What's normal in our New Normal?

The marshes, open water, and even much of what passes for a river channel in Pool 1 of the Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area, have begun to freeze over. At dog-walking time this morning, the local temperature was in the single digits. Even some of the larger lakes are making ice, although none is/are safe to travel on. A couple of years ago these same waters were still mostly open and attracting some southward-bound swans.

Pool 1-Sunrise River, early December 2015

Photo by J. Harrington

At least today we're getting some blue skies and sunshine, enough to warm up our new "blacktop" road and melt the edges of some snow cover left from the snow showers of a couple of days ago. We're slowly but surely coming to the realization that the scientists(?) who called climate change "global warming" would have served us better if they had chosen climate disruption or broken climate or something along those lines. "Warming" sounds very innocuous and, as some deniers have pointed out, the climate is always changing. What we have more and more are hell, as in the current fires in California, and high water from intense hurricanes and rainstorms. In fact, during the past few years, those frozen nearby marshes have had higher water in late autumn than we remember from a quarter century or so ago when we first moved in. We've noted here previously that Minnesota's short term weather and long term climate would be far preferable if the averages weren't comprised of such extremes. A daily average temperature of 50℉ means one thing if it's derived from a low of 40℉ and a high of 60℉ but something else entirely if the low is 0℉ and the high 100℉. We're doing our bit to combine the humanities with STEM type issues. By including the Arts, STEM becomes STEAM.

Meditation on Statistical Method

By J. V. Cunningham

Plato, despair!

We prove by norms

How numbers bear

Empiric forms,

How random wrong

Will average right

If time be long

And error slight,

But in our hearts

Hyperbole

Curves and departs

To infinity.

Error is boundless.

Nor hope nor doubt,

Though both be groundless,

Will average out.

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