Setting the record straight

 I said I'd try to do better at posting on this blog, but I never in my wildest dreams — and I've had some real doozies — thought I'd be back this quickly.

Suffice it to say, as I was thinking in the shower about my last posting, from last night, I came to the conclusion that it might have been a touch misleading, unintentionally of course.

So, I decided it would be easy enough to hop under a blanket, fire up the old laptop and chatter away on the keyboard for a few minutes to set the record straight.

I did not mean to lead people to believe that this week's freak snowstorm of 27 inches was unequivocally tied to climate change. It hasn't been. 

It was my leap of faith to conclude that such a massive amount of snow, unforeseen by trained weather forecasters, had to have some "outside influence" to whip something up that powerful, even if it was limited to such a small section.

And in my view, it fit what climate change has come to mean, in that everything we have seen will be intensified. Heavy rains will get heavier, massive snows will pile ever higher, strong hurricanes will get stronger and intense tornadoes will become even more intense. All that goes without saying that warm temperatures will get warmer, winter will get shorter, and so on.

Yes, you can presume, without a shadow of a doubt, that I am among the millions who are convinced that climate change is real. Very real. And yes, I think we see it nearly every day in some form, if we're willing to stop, consider what we've seen in the past and what we're seeing now.

I might be cheating just a bit by virtue of my experience as a former long-time reporter at The Hays Daily News. While there, I was the go-to weather reporter, the keeper of weather records, at least as far as the newspaper was concerned. I shudder to think how many weather stories I've written.

To put it bluntly, I was intimately familiar with weather patterns and weather history in Hays and northwest Kansas.  And it was fun.

But i find it drives me a bit crazy to hear television meteorologists today talk about windy weather ahead, and then note we might have gusts of 20 mph. Sorry, folks, that's a light breeze in the western part of the state. It's not especially strong even in the eastern reaches of Kansas.

Or, perish the thought, when TV folks lament the prospect of wind-chill readings of 10 below zero. That really isn't a big deal to be honest. Heck, I can remember when ... I'll leave it at that.

But it underscores where we are today. 

Temperatures have warmed so much, even though only a degree or two on the long-term average, but noticeably so incidentally that a 10-below-zero wind chill borders on abhorrent. I'll stand my ground on disputing the windy threshold.

But 27 inches of snow is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you consider 30 inches is the all-time record, and that was just set in 2009.

So yeah, I tend to see climate change as an almost larger than life influence on how we perceive weather today.

Let's face it, climate change has become something of the elephant in the room. But, when you're talking about the great outdoors, that must mean it's a mighty big elephant.

Yes, it's January, but signs of spring abound

Note: After  a long hiatus, my youngest daughter shamed me into taking up my keyboard once again and spreading, at least in my mind, some words of wisdom.  To explain my absence, I was discouraged, disheartened by the apparent lack of readership, at least noted by the internal mechanics of the great and powerful google, which knows all and tells even less, unless, of course, you're willing to pay for it. Please give it a read, and I'll try to do better at writing regularly. Feel free to drop me a line, whether you agree or disagree with my musings.

Yes, it's January. Is spring near?

Hope springs eternal, so they say.

Who exactly says that is not a question I can answer, but it seems to be reality. Or perhaps the better fitting term would be a rite of passage.

No matter what applies here, it struck me this week, as I watched a squirrel scamper up and down a stately oak tree, a thread I happened to read on the Kansas Bird electronic mailing list about how spring surely must be right around the comet.

It had all the trappings of good pornography, other than it focused on wildlife. not wild life. Creatures of the outdoors, the birds and the bees, one could say. More specifically, it was about birds, hence the reason why it was passed along on an electronic mailing list owned, operated and originating from a statewide bird group.

So, the idea of spring approaching, never mind the 27 inches of snow that Ed and Cindy Harold of Weskan had received a day prior to watching as the squirrel made seemingly tireless runs up and down the mighty oak tree some 250 miles away, give or take.

Ed Harold, for the uninitiated, sometimes refers to himself — tongue-in-cheek of course — as the man of the mountain. Because he is the de facto caretaker of Mount Sunflower, at 4,039 getting above sea level, it is the highest point in Kansas.

Ed, or most likely, Cindy posted a photo of Kansas’ only remaining mountain man standing outside their mountain-side home, adjacent to what was likely a patio table, the bounty from the day’s snow storm piled 27 inches deep.

The yardstick embedded into the snow, naturally, was turned toward the camera so viewers could easily enlarge the photo and see the measurement for themselves.

Even if a 27-inch snowfall isn’t shocking enough in its own right, the snow had gently, if you can call several inches of snow an hour gently, piled up uniformly, like it was stacked that way intentionally.

This you must remember, occurred on the wind swept plains of far western Kansas. And I do mean far western. As in only a few miles from the Colorado border.

Snow in this part of the state doesn’t typically come straight down. No, out here, snow most often falls horizontally, driven by the howling wind, often piling up into nearly mountainous  drifts of sometimes dirt-laden piles of snow, the dirt scoured out by the very wind blowing the snow.

None of this, of course, has much of anything to do with the squirrel that spent an above-freezing calm afternoon scampering up and down the stately oak.

It does, however, show a stark contrast, in one spot 27 inches of snow and a few driving hours east, intermittent sunshine to warm an otherwise dry and snow-free area.

It’s not the thing that made of tales of old, but rather the ability to see in virtual real time what’s happening in various locations around the state, as well as nation and world.

Some might call it a modern miracle, but it’s certainly not that. It instead is an encroaching reality, driven by the marvels of technology.

But it’s also, a subtle reminder to those willing to accept science that climate change touches nearly everything in a myriad of ways.

To be sure, the naysayers will rise to challenge, claiming that Kansas has always been a state of contrasts. We’ve long had summer one day and winter the next, or snow in one part of the state and dry conditions elsewhere.

While true, they are also are essentially meaningless in this situation.

In this case, this approaching storm behaved as expected, inasmuch as it stayed in the western reaches of the state.

It was, however, predicted to be a low intensity snowstorm, in forecast after forecast. Snowstorms can be difficult to call, and they can prove extremely variable. But, here we’re talking about a early forecast of an inch or two and up to six or slightly more as the day dawned.

Nowhere was there a forecast of 27 inches.

Ed Harold said it wasn’t the biggest snowfall ever, one similar falling in the 1970s. That one was normal, to use the term loosely, as it fell horizontally.

But the mountain man’s snow of 2022, came in just shy of the 30-inch snowfall that fell in a 24-hour period in 2009 in Pratt.

So, while my squirrel friend — not the Harolds of course — scampered up and down the oak, carrying leaves and twigs to make a nest in some recess of the tree, we must remember that climate change is real. It’s all around us even here in Kansas. The nights are generally warmer and average temperatures continue to climb.

We must recognize reality, and do what we can to help reduce its effect. There’s plenty that can be done, even without inconvenience.

What will it hurt if we turn our thermostats down a couple degrees? We can grab a sweater or a blanket. It will save money.

If it helps the environment or the climate, so much the better.

It’s all pretty simple. We must do it ourselves, we must demand it from those who govern.

It all will help. We all must help.