I smile when I see reports of 36 degrees in Miami Florida. My pleasure is manifold, first hit is on the smug southerners who pridefully proclaim that “It never gets that cold here! Nyah Nyah!”, well, now it does. The second pleasure is for the snowbirds, you seriously thought you could outrun it?

The main pleasure comes in a kind of satisfaction regarding climate change. Sure, global warming is definitely a chapter title in this book we’re currently reading out of, but this is just a mild little precursor, a microscopic fluctuation, the prologue so to speak. As the climate changes, the weather patterns will change. Global warming is coming and it’s making some places warmer and other places colder. This year is an El Nino year, with the North American weather pattern being dictated by the blotch of warm Pacific Ocean water and I believe it to be the principal driving factor behind this years minty-fresh winter. Even with El Nino, you can’t easily dismiss a low-temperature record that was broken since 1927. It may be El Nino, but you can almost catch a whiff of something else out there, a little something extra riding on top of the natural variation. Only time will tell what global warming will do to the North American weather pattern. Maybe it will make everything stronger – hotter summers and colder winters, or maybe instead it will muck about with the seasons, Spring and Fall starting and stopping at different times.

On Facebook I mused that our planet is in a constant state of trying to find the perfect balance. I don’t see anything that disproves that idea. There is something deeply satisfying however in the notion that humanity, through it’s own shortsightedness and resistance to change forced our own planet to seek out a new balance, one that doesn’t have our desires in mind. A kind of species schadenfreude, and the joke is only now starting to unfold. True hilarity will take another hundred years to suss out, to quote a favorite movie, “This is all far from over…”