More sunny days

What a blessing to have a sunny week finally appear in our cold, dark, and soggy (and frosty) winter! We're definitely in the home stretch (I think hopefully), as normally we would have had a number of days like today already -- sunny and highs in the 50's. The weekend will be even more pleasant, with sunny skies and temperatures into the lower 60's. Today was quite 'normal' according to weather records.

Normal is getting more variable than ever, it seems to me.

There was an excellent piece by Thomas Friedman of the NY Times about 'Global Weirding' earlier this week. I'm not an expert on global climate change (far from it), but my survey of review literature, and talking with knowledgeable folks about their thoughts, in the process of working on a piece not long ago about how gardeners are perceiving climate change was revealing to me.

Highly variable weather events are predicted by many global climate change models; they don't predict a lock-step increase in temperatures by any means. But certainly, there's an overall increasing trend in average temperatures, especially in the winter, and it's predicted to continue. So the blips of record snows are only data points in global weirding, not a refutation of the process of global climate change.

Blog Action Day - A Changing Climate

As a long-term nature observer and gardener, there are many signs of climate change. The most striking are extreme weather patterns. Predicted by a number of climate change models, variability in rainfall and temperatures may be the most telling indicators. In my part of the world, we've seen warmer winters (in night-time lows), drought and deluge (definitely yes), and drier summers (certainly in the recent decade of drought).

Is this 'normal'?

Maybe, but it seems to indicate that increasingly, human-induced inputs are affecting global climatic patterns in unprecedented ways.

I'm glad to lend a voice to Blog Action Day efforts to promote awareness on this issue.