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.