Guest smack-down by David Middleton
Funny thing… The writing of this post was disrupted by a preview of the Green New Deal in Dallas over the past 5 days… More on this later.
Losing Earth: A Recent History is a bad science fiction novel by Nathaniel Rich of The New York Times. It’s apparently an expanded version of a New York Times article he wrote. Last week, RealClearEnergy linked to an extract from this book on The Daily Maverick (whatever the frack that is).
Here’s an abbreviated version of the extract:
OUR BURNING PLANET: BOOK EXTRACT
What failure to reverse climate change could mean
By Nathaniel Rich• 27 May 2019By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change ― including how to stop it, according to the book, Losing Earth.
[…]
The Daily Maverick
It basically goes on like this:
- James Hansen good.
- IPCC good.
- Al Gore mega-superhero.
- Oil companies evil.
- Orange man bad.
- Green New Deal Cultural Revolution NOW!
- Global socialism now, or Earth fries in 12 years!!!
The above isn’t a list of actual quotes from the article. It’s my flippant impression of the article … And I’m being generous; this book extract doesn’t even deserve flippant.
First off, this is beyond moronic…
What failure to reverse climate change could mean…
Nathaniel Rich
It’s impossible to “reverse climate change” . “Climate change” is directionless.
If, by climate change, this “eloquent science history” (according to Barbara Kiser of Nature) means “global warming,” a reversal of the warming we have experienced since 1978 would mean a return to “The Ice Age Cometh“…
A return to That 70’s Climate Show doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea to me. If the serially wrong climate models were even close to correct, AGW saved us from The Ice Age Cometh…
If, by climate change, this “eloquent science history” is referring to the more significant warming Earth has experienced since the depths of the Little Ice Age, it would be far more catastrophic than any RCP8.5 nightmare.
Great Famine
Beginning in the spring of 1315, cold weather and torrential rains decimated crops and livestock across Europe. Class warfare and political strife destabilized formerly prosperous countries as millions of people starved, setting the stage for the crises of the Late Middle Ages. According to reports, some desperate Europeans resorted to cannibalism during the so-called Great Famine, which persisted until the early 1320s.
Black Death
History.com
Typically considered an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which is transmitted by rats and fleas, the Black Death wreaked havoc on Europe, North Africa and Central Asia in the mid-14th century. It killed an estimated 75 million people, including 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. Some experts have tied the outbreak to the food shortages of the Little Ice Age, which purportedly weakened human immune systems while allowing rats to flourish.
Iceland was one of the hardest hit areas. Sea ice, which today is far to the north, came down around Iceland. In some years, it was difficult to bring a ship ashore anywhere along the coast. Grain became impossible to grow and even hay crops failed. Volcanic eruptions made life even harder. Iceland lost half of its population during the Little Ice Age.
Tax records in Scandinavia show many farms were destroyed by advancing ice of glaciers and by melt water streams. Travellers in Scotland reported permanent snow cover over the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland at an altitude of about 1200 metres. In the Alps, the glaciers advanced and threatened to bulldozed towns. Ice-dammed lakes burst periodically, destroying hundreds of buildings and killing many people. As late as 1930 the French Government commissioned a report to investigate the threat of the glaciers. They could not have foreseen that human induced global warming was to deal more effective with this problem than any committee ever could.
Environmental History Resources
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was most likely the coldest climatic period of the Holocene Epoch. In Central Greenland it was roughly the same temperature as it was during the Bølling-Allerød glacial interstadial.
Just how much climate change do we need to reverse?
Back to the last Pleistocene glacial stage? Back to the Eemian interglacial? Or further back than that?
The modern ~1 °C rise since pre-industrial times doesn’t break out of the Quaternary Period noise level… another 1 °C rise still won’t even break out of the Quaternary Period noise level.
If we reverse climate change back before the Quaternary Period, I don’t think that would work out so well either…
Earth’s average surface temperature is only a few degrees C above the coldest climate of the entire Cenozoic Era, the Late Pleistocene glacial stages.
Maybe by “reverse climate change,” is Mr. Rich just referring to lowering the atmospheric CO2 level back down to some imaginary Goldilocks concentration?
What exactly is the Goldilocks CO2 concentration?
Maybe he answers these questions in the book? I’ll never know… because I wouldn’t even check it out of a public library much less purchase it. So, let’s move on…
As Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, recently put it:
“We’re increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what’s going to happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened.”
Nathaniel Rich
Of course “we” are “increasingly shifting from a mode of predicting what’s going to happen to a mode of trying to explain what happened”… That’s the result of 30+ years of failed predictions.
And your predicitive skill is not improving.
So what happened? The common explanation today concerns the depredations of the fossil fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. Between 2000 and 2016, the industry spent more than $2-billion, or 10 times as much as was spent by environmental groups, to defeat climate change legislation.
Nathaniel Rich
I’m sorry… But $2 billion over 17 years (<$120 million/yr) isn’t even a tiny fraction of what environmental activist groups and government bureaucracies spend on efforts to destroy prosperity and individual liberty.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is totally dedicated to the destruction of prosperity and individual liberty in the USA and religiously devoted to the AGW myth. Their annual budget ($152 million) is more than the combined income of the American Enterprise Institute ($75 million), Cato Institute ($37 million), Heartland Institute ($5 million) and Competitive Enterprise Institute ($8 million).
The Federal government p!$$ed away $2 billion every 60 days promoting the Gorebal Warming scam as recently as 2017.
Furthermore, the “fossil fuel industry” (singular) not only doesn’t exist, but it didn’t cause this:
Global demand for plentiful, affordable energy caused it.
Oil & Gas and Coal are two very different industries… Both of which are essential to U.S. energy dominance, economic prosperity and individual liberty.
If the United States had endorsed the proposal broadly supported at the end of the Eighties — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees. A broad international consensus had agreed on a mechanism to achieve this: a binding global treaty.
Nathaniel Rich
“If the United States had endorsed the proposal broadly supported at the end of the Eighties — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 by 2005”… we would have committed economic suicide.
It has been said that regulating carbon dioxide emissions will make the United States the cleanest Third World country on Earth. And whoever controls carbon dioxide emissions will control the world.
Dr. Roy Spencer
And it would have had a Dean Wormer effect on the weather.
0.05°C is basically…
By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change…
By 1979, we knew Jack Schist…
The atmosphere’s blanketing effect over the earth’s surface has been compared to the functioning of a greenhouse. Short-wave sunlight passes as easily through the glass of the greenhouse as through the atmosphere. Because glass is opaque to the long-wave radiation from the warm interior of the greenhouse, it hinders the escape of energy.
As a planet, the earth is not warming or cooling appreciably on the average, because it loses as much radiant energy as it gains.
Kolenkow, Robert J., Reid A. Bryson, Douglas B. Carter, R. Keith Julian, Robert A. Muller, Theodore M. Oberlander, Robert P. Sharp & M. Gordon Wolman. Physical geography today : a portrait of a planet. Del Mar, Calif. : CRM Books, [1974]. p. 64.
FORECASTING THE FUTURE. We can now try to decide if we are now in an interglacial stage, with other glacials to follow, or if the world has finally emerged from the Cenozoic Ice Age. According to the Milankovitch theory, fluctuations of radiation of the type shown in Fig. 16-18 must continue and therefore future glacial stages will continue. According to the theory just described, as long as the North and South Poles retain their present thermally isolated locations, the polar latitudes will be frigid; and as the Arctic Ocean keeps oscillating between ice-free and ice-covered states, glacial-interglacial climates will continue.
Finally, regardless of which theory one subscribes to, as long as we see no fundamental change in the late Cenozoic climate trend, and the presence of ice on Greenland and Antarctica indicates that no change has occurred, we can expect that the fluctuations of the past million years will continue.
Donn, William L. Meteorology. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill 1975. pp 463-464
Suggestion that changing carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could be a major factor in climate change dates from 1861, when it was proposed by British physicist John Tyndall.
[…]
Unfortunately we cannot estimate accurately changes of past CO2 content of either atmosphere or oceans, nor is there any firm quantitative basis for estimating the the magnitude of drop in carbon dioxide content necessary to trigger glaciation. Moreover the entire concept of an atmospheric greenhouse effect is controversial, for the rate of ocean-atmosphere equalization is uncertain.
Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976. p. 441.
By 1982, we knew what we know today… The models were wrong…
If there actually is a need to rapidly reduce carbon emissions…
This could only be accomplished through “the depredations of the fossil fuel” industries and the unleashing of the nuclear power industry.
Real Clear Energy
If carbon emissions truly were an existential threat, almost as severe as the economic threat of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution, then we need to find a way to economically capture and sequester the maximum volume of carbon dioxide. And there is only one way to do this. Capture carbon emissions from coal and natural gas fired power plants and use it for enhanced recovery projects in old oil fields.
OCTOBER 31, 2017
Petra Nova is one of two carbon capture and sequestration power plants in the world
The Petra Nova facility, a coal-fired power plant located near Houston, Texas, is one of only two operating power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the world, and it is the only such facility in the United States. The 110 megawatt (MW) Boundary Dam plant in Saskatchewan, Canada, near the border with North Dakota, is the other electric utility facility using a CCS system.[…]
Petra Nova’s post-combustion CO2 capture system began operations in January 2017. The 240-megawatt (MW) carbon capture system that was added to Unit 8 (654 MW capacity) of the existing W.A. Parish pulverized coal-fired generating plant receives about 37% of Unit 8’s emissions, which are diverted through a flue gas slipstream. Petra Nova’s carbon-capture system is designed to capture about 90% of the carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) emitted from the flue gas slipstream, or about 33% of the total emissions from Unit 8. The post-combustion process is energy intensive and requires a dedicated natural gas unit to accommodate the energy requirements of the carbon-capture process.
The carbon dioxide captured by Petra Nova’s system is then used in enhanced oil recovery at nearby oil fields. Enhanced oil recovery involves injecting water, chemicals, or gases (such as carbon dioxide) into oil reservoirs to increase the ability of oil to flow to a well.
By comparison, Kemper had been designed to capture about 65% of the plant’s CO2 using a pre-combustion system. The capital costs associated with the Kemper project were initially estimated at $2.4 billion, or about $4,100 per kilowatt (kW), but cost overruns led to construction costs in excess of $7.5 billion (nearly $13,000/kW). Petra Nova CCS retrofit costs were reported to be $1 billion, or $4,200/kW, and the project was completed on budget and on time.
Principal contributor: Kenneth Dubin
US EIA
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 85 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from old oil fields through CO2 EOR. While, for most fields, CO2 EOR is uneconomic with oil prices below $85/bbl, if a drastic reduction of CO2 was really a matter of urgency, a little bit of taxpayer money spent on subsidizing carbon capture storage and utilization (CCSU) would have a much greater impact on carbon emissions than all of the taxpayers’ money p!$$ed away on wind and solar boondoggles.
My preview of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution
For the past three years, I have been commuting between Dallas and Houston. My wife and I and our 11 dogs live in Dallas and I have been working in Houston since March 2016. On Sunday, we went out for lunch at a nearby Tex-Mex restaurant before I headed back to Houston. We knew that thunderstorms were in the forecast, but we were not expecting this…
High Wind, Debris Causes Major Damage in Dallas
By Diana Zoga
Published Jun 9, 2019The high winds on Sunday afternoon blew out windows of skyscrapers and took down trees and traffic signals in downtown Dallas.
The city’s office of emergency management said there were no reports of injuries related to the broken windows or downed trees.
Repairing traffic signals would be one of the city’s first priorities, officials said at a Sunday night press conference. Repairs will be made first to lights that are completely inoperable, while lights that are flashing red will be next.
[…]
NBCDFW 5
The storm hit while we were eating and the power was quickly knocked out. The winds were so strong that it looked like footage of a hurricane through the restaurant windows. We had to wait for the winds to die down before we could rush home (less than 1/4 mile away). The drive was harrowing. There were trees down everywhere. We were worried sick about our “fur babies.” When we got home, we could only find 10 of the 11. Our 6-month old Corgi puppy was missing… But we found her hiding under a toilet. We had a few tiles blown off our roof, one of which hit the hood of my Jeep and everything on the patio had blown into the pool, including a glass table top (instead of shattering on the patio). A large piece of metal artwork blew off the wall, across the pool, and wedged into a tree right in between two windows. Miraculously, no windows were broken. Apart from a traumatized Corgi puppy, the family was unharmed.
The worst part of the storm was the power outage.
Oncor Expects Vast Majority of Customers to Have Power Wednesday Night
Dallas says residents without power who need refuge from the heat can find temporary relief at libraries and rec centers
Published Jun 9, 2019About 16,000 Oncor customers, most in Dallas County, are still without power in North Texas Wednesday. Power has been restored to more than 330,000 homes and businesses. An Oncor spokeswoman says they expect the vast moajority of power to be restored by tonight, but that could stretch until tomorrow in the hardest hit areas.
“Just right now the kind of restoration that we are having to do, it’s the most complex types of outages, because we are having to reconstruct a lot of these distribution equiptment. So instead of just you know showing up and tunring it on immediately, we are having to remove the trees, remove the damaged polls, re-dig holes for the polls, re-put in the polls and then restring the lines,” said Kerry Dunn of Oncor.
At it’s peak, as many as 350,000 customers lost power across the Metroplex Sunday — with Dallas County seeing the most outages, according to Oncor Electric. Oncor had warned the outage was expected to last for several days.
“This storm was really unique because we saw damage akin to something we’d see with a tropical storm or a tornado. But instead of a small area, we’re seeing a very large portion of Dallas County with major damage,” said Oncor spokesperson and meteorologist Jen Myers.
[…]
Crews from 11 states are working around the clock.
[…]
NBCDFW 5
I want to thank Alabama Power. We were without power from Sunday through Wednesday evening. On Sunday night, Oncor crews restored power to parts of our neighborhood. Then we saw no one until Tuesday afternoon, when an Alabama Power vehicle “scouted” our neighborhood. Yesterday, Alabama Power crews were in the alley, clearing debris from the power lines.
Four days of relying on the Sun and batteries for light and electricity seems like a pretty good preview of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution. On top of that, it forced me to take an unplanned week of vacation from exploring for oil & gas, to cut up tree limbs with a battery-powered electric chain saw. We still don’t have Internet service (the phone line caught on fire while they were fixing the power lines and AT&T can’t understand why that might be a problem). I’m using my smart phone as a hot spot… So I still can’t explore for oil & gas from home – the connection is too slow to remotely access my workstation. I can’t imagine a better demonstration of the Green New Deal Cultural Revolution. On top of that, I wrote most of this post Sunday morning and scheduled it to be published Monday morning, figuring I would finish it up Sunday night in Houston. No electricity, no oil & gas exploration and a silenced AGW skeptic… We should call the Dallas wind storm, Superstorm Alexandria… 😉
Fortunately, it was unseasonably cool for June in Dallas over the past few days… And, oddly enough, the storm appears to have been driven by sudden cooling…
Dallas-Fort Worth faced its own sort of perfect storm Sunday.
“We had everything in place — a very unstable atmosphere, heat, humidity — then, of course, we had the cold front, which cooled us down quickly,” said Patricia Sanchez, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Dallas-Fort Worth faced its own sort of perfect storm Sunday.
“We had everything in place — a very unstable atmosphere, heat, humidity — then, of course, we had the cold front, which cooled us down quickly,” said Patricia Sanchez, a National Weather Service meteorologist.[…]
The temperature at DFW International Airport reached 90 degrees before noon, and hovered there until about 2 p.m., according to the weather service.
Then, as the storm moved through the area accompanied by a cold front, the temperature dropped to 70 in less than an hour. As the dry air of the cold front collided with the warm, moist air already in the area, the humidity plunged from 90% at 1 p.m. to 58% by 3 p.m. It’s that mixing of two air masses that can spark violent storm activity.
The weather service had seen the possibility of strong storms Sunday morning, when Dallas-Fort Worth was warned of an enhanced risk for severe weather.
[…]
The storm’s silver lining is that lower temperatures carried by the cold front have made conditions more bearable for the tens of thousands of people without electricity.
Temperatures are expected to stay below normal in the 80s through at least the middle of the week, KXAS-TV (NBC5) meteorologist Grant Johnston said. Dallas-Fort Worth is also expected to stay dry through the work week.
Dallas Morning News
Conclusions
We are not “Losing Earth.” It’s actually physically impossible for us to lose Earth. On the other hand, at some point in the future, Earth will probably lose us.
Featured Image
References (will be expanded later)
Alley, R.B. 2000. “The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland”. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.
Alley, R.B.. 2004. “GISP2 Ice Core Temperature and Accumulation Data”.
IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2004-013. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
Berner, R.A. and Z. Kothavala, 2001. “GEOCARB III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time”. American Journal of Science, v.301, pp.182-204. February 2001.
Pagani, M., J.C. Zachos, K.H. Freeman, B. Tipple, and S. Bohaty. 2005. “Marked Decline in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the Paleogene”. Science, Vol. 309, pp. 600-603, 22 July 2005.
Pearson, P. N. and Palmer, M. R.: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 60 million years, Nature, 406, 695–699,https://doi.org/10.1038/35021000, 2000.
Royer, et al., 2001. Paleobotanical Evidence for Near Present-Day Levels of Atmospheric CO2 During Part of the Tertiary. Science 22 June 2001: 2310-2313. DOI:10.112
“The Ice Age Cometh?” Science News, The Society for Science & the Public , 1 Mar. 1975, www.sciencenews.org/sn-magazine/march-1-1975.
Tripati, A.K., C.D. Roberts, and R.A. Eagle. 2009. “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years”. Science, Vol. 326, pp. 1394 1397, 4 December 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1178296
Ward, J.K., Harris, J.M., Cerling, T.E., Wiedenhoeft, A., Lott, M.J., Dearing, M.-D., Coltrain, J.B. and Ehleringer, J.R. 2005. “Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA102: 690-694.
Zachos, J. C., Pagani, M., Sloan, L. C., Thomas, E. & Billups, K. “Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present”. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).
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And for the true believers there is always —
He gets ’em every time.
Is peak oil real? When will peak oil arrive? what will it look like if and when it gets here? What does the oil and gas industry itself think about when and how peak oil will occur?
Several months ago, I listened to a talk given by an energy policy analyst who speculated on the future of oil and gas in the United States. One of the topics he covered is how the oil and gas industry itself views its own future. Not what the industry says about itself publicly, but what its own actions say about what the industry thinks the future actually holds.
Concerning what the industry thinks about the renewables, wind and solar, the policy analyst remarked that strategic planners in oil and gas understand full well it is impossible to go much beyond 30% penetration by the renewables without experiencing sharp increases in the price of electricity. As penetration levels begin to go beyond 30%, price increases begin to go exponential.
These planners also know that as things stand today, gas-fired generation offers the most cost effective means for load following of wind and solar’s highly variable power output. At the prices people are willing to pay for electricity, buffered energy storage schemes such as utility-scale batteries and pumped hydro will never be practical at the scales required to properly support the renewables.
It is his opinion that by 2050, natural gas will supply three quarters or more of our power generation capacity, the renewables possibly one-quarter. By 2050, coal-fired generation will be entirely gone from America’s power generation mix, and nuclear will be mostly gone. Summarizing this analyst’s opinions, his assessment is that the oil and gas industry now has good reasons for believing it will control America’s production and consumption of energy some number of decades into the future.
My general counterpoint to his opinion, as I stated it during his talk, was my own long-held belief that although peak oil has probably been delayed by at least three decades, possibly more, it will certainly arrive within the next fifty years. His response was that at current rates of consumption, the world has enough oil and gas to last roughly another three-hundred years at a price most people will be willing to pay for the convenience of having it.
It’s my observation that this energy analyst’s three hundred year figure isn’t the product of a nominally rigorous, highly detailed, formalized analysis on his part. Rather, the figure represents his informed opinion based upon looking at a number of different papers and articles concerning the future economics of oil and gas production.
As it concerns peak oil, in examining all of these papers and articles, the analyst has built a partially subjective picture of the topic in his own mind and has then developed an opinion which reflects how that overall picture looks to him.
This raises another question.
Is a partially subjective opinion more reliable as a policy guide than is a highly detailed technical analysis which purports to supply a solid basis for policy decision making? Or should an informed opinion carry just as much informational value as a guide for making public policy?
At any rate, suppose for purposes of argument the world does have another three-hundred years of oil and gas at today’s rates of consumption and at prices people will be willing to pay for it. Certainly, such a prediction must assume that the price people are willing to pay for liquid carbon fuels and for natural gas is highly inelastic.
If this is the case, and if public policy decision makers adopt President Obama’s 80% by 2050 GHG reduction goal, then the only reliable means for getting from here to there is placing strict controls on the production and consumption of all fossil fuels. If it happens at all, it only happens through government imposed, strictly enforced fossil fuel rationing.
Yes.
We won’t know until it’s in the rearview mirror.
See previous answer.
We mostly don’t think or care about it.
It occurs to me we may well hit peak wind and peak solar long before we’ll reach peak oil. May have already achieved peak hydro given the current political climate. And in the bigger scheme, those relatively insignificant energy production milestones will only serve to delay the technological innovation peak oil doomsayers claim necessary to ensure our very survival. Imagine that.
“By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change.”
The irony is rich in this one. Climate physicists knew little then, and continue to know little today.
Thirty years of climate modeling mania has done more to destroy research into the physics of climate than the complete withdrawal of all government funding could have done.
Consensus climatologists have surpassed even the Bourbons. They have learned nothing and forgotten everything.
The arrogance and incompetence of climate modelers is insupportable. They have destroyed climatology as a branch of science.
Thank you for running that Science News cover in your main post. I’m so tired of seeing that Newsweek story that most [other] people use. [Hey, you used it in a comment….] The full article is at https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/8983
That Science News article made a substantial impression on me, it or a later one claimed that all it would take to start a glaciation was for snow in Canada to not melt one summer. I remember talking about it with my father and wondering what the progression the climate and snow cover would make.
I think a couple months later I had to fly across the country and looked with great interest at the snow covered Rockies. And the dark conifers that stood above the snow. And realized it would take a lot of snow to cover those trees and that they had to be covered if there was any chance snow couldn’t melt completely some summer.
Then we had events in New England like several inches of snow in May 1977 – https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/08/40-years-ago-massachusetts-snags-a-memorable-snowfall-in-may-storm/ and the New England Blizzard of ’78 – http://wermenh.com/blizz78.html . (There was an equally historic blizzard in the upper midwest a couple weeks earlier.)
After that came the big warming and the Mass. coast stopped getting flooded, and life got boring for a few decades.
We here in northern Illinois are getting snow, up to several inches, in April now, on a recurring basis. I get photos of them, this last bout being three separate storms in April that left, each time, a couple of inches of the white stuff.
The average temps in May and Junes used to be in the low 70s. Now they’re in the mid to upper 60s. That makes the insect population (bird food) slower in emerging, and I’m still feeding groups of birds because the bugs aren’t as plentiful now in June as they should be. (It could also mean those birds are a bit lazy.)
I’m tracking the weather, which is showing a long, slow trend toward a chillier CLIMATE where I am. But the geraniums on my front steps look good, And if the weather weren’t chilly, then the linnaria – a cool weather plant – would NOT still be in blossom. It is thriving and full of flowers.
Those are the things I look at, well ahead of thermometers and hysterical climate twaddle from money-grubbing political mopes.
Here on the Northern California coast the camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons blossomed almost three months later than normal. An Ice Age cometh.