Bryo Cryo

Day 53: It's cold. Okay, it's only Pacific-Northwest cold, not East-Coast cold, but it's all a matter of what constitutes "normal" for the residents of any given area. I'm sure somebody in Florida would classify 40 degrees as "cold," 30 degrees as "damn cold" and 25 degrees as "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey," but here in the PNW, 22 degrees is cold enough to justify complaining. Let it drop into the teens, and we go into full-blown weather cursing. Now I happen to know that there are a lot of people out there who believe that colder winters disprove global warming, but they are confusing two non-interchangeable terms. "Weather" is what we get daily. It rains, it snows, we have a dry spell or a heatwave. That's "weather." Climate change is, in a short definition, a long-term shift in norms, e.g., a shift toward lower annual rainfall or hotter summers charted over decades or even centuries. There may be some backsliding in the graph, downturns when an unusually wet summer seems to make up for 20 years of dried-out lakes and glacial retreat, but when viewed from farther back temporally, a shift becomes obvious. Climate and weather are not the same thing, and while thousands may lose their lives in a meteorological event like a flood, a global shift in climate will make its effects known on all living creatures.