Autumn storms, odds and ends

Two weekends ago, we had a freak autumn snowstorm that dropped a little more than a foot of snow on trees that still had the majority of their leaves. As a result, some people lost power for a week, and trees and tree limbs went down everywhere. (I was lucky, losing power for a mere three days, but darn was it cold at night in my house!) A maple tree in my yard had a large, horizontal limb partly break off and fall onto a privet hedge. Part of it was sticking out into the street, and I had to grab my pruning saw and go out while it was snowing to cut that part of it off so that it wouldn't block cars. The part that wasn't sticking out into the street is still where it fell, still partly attached to the tree. The tree-pruning companies are so booked up that I couldn't get an appointment for someone to come and remove it until the 22nd of this month, still a little more than a week away. Here's the branch:

Here's another view:

Here's the tree just a little more than a week before the storm - you can see the branch that broke off in the lower right:

In other news, my father will be buying a new house this week. I will be helping him gradually pack and move stuff out of the old house where he has lived for almost 30 years, and where I grew up, and into his smaller new house. We will be able to do this gradually because he plans to sell the old house to neighbors who are interested in it, and they won't be ready to move in until around March.

Early taste of late spring

When I went outside Friday and yesterday, I had to remind myself repeatedly that this is the second half of March, not the second half of April or even the first half of May. The temperature was around 70 Fahrenheit (21 Celsius), which is quite a bit warmer than we would normally expect for March, which is a month where we can normally expect temperatures a good 15 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit (about 10 degrees Celsius) cooler. The preceding several days were not as warm, but still warmer than average.

Plants are clearly responding to this unusually early coming of warm springtime weather. Normally, I can expect to see crocus coming up at the very end of March or beginning of April, and the daffodils and tulips following shortly in early to mid April - though only the crocus blooms almost immediately after appearing. Yesterday, though:

Crocus - already blooming!

Tulips

Daffodils

And it isn't just the bulbs that seem are responding to the early warmth:

Some shrub - maybe some kind of honeysuckle?

The only snow I saw on a 3-mile walk was one pile of very dirty snow next to a school parking lot that had managed to hold out against over two weeks of rain and mainly above freezing temperatures:

Holdout snow pile, which is probably noticeably smaller today

Still, if you look really close at some of the trees in the background, you can see a slight tinge of red on some of them. That's a sign that they are red maples and that their first red flower buds are getting close to opening - probably some 2-3 weeks earlier than in an average year.

Now, what I'm really hoping for is that we don't get any long cold spells for the rest of the spring. Some plants can endure some real cold after they start growing leaves and flowers for the spring, others can't, and the latter will depend on the rest of the spring being free from serious cold spells.

I walked down a road that I haven't walked since last summer, and so from my point of view the plants weren't the only things that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. A new building had risen from ground that supported only trees last year:

I could be wrong, but this building doesn't look like it will be particularly attractive
when finished. I'm not sure what it's going to be - the area around it is entirely residential, but it looks
more like a small office building to me.

Well, it's cooler today, but still pretty warm. By late in the week, it's supposed to be getting down to near freezing at night. Hopefully it won't stay much colder than that for an extended period of time. Also, even if the spring temperatures decide to act like this is Georgia or something - the summer temperatures had better not act like this is Georgia! Part of the bargain of living in a northern state, IMHO, is that you accept a colder and longer winter in return for not having to endure as long or as hot a summer.

Up early this year

A couple of days ago, I noticed something unexpected outside. The perennial bulbs are coming up out of the ground already - crocus, tulips, and daffodils. I don't think that I've never seen them poke above ground this early in the year before. Typically, the end of March or the beginning of April are more typical, especially for the daffodils and tulips, which tend to be a little bit behind the crocus.

Winter started out cold and snowy in December here, but for most of 2010 it has not been very severe at all. While places further south or further west and north got clobbered with very heavy snowfall, we've had little. There is almost no snow left now.

Hopefully there will NOT be a really cold spell now that the plants seem to be starting up early.

Strange winter, cool summer, and climate change

It's been a weird winter in the eastern USA - after getting some heavy snow back in December, the heavy snows seem to have largely ignored the far northeastern states for the past month and a half, and have totally clobbered places further south, like Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C, while cold weather has made much of the southeast little warmer than the northeast. Here we have had a pretty cold but dry winter with less than average snowfall after the beginning of January. The real weirdness for us was actually last summer, which was one of the coolest and wettest on record. This brings up a problem for many people - if the world is supposed to be getting warmer, why are we getting abnormally cool summers and winters with heavy snows falling much further south than usual? Before anyone panics, yes, I do know that short-term weather doesn't always correspond with long-term climate change, and that even if the whole planet gets much warmer, some spots will actually get colder at certain times of year. I don't think that most people think about weather and climate in that way, though. Farmers and other people whose work and livelihood is heavily impacted by seasons and long-term climate as well as short-term weather might take a longer view, but I think that your average city or suburb dweller doesn't remember or think as much about long-term changes in weather patterns. This is an entirely subjective judgment on my part, and I might be totally wrong (that certainly has been known to happen!), but it seems to me that quite a few people will see a cool summer and heavy snowstorms further south than usual, and think "Global warming, my ass! More like a new ice age coming - those so-called experts don't have any idea what they are talking about."

To be honest, that's my gut reaction, a reaction that gets neutralized by what I've read about global warming and climate change, but still lurks in the back of my mind, waiting for another chance.

It's not surprising that a lot of people in the USA disbelieve in global warming/climate change. One thing that I think distinguishes popular attitudes in the USA from those in many other countries is that historically Americans have a strong streak of distrusting "the experts". This is sometimes called anti-intellectualism, but I think that it would actually be more accurate to call it "anti-expertism". The idea is that experts in various fields are really a self-appointed elite who don't know much more than ordinary people do, but who pretend that they do in order to justify a privileged position for themselves and control over the lives of others. This concept is often closely connected to fear of strong government, a classic theme of US history that always comes back to center stage even after it sometimes fades into the background for a while. Not surprisingly, anti-expert feelings are usually especially strong when the experts are telling people unpleasant news, like that people will have to make major changes in their lifestyles or face climate changes big enough to negatively impact all of human civilization - or that they will face these climate changes even after they make major changes to their lifestyles. Anti-expert beliefs are strong enough for many Americans that they will see anything that seems to contradict the "experts", even if it is not scientifically valid, as proof positive that the experts are "full of it".

Unfortunately, recent weather patterns in the eastern US don't exactly make global warming look plausible to large numbers of people who are inclined to be highly critical of the whole idea in the first place.