Lately I have been looking at my January Daffodils, and wondering how is it that people refuse to wake up to the increasingly unstable and weird weather we are experiencing. I’m about to complete my 50th lap around the sun, which entitles me to say old-timer things like, “when I was younger, I remember snow in January in Tennessee, not flowers and honeybees.” Of course some folks are taking notice, such as Justin Gillis of the NYTimes Green blog, who has some good posts on extreme weather. In an excerpt from a Dec 2011 NYTimes post, he quotes another climate expert: “‘I’ve been a meteorologist 30 years and never seen a year that comes close to matching 2011 for the number of astounding, extreme weather events,’ Jeffrey Masters, a co-founder of the popular Web site Weather Underground, said last month. ‘Looking back in the historical record, which goes back to the late 1800s, I can’t find anything that compares, either.'”

We blogged on this phenomena in August 2011, and the trend has only continued.

Some folks now have clever videos that help make the link between weird weather and other human interest stories, like baseball players on steroids. This University Corporation for Atmospheric Research UCAR post has some good information on the challenges of making the link between climate changes and extreme weather. Of course with climate, and moreso with local weather events, nothing is “black and white.” There will be variability, but the trends are very disconcerting, at least to this old-timer.

“I remember when ………..”