Infra-Data on our Climate

Our furnace came on overnight what with the temperature having declined to 40° F. Last year we reached this marker a little later, September 19; the temperature then had been 45.9. Last year with here-a-day, there-a-day of silent furnace, the 19th signaled the beginning of the heating season. And we keep our house quite cool.

As I’ve already noted, thus far the summer has been unusually cool—much as our previous winter had been unusually mild. Here is hope that the same compensations will operate in the future as well.

The meta-data are one thing, what happens locally is what we live. In the big picture vast floods, fires—and who knows where the locust is. Here, by some magic of the Jet Stream, which makes two odd wiggles northward as it describes a very shallow trough over the northern U.S.A., thus frequently passing north of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, therefore having made our summers there hellishly humid, and then also at Detroit, with the same result, has been shielding us, this year and last, from the worst extremes of what seems to be the return of the Dust Bowl again—and corresponding excess of water elsewhere.

I try to keep good infra-data; I mark the furnace leaving hibernation and our plants coming indoors in the fall (Mid-October, recently) and going out in Spring (Mid-May). The furnace has come on, the plants have come in earlier each year. But so far I only have two years of data. With such rich information, and $3.75 in cash, I can buy myself a Starbucks Frappucino Grande Mocha/Mocha Light.