Here in Virginia, it looks like we will have a soggy Halloween. But in Chicago the cold and snow may barrel in big time.
“A buckled jet stream weather pattern known as the Pineapple Express has sent warm weather from closer to the equator north to Alaska, setting records there,” we learn from The Chicago Tribune, “even as it’s forced below-normal temperatures south from closer to the Arctic and into the Chicago area.”
The Tribune notes that they are working on a new record in the Windy City. Not a new lowest temperature, but, well, “a record for coldest high temperature.” Go back over a century and a half, before all this ‘global warming,’ and “records were set in 1873 for the coldest Oct. 31 high temperature, 31 degrees, and the lowest low temperature, 23 degrees.”
What is refreshing in all this is not the chill winds, nor the snow. It’s to read multiple articles about the weather and see not one mention of greenhouse gases and man-made ‘climate-change.’
Mark Twain famously once quipped that “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Nowadays, too many people are trying to do something about not just ‘the weather’ but about ‘the climate.’
Which, we should understand, is deceptively simple when we put the definitive article in front of the word: THE climate. When I was a kid, most climate talk referred to weather patterns in regions. Not the whole planet as one big region.
What if the interaction of different regions were the real story?
So, my Halloween treat has already been digested: the hobgoblin of catastrophic climate change has been set aside, the cold weather too strong a contrast to feed that diabolical narrative.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
from a photo by Ian Collins
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