Sunday, January 19, 2020

Can you feel it getting warmer?

It's Winter, cold, snow showery, cloudy, but there's a batch of chili cooking. I'm sitting in an easy chair, watching the birds come and go at the feeders, writing a blog post and nursing a tooth ache. The snow blower is back in the garage, with hopes that this time the cables are dry, lubricated and set to stay that way. As you may have heard, we're due for a January thaw later this week.


The nice folks at the Twin Cities weather service have provided a delightful graph showing that the days now keep getting warmer, on average. We haven't forgotten last January's polar vortex at month's end, with outside actual temperatures dropping to twenty to more than thirty below (without wind chill). How long do you think average daily highs and lows will hold up with the increased volatility of the weather? Do you think we can count on having turned a corner in this year's Winter's onslaught?

January 31, 2019 = -31℉
Photo by J. Harrington


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier
(after Wallace Stevens)


I
Among starving polar bears, 
The only moving thing 
Was the edge of a glacier.

II
We are of one ecology
Like a planet
In which there are 200,000 glaciers.

III
The glacier absorbed greenhouse gases. 
We are a large part of the biosphere.

IV
Humans and animals 
Are kin. 
Humans and animals and glaciers 
Are kin.

V
We do not know which to fear more,
The terror of change
Or the terror of uncertainty, 
The glacier calving
Or just after.

VI
Icebergs fill the vast Ocean
With titanic wrecks. 
The mass of the glacier 
Disappears, to and fro. 
The threat
Hidden in the crevasse
An unavoidable cause.

VII
O vulnerable humans,
Why do you engineer sea walls?
Do you not see how the glacier
Already floods the streets
Of the cities around you?

VIII
I know king tides, 
And lurid, inescapable storms; 
But I know, too, 
That the glacier is involved 
In what I know.

IX
When the glacial terminus broke, 
It marked the beginning 
Of one of many waves.

X
At the rumble of a glacier
Losing its equilibrium, 
Every tourist in the new Arctic
chased ice quickly.

XI
They explored the poles 
for offshore drilling. 
Once, we blocked them, 
In that we understood 
The risk of an oil spill
For a glacier.

XII
The sea is rising.
The glacier must be retreating.

XIII
It was summer all winter. 
It was melting 
And it was going to melt.
The glacier fits
In our warm-hands.


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Please be kind to each other while you can.

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