The White Lion Of March

Day 145: March has come in like the proverbial lion, although a rare albino form of the beast. Six inches of white deposited itself in my yard yesterday, topping off the eight-inch rock-hard glacier purporting to be lawn and garden. March snows in the Pacific Northwest should be light and brief, a dusting melting off by mid-afternoon, never more than an inch, never persisting for days on end. Weird weather, you say. Yes, if you look at the short term, but harder winters and heavier snowfalls are symptomatic of a deeper issue: climate change.

Now I hear you sputtering, "But...but...but they say we're having global warming! I'm freezing my buns off here, and I can't see out for snowdrifts against my window!" Yes, that's right. The two things go hand in hand.

In simple terms (and the issue is really much more complex), our summers are getting hotter and drier. Hot, dry conditions drive moisture into the atmosphere, with evaporation occurring not just from bodies of water, but from anything with water content (leaves, evergreen needles, even human skin). It remains there until the annual weather patterns shift, at which time it comes back to Earth in force as precipitation, i.e., flood-producing rains, heavy snowfalls. The net result, mapped over a period of decades (as opposed to days, weeks or months), indicates the climatological trend.

Weather or climate? The average American's knowledge of science seems to be limited to the one question they asked as children: where do babies come from? Unfortunately, it seems like many of them still believe they're brought by the stork. Trying to explain climate change/global warming to someone who can't tell you the difference between an amphibian and a reptile is as futile as talking genetics to a Creationist. The brain cells simply aren't there to address.