The Daily Babble

Weather, Whither?

This has been one freaky first week of March hereabouts. First of all, I've heard more thunder in the past month or so than in the previous nine years put together. We had a long string of unusually warm and sunny days in February (usually the rainiest or second rainest month of the year) and so far in March it's been all clouds and precip, but lately also cold. It just doesn't get this cold for this long here.

We have a lot of microclimates here on the North Coast. It's not unusual for it to be ten or twenty degrees warmer or sometimes colder just a few miles inland from the temperature around the bay or in the coastal zone, and even more extreme variation at 40 or 50 miles. And the hills and mountains also have that kind of variation from the coastal temps. But when the weather is freaky, the microclimates get even smaller and the variations greater. So today, the second of what looks like four or five cold days (it's below freezing right now, in the mid 20sF, which almost never happens here) people coming to work at Humboldt State could report a morning of: rain, golf-ball sized hail mixed with sleet or snow, sleet mixed with rain, or snow---half a foot of it by morning just twenty minutes from where I'm sitting, though the sight of a snowflake here would be recorded in the history books.

I talked to a guy today who works in Arcata, but got up early to drive up to the nearest peak and take a long walk in the snow before work. I wish I'd thought of it. By afternoon there were just patches visible from town. But as I was working the net this afternoon, broody clouds turned suddenly to sunshine, and simultaneously it began to rain. And when the rain stopped, it got all gray again. Freaky.

I notice that everytime someone mentions weather on a blog, people from all over the world comment on the strange weather where they live. Apart from the obvious climate crisis, it does get you thinking about how prophecies of apocalyptic times often involve the weather or other natural phenomena. And the remarkable coincidences of natural disasters at times of the unnatural disasters that civilizations inflict on themselves. Like the dust storms of the Depression, which was also when one of the most violent hurricanes in the country's history ripped through Long Island, New York.

So while our weather is freaking out, we're reading of the Bush government falling apart at the edges (at the very least), with a Secretary of Interior bolting ahead of more Abramoff scandals, and the White House's top domestic adviser and enforcer of fundamentalist dogmas on public health agencies in the areas of reproductive health, birth control and AIDS, arrested for systematic frauds on low-end department stores for a total of $5,000. And a prominent GOPer talk show host saying he's embarrassed to be a Republican. And now Justice Sandra Day O'Connor ripping into the Republican right for dangerous attacks on the judiciary, and uttering the word "dictatorship" in the quote above. Could the world be ending? Or just Karl Rove's world?

And then there's Iran and Iraq and the hard place between. I saw "Washington Week," the heavily energy-related corporately sponsored blatherfest on what's fraudulently called public television, and those reporters actually had their blood up over all this, including the still ongoing Dubai port deal and port security in general. Now in terms of intellect the collective wattage of this group typically is maybe enough to light up the inside of a refrigerator but I wouldn't want to try to read by it. So when they see the Bushites floundering, something is definitely hanging in the wind.

I'm looking out for falling frogs.