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)

Craig Santos Perez

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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