Orel Family

Our Maple Tree -- what's left of it after an ice storm -- bloomed. Michigan, February 22. The old saying is that, if a frog is put in to a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if the frog is put in to a pot of cold water, and the water is heated only gradually, the frog will sit there, unaware of the danger until it is too late. The metaphor is so obvious that Al Gore used it in An Inconvenient Truth , more than a decade ago. So here we are. Te GISS data shows that, for the 3rd consecutive year, we had the warmest year since the start of record-keeping in 1880. In January, I wrote , "It took a little longer than I expected, but the final numbers for 2016 were finally posted today. As expected, 2015 is the warmest year on record. As expected, December was warm. Very warm. December is now the warmest month ever, compared to average." By the end of March, December 2015 was only the 4th warmest month ever. But I also wrote, in that piece: "...

Graph 1: Ascending: The global temperatures of my life. (data source: GISS) January 9, 2016:  Last January, I posted a piece I titled, "Just a Little Bit Warmer," just after NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released the final piece of data for 2014 global temperatures. As expected, the data showed that 2014 was the hottest year since the beginning of record keeping in 1980, albeit by a very small margin. In a few days, GISS will publish the final data for 2015. Once again, it'll be a new record. This time, by a wide margin. The data will be at  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt . In October, the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index crossed 1 full degree celsius above normal, for the first time ever. November became the 2nd month in a row above that mark, and December may well make it 3 consecutive. 2015 will also mark the 4th consecutive year of rising global temperatures; the last time that happened was 100 ...

Graph 1: Ascending: The global temperatures of my life. (data source: GISS) Last Friday, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released the final piece of data for 2014 global temperatures. The numbers are published in several places, and the newspapers pick them up almost instantly, but the page I've always used is  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt . It's a simple text page, and NASA's been using the same address for it since at least the 1990s. Sometime around the middle of each month, they just add another number, showing the final data for the prior month. And then I can look for myself, as is my preference. I follow the data pretty closely, so I already knew that May had been the warmest May since the beginning of record keeping in 1880. I also knew that 2014 set new records in August and September, too. I knew that, when looking at records, even monthly records, it's pointless to look further back than 1998. And...

March 23, 2012: Extreme heat caused cherry trees to bloom a full month early, dooming the crop. In March 26, 2012, I wrote a blog piece titled, Cooked and frozen - the looming disaster for our tree fruit.   Due to a ridiculously warm March and the near inevitability that temperatures would return to normal, I could foresee the impact: "Tomorrow evening, the low temperature here is predicted to be 28 degrees. Assuming that prediction -- or another one for later in the week -- is accurate, our cherry crop will be wiped out. We have no rational or affordable defenses against it." Sure enough, a frost on March 27th -- it got down to 27 degrees here -- wiped out the cherry crop. What a difference this year! Oh, we've had freezes. 10 of the last 11 nights, including three that were colder than that coldest evening last year. But we haven't been outside to run water to the trees. Haven't even looked. Because this year, the trees haven't bloomed. The hollyhocks ...

One month ago, I took a business trip to Austin, Texas. I turned on the radio in the rental car, and first thing I heard was a weather report. "Cover your plants, we may have Austin's first frost of the season tonight," came the warning. I laughed; after all, our first frost in Michigan this year was in September, and it was currently December 11. After the weather report, the station's scheduled programming came on. It was  Rush Limbaugh . Over the next 6 minutes, he managed to tie "global warming" in to a liberal agenda that included everything from taxing the wealthy to policies on illegal immigration to gun control to calls to ban NFL kickoffs . "That's how the left does it," he explained. "They guilt you in to accepting their global warming belief." As I write, it is 57 degrees Fahrenheit here in West Bloomfield. The normal high temperature for January 12th is 32 degrees. It is the 7th day of our warm-up. Local ski areas ...

A little more than 5 years ago, I wrote a blog piece called Global Cooking . Maybe not so much for other readers at the time, but for myself. To document a winter that essentially wasn't happening, with early January temperatures in the 40s and 50s. Using a chart from the Weather Underground website , I wrote, "Today is the 26th consecutive day of above normal temperatures here. Every day during these past 26 has had a high temperature at least 7 degrees above normal." I also noted, among that year's oddities, that I had harvested broccoli in the garden on New Year's day. 5 years before that, in 2002, when 4 consecutive mid-April days in the 80s caused the fruit trees to bloom prematurely. But a frost nearly immediately thereafter completely wiped out that year's cherry crop, and reduced the apple crop by almost 90%. None of this prepared us for 2012. Here is the weather chart for March, 2012 from the Weather Underground site. The average high temp...

Last month, when I wrote a post called "Global Cooking," our local area was in the middle of an astoundingly mild beginning to the winter. Eventually, we would reach 37 consecutive days of above-average temperatures, including 31 consecutive days at least 7 degrees above normal, 11 consecutive days without a freeze, and 6 days with a high or low at least 20 degrees above normal (2 with both). On January 5th, the high temperature was 52 and the low was 44; that would be an average day on April 14th. Of course, that weather was due in no small measure to the effects of El Niño, and when El Niño subsided, inevitably so did the heat wave. Here, the warm weather finally ended in mid-January, and the cold arrived on January 28th. For the past 23 days, temperatures have been below normal, including one particularly bitter day when the high temperature was just 6 degrees (forcing a cancellation of ski school because it was too cold!). Inevitably, this has led to some caustic rem...