Less Than Zero

The first time the words "below zero" were impressed on my consciousness as a child, I was thrown into a quandary.  If zero meant "nothing", what could possibly be less than zero?  (Yes, this was before Robert Zimmerman got out of Minnesota.)  How could anything be below nothing?

But there it was, and my mother took it very seriously.  For years afterwards, any temp "below zero" was like a cosmic event, what "awesome" actually means.  And in western Pennsylvania in the 50s and 60s there were more than a few.

When I lived in Pittsburgh in the late 80s and 90s, that winters were shorter and milder was street wisdom.  I recall a veteran of the Squirrel Cage bar pointing to where ice used to form on the street in front of it in November, not to disappear until March.  Not then, though.  Not anymore.

So I appreciate that folks in that part of the world had to readapt to that kind of weather this winter, after a generation or so.  It's hard to judge at a distance whether it is more extreme now than even back then, but it does sound like it.  And a lot less predictable.

That global heating could lead to intense cold and big snowstorms may be counter-intuitive, but it was predicted long before it started happening.  The physics of it aren't complicated, though the many factors involved make the time and specific manifestations difficult to predict.  But readers of Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy from the 90s will recall that intense cold visited Washington as a consequence.  Cold and snow is there now.

Here we've had no winter at all.  The tulips are blooming (I took this photo however in March last year), the hummingbirds departed several weeks early, and it's generally been a warmer, sunnier winter than any in the 19 we've seen here.  Even last winter was not this consistently mild.  We also did not get the wet February we got last year.  We got some moisture from the storms earlier in the month, and some foggy days.  But the last appreciable rains were in early December.

The departures from normal here are certainly a lot more pleasant, which is some ways makes them more eerie.  But the new extremes in the East as well as most of the West, which right now may not be so far from normal variation to be intrinsically alarming, certainly add an edge to the kind of scientific speculation that emerged this past week, predicting mega-drought for the West, and significant deterioration of livability in New York--studies I'll review in another post.

In some ways, getting our heads around the climate crisis is a little like dealing with the concept of below zero, though even more complicated to contemplate.  We get to some understanding by degrees, by paying heed to what climate scientists say about the weather, and adjusting our ideas accordingly, about what the climate crisis is and what changes it can make.

For right now though, my thoughts are with those suffering cold and snow extremes in places I used to live (Boston, DC, PA etc.) or have visited, like Niagara Falls, where days of below zero temps actually froze parts of the falls themselves (photo above.)  But I'm still going out in the sunshine.