, whether of not the connecting tissues of scientific explanation can be established.
Notes on photographs:
1. Frost on flowering crab apple, 3 January 2013.
2. Frost on Stella sweet cherry (front) and globe willow (back), 3 January 2013.
3. Snow on Stella sweet cherry, 23 February 2019.
End notes:
1. Reuters. "Australia Bushfires Are Creating Their Own Weather Systems." Posted by Huffington Post. 4 January 2020.
2. Burning Russian thistles (Salsola pestifer) were discussed in the post for 19 December 2010.
3. Sophie Lewis. "Australian Wildfires May Have Killed Half a Billion Animals." CBS News website. 2 January 2020.
4. Wikipedia. "1883 Eruption of Krakatoa."
5. "Open Range." Encyclopædia Britannica website. 20 July 1998.
6. Wikipedia.
7. David Laskin. The Children’s Blizzard. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Quoted by "With a Bang: Not a Whimper: The Winter of 1887-1888." Minnesota. Department of Natural Resources website. 10.
No comments:
Post a Comment