Wimped out.....................

 

...................choose not to walk this morning:

Prefering warmth to cold.......................

      A modest understanding of the dynamics of climactic change in past societies could well prove useful in the event that climates continue to fluctuate.  If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off of the maximum elevation that crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people's actions in the future.  You can use this knowledge to forecast changes in everything from grain prices to land values.  You may even be able to draw informed conclusions about the likely impact of falling temperatures on real income and political stability.  In the past, governments have been overthrown when crop failures over several years raised food prices and shrank disposable incomes.

     For example, it is no coincidence that the seventeenth century, the coldest in the modern period, was also a period of revolution worldwide.  A hidden megapolitical cause of this unhappiness was sharply colder weather.  It was so cold, in fact, that wine froze on the "Sun King's" table at Versailles.  Shortened growing season produced crop failures and undermined real income.  Because of the colder weather, prosperity began to wind down into a long global depression that began around 1620.  It proved drastically destabilizing.  The economic crisis of the seventeenth century led to the world being overwhelmed by rebellions, many clustering in 1648, exactly two hundred years before another and more famous cycle of rebellions.  Between 1640 and 1650, there were rebellions in Ireland, Scotland, England, Portugal, Catalonia, France, Moscow, Naples, Sicily, Brazil, Bohemia, Ukraine, Austria, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey.  Even China and Japan were swept by unrest.

-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

Bring back the Wooly Mammoth!.........

..................................................................No, seriously.

Well, it is............................

Dean Martin et. al. ..................................Baby, It's Cold Outside

We are having some weather tonight.....

"Beware the man who takes the weather personally."

-Ol' Remus

All other things being equal...................

....................I'm 97% sure that I prefer global warming to global cooling.   My favorite optimist has the story.  A few cherry-picked quotes:

" If we aspire to keep the show on the road for another 10,000 years, we will have to understand ice ages."

“winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change”.

"All of human civilisation happened in an interglacial period, with a relatively stable climate, plentiful rainfall and high enough levels of carbon dioxide to allow the vigorous growth of plants. Agriculture was probably impossible before then, and without its hugely expanded energy supply, none of the subsequent flowering of human culture would have happened.

"That interglacial will end."

The glory of living.....................................

.............................................without air conditioning.  A wee excerpt:


There are positive aspects of going without. Fewer house guests. More dinner invitations. That humble-bragging business. Showers. I can’t tell you how rewarding showers feel. And ice cream tastes way better.


Air conditioning made Americans greedy and silly. Once the country got hooked on central air, strange things materialized: windows that don’t open, the office sweater in August, summer colds, Las Vegas, football in Phoenix.

Booked.........................

...........................Jeff models the latest in fashionable cold weather gear.

All in good time...............

Cold weather returns...............................It is winter you know.

Pond surface at OSUN/COTC starting to ice over

Oh good, another polar vortex.  This should sell some winter coats

AccuWeather report from here

Normally I don't feel sorry for the deer.......

Yep......................................................

Different alright...................................

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."
-John Ruskin

A good day to stay close to the fire..........

Yep...................................................

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