Category Archives: Global Warming

Global Warming, As It Pertains to Me

5/3/2012 – 3:04 pm

Friday evening I was tying old shower curtains around my grape arbor.  The temperature was dropping quickly all along our block, neighbors were busily wrapping fruit trees, to protect the blossoms from two nights of predicted well-below-freezing weather.
The wind was up as the front moved in, the light through the clouds held a blue tint [...]

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Al Gore’s Igloo

4/5/2012 – 3:18 pm

This is the fourth installment of my New Year’s pay more attention to the weather resolution.  It was hard to wait until the first of the month, given the summer-like heat Vermont experienced a few weeks ago.  When a late-winter storm hit Washington, DC in 2010 (I was on one of the last planes out [...]

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In Like a Lion?

3/1/2012 – 3:47 pm

February and March are (traditionally) the heaviest snow months in Vermont, although not the February that ended yesterday, extra day notwithstanding.  It did snow last Friday.  We were all duly warned about a winter storm and got maybe an inch and a half.  The snow did, however – more or less – stay on the [...]

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The Stalking Horse

2/16/2012 – 5:17 pm

A stalking horse, for hunters, is something of a moving blind.  The idea is that the prey – often birds – would be startled by the appearance of a human, but not a horse or cow, so the hunter uses the stalking horse (“stalking cow” doesn’t have the same ring) to approach unseen, until the [...]

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The Weeks of Winter

2/2/2012 – 3:15 pm

Happy Groundhog’s Day.  The news reports that the various prognosticating groundhogs cannot agree on whether winter has or has not ended.  Maybe they can’t agree on whether it’s started.  I’m not sure human-groundhog communication is all that sophisticated.
Yesterday was the Imbolc, the Celtic feast of pregnant ewes, a harbinger of spring soon to come.  There [...]

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Duty Now for the Future

11/10/2011 – 6:41 pm

My neighbors seemed to hit on a 21st century harvest ritual last Sunday.  It was the first dusk of standard time and was getting dark around 4:40.  It had been a beautiful days and we’d all been closing our gardens for the season, when I noticed fires burning in a few backyards.  It seemed a [...]

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What the Left Hand is Doing

9/29/2011 – 2:55 pm

Cognitive dissonance is name given to the discomfort caused by trying to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas.  Policy dissonance might be the name applied when two conflicting ideas are the basis for government action.
An example: Texas is still in the worst single-year drought in its history and the hottest summer in Texas history just ended [...]

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