Splish-splash, we're all taking a bath

"like the water's flow under December's snow"

Longfellow - The Skeleton in Armor (1841)

Dunno whatcher talkin' 'bout Hank, Christmastime's t-shirt weather.

I'd like to remind everyone of a concept increasingly fading from our lexicon: the spring thaw.

This photo was not taken this year.

Y'see kids, you wouldn't know it from looking out the window but at temperate latitudes it was heretofore considered normal for snow to gradually accumulate for weeks at a time over the winter months, especially in upland regions, thawing or sublimating only gradually or partially in late winter and then finally melt altogether sometime in late February or early March when the temperature decisively rose. The resulting meltwater flooding caused occasional problems, but as it turns out, temperatures just above freezing don't help evaporation much either, so what we're getting now with fewer sub-zero days every year is longer and longer months of repeated freezing and thawing and miserable slushy, deformable ground wreaking havoc on infrastructure. Previously, wide, flat sinks like you see above managed the springtime overflow (and were in no small measure supported by it) plus ecosystems have adapted to winter ground cover, as exemplified by the now extensively studied snowshoe hare example. The bunnies don a white coat during winter months to blend against snow. With snow lasting less and less every year, instead of being camouflaged, now they pop out against the scenery like brilliant little lightbulbs, drawing the eye of every fox, hawk, raccoon and coyote like an all-you-can-eat corn dog buffet to a redneck.

Stop posing heroically just because you've finally admitted reality exists. The evidence for global warming was never difficult to understand. It didn't take long for timelapses of melting glaciers to pile up. Any advanced calculations were done for you. Hell, I was bugging my relatives and did a junior year high school science class presentation about it back in the late nineties. It was already old news. For my entire lifetime, you've been able to read evidence not only from atmospheric physics and dwindling albedo estimates, but chemical analyses of soil, ice, air and water samples, biological analyses of wildlife geographic ranges shifting uphill and northwards to deal with warming habitats, hell, even social corroboration. One of the saddest moments came in 2005-ish? when a delegation from (I believe?) Vanuatu addressed the United Nations, meekly begging hat in hand for some measures against rising waves because quite a few of their islands are atolls merely a hand's breadth above sea level, and they're already getting washed away millimeters by millimeters every year. We all knew they'd be ignored. And they've been sounding the same alarm ever since. And they've been ignored.

 

I suppose what I'm really getting at is that the next elected official feeding convenient lies to the degenerate braindead hordes of hillbilly refuse which have denied global warming for a hundred years based on fairy tales about divine providence and are STILL denying it even as it's sloshing against our boots in the middle of January deserves to be held face-down in one of those puddles above until it stops kicking.