Global warming, my frosted hind foot!

It’s not so unusual to have cold weather or even snow in April for a day or two, but we usually don’t end up monitoring the windchill. The roaring winds on Friday and Saturday would slap you down and drive an icicle through your heart, not to mention the Reverend Mother’s peonies and aliums.

Ok, despite the headline and how this post starts, I’m not going to go on about what the weather was like here the past few days. If you live here you know, and if you don’t, you don’t care. But I did notice some oh, inconvenient, truths while huddling in the basement near the warm TV.

Saturday night Rev. Mom and I settled in to watch one of my favorite movies, Local Hero, which I had received as a birthday present. The movie was filmed in the 80s, and at one point a couple of scientist characters are talking about how they proved they can prevent the coming ice age by rerouting the North Atlantic Drift . Yes, 25 years ago if anyone was talking climate change it was in terms of global cooling.

After my wife retired I switched from the DVD player to highlights from the Masters. The announcers were huddled together in the Georgia night wearing stocking caps and parkas, their breath puffing in great white clouds as they talked about how the unnatural cold and high winds were making the tournament a disaster for the players and causing high scores.

Sunday I watched the Masters live as it played out in balmy temperatures that climbed as high as 50 degrees. In the short commercial breaks I flipped over to the Twins game. This was only the second game in what had been meant to be a three-game series because Friday’s game had been called, not on account of rain or even snow, but simply, “cold”. I saw Joe Mauer standing at the plate in the bright spring sunshine, great clouds of his breath obscuring his famous sideburns.

You know, if this keeps up we might want to go back and look at those theories on how to reroute the North Atlantic Drift.

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