Spring anyone?

I'm ready for Spring! Or a warmer climate. The day following Christmas this year was warm for Northeast Ohio. Warm for anywhere north of Georgia for that matter.
I was sick the entire holiday weekend, but I was able to feel the warm and sunny, albeit breezy air that day. I believe we topped out in the low to mid-60's (around 17 degrees celsius for my international friends.)
It was a holiday weekend like I always hope for - snow on Christmas Day, and warmth thereafter! If only life really worked that way. But reality bites and alas ... that was a freak of nature up here.
It was the kind of experience that makes one long for the sweet touch of Spring - all the while knowing there's another 4 months of winter! At least!
So, I get to thinking - for a crazy minute ... about living in Florida. What's worse - I got the idea from what has to be the saddest goddamn movie I have ever seen. Marley and Me. Now - it was a great flick - don't get me wrong. Very realistic portrayal of life, funny at all the right times, but in the end - the saddest film known to mankind. I'm not even lying. I felt violated - I hadn't signed up for that and it pissed me off.
Anyway - so I start thinking about, "could I live in Florida?" The answer of course is probably no way in hell, but it got me to thinking about finding a warmer climate. So I'll be searching - probably in vain - for a more hospitable place to winter.
Good thing is - my girlfriend is kinda looking for the same change, so it works out well! We're both full of wanderlust.
Meanwhile, I'll suffer - like I do every year - through the harsh, killing cold of a Northeast Ohio winter - until orange barrel season comes around once again.
Cheers!

Global warming and local weathermen!

OK - I'll probably get some people fired up with this one, but I just had to say ... something. The front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer today has a pic and a headline:" Global Warming - Did we cause this? (picture of polar bear stranded on a small strip of ice surrounded by water) These guys don't think so ..." Below - pictures of 5 local weathermen: Andre Bernier, Dick Goddard, Mark Johnson, Jon Loufman, and Mark Nolan. Now, it seems there's a raging debate between day-to-day meterologists, whose job it is to predict and report local weather conditions and climatologists, whose job it is to collect and study mountains of data from a span of thousands of years to predict the likelihood of weather conditions in our near and not-so-near future. Climatologists take a stance that the United Nations 1200 member Intergovernal Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Science, and the American Meteorlogical Society takes - the Earth's climate is warming and the human burning of fossil fuels in cars and industry is helping to accelerate that warming. The local weather guys say that these three groups - the latter, responsible for giving them certification - are wrong! Now my first instinct is to laugh. These guys can't even predict the weather here in Cleveland - I predict the weather better by expecting the exact opposite of what they have to say (and I'm right about 90% of the time.) By the way, the last guy I mentioned doesn't even do the weather anymore he's become Ron Burgundy. Anyway, the local guys blame the warming trend on events that they believe are cyclical. Now, the Earth does go through cycles. The sun does go through cycles as well.Channel 8 (Fox news) weathermen Bernier and Goddard, both believe that solar cycles are to blame. OK - good hypothesis - let's investigate. Solar cycles osscilate in a cycle that spans about 10 years. So every ten years, there's a peak and a dip. Starting in 1975, at the bottom, solar flare activity rose consistently until 1980, when it reached a peak. It then hit a low in 1985 and so on and so on. So, in 1990 there was a peak - in ' 95 a dip - in 2000 a peak - in '05 a dip and now we're on the upswing. Solar flares have been consistent. However, since 1960, there has been an unobstructed rise in CO2 levels - from 315 parts per million to 385 ppm as measured atop Mauna Loa, Hawaii. In addition, global temperatures (in a graph dating back to 1860) show cyclical highs and lows with some slow progress upward until about 1980 when they have moved far more upward and never looked back. The average global temp is now far higher than ever before found in recorded history and CO2 levels are astronomically higher than ever recorded in ice studies that date back thousands of years.So basically, the solar flare argument just won't flush. The data does not correspond. Perhaps our local guys haven't been keeping up on the data. The article then goes on to quote Jon Loufman as saying, "Climate records also show that long before civilization, the Vikings settled in Greenland because it was warm enough."OK - the Vikings settled in Greenland about 1000 years ago. At that time, the Earth was on the apex of a warming cycle - the same cycle these guys are touting. It then fell into a "lesser" ice age that bottomed out about the year 1600. AND - almost all of Greenland's Viking civilization was near the coast, which is even today, more hospitable than even a few miles inland. But while the argument he makes that Earth was in a warm cycle is valid ... there is the fact that the temperatures at that time were nowhere near as warm as they are spiking now. Finally, the argument sways to the idea that these guys looks at numbers all the time. They claim they're used to seeing weather extremes all the time. "Why should we think that anything's different today just because one day's hot and another day has heavy rain?" They see it as a natural variability. This is perhaps the most disturbing of the arguments. Ignorance is bliss. The local guys admit to not being privy to the massive amounts of data that climatologists compile. It is not their field. That would be like me, an air crew scheduler, talking to the press about how I feel a plane will respond to a coming storm. Wouldn't that be the pilot's place to say? I have some knowledge but I'm not the expert. I call this way of irresponsible thinking about global warming "Titanic Theory." "God himself cannot sink this ship."Well kiss my left nut - it's 23,000 feet under the sea isn't it?