Snow Blog

So it's snowing here in Cleveland/Chattanooga area. It's actually snowing a lot in Cleveland (by Cleveland standards). There are mixed opinions about the "coolness" of this snow. Some wish there were more so we could get out of some work, some hate it because it's just enough to make the roads a bit dangerous early in the AM or late in the PM, others just hate the cold, or have an opinion that goes something like, "So?".

Personally, I think it's awesome. When the roads are horrible and we are kept working till those with authority decide it's too dangerous to leave their house to see if the roads are really that bad, then it kinda sucks, but really it's an indirect suck. The snow isn't the problem, it's the people who care about the money they will lose if they send their employees home before it's absolutely necessary or, as is often the case, only moderately dangerous. One guy I work with lives in Ringold, GA and a 45 min trip turned into a 4.5 hr trip on a snowy, crowded interstate. Oh, to have the lives of many to use as I see fit. Anyway, that's enough about non-snow for now.

Snooooooooow!... Snow! Snow! Snow! Snow! Snow! I think it reminds me of past Christmases/winter breaks, and snow days out of school, of movie Christmases where they almost always have snow (I'm always envious), and good times had with all of those things. Nothing like your parents coming in and instead of waking you, whispering those sweet, sweet words into your ear, "School's out. Go back to sleep." If I weren't so sleepy at these times, I would have immediately jumped out of bed and prepared for a day of... VIDEO GAMES! Actually, that was only a few times when illness decided that a school day was a horrible day for a fever, but a day of playing in the snow with reckless and irresponsible friends was the perfect time to let the white blood cells out to pasture.

Anyway... Yay, fun in the snow! You get it. All of this was brought to my brain by one, the snow(responsible for the nostalgia), and two, a lot of global warming posts(responsible for this blog).

Now, I remember snow as a kid. I don't remember this much snow except in the infamous BLIZZARD OF '93!... A.K.A. "the bread and milk drought of '93". Since then we really haven't gotten much snow lovin. One or two flurry days here or there but most of the time the mountains would be covered in white and it would just be cold everywhere else. What we are experiencing now is, I admit, colder-than-normal weather. I don't play geographer often, because I was never interested in memorizing countries and cities and all of those other geography things. But I think I have a decent enough grasp of vocabulary to understand the term global. Merriam Webster says global =

1. Spherical

2. of, relating to, or involving the entire world

3. of, relating to, or applying to a whole.

I'm aware that 49 states simultaneously had snow on the ground last week. That's pretty awesome but I'm a biased, snow fan-boy. It's also pretty weird. We have some very hot, very dry places in the states. Places that rarely see snow. But, I think it a view of global warming that limits the concept to " it's getting hotter" is a bit simplistic. Two of the effects I've read are increases in regional precipitation and intensity/occurrences of extreme weather. Would you consider snow in Reno, NV or Dallas, TX more toward normal or extreme? I'm not saying they had snow fall. I have no idea where snow fell and didn't fall but from the sound of it, it was in some pretty weird areas... and all at the same time. Are the amounts of snow fall we have experienced this winter consistent with the amounts in previous years? Was D.C, an area I would say expects and can deal with snow, prepared for the blanket of frozen precipitation that drilled that place last week?

I'm on the fence about global warming, leaning more toward the "it's better to be safe than sorry" position, but I don't see how a cold winter in North America discredits the global warming theory. To say so subtlety reveals the chauvinistic belief, admittedly, most Americans have about our country. Don't forget the North Pole, South Pole, melting ice caps, melting glaciers, rising ocean levels, rising ocean and land temperatures, etc., etc. Sure, the theory is controversial, as is the data, but I'll take my "responsible citizen of Earth" cue from controversial data over a couple of snow days any day of the week.

I wonder if my grammar would improve if I wrote these things in the later morning instead of at 2 AM.... I doubt it.