After 6th-warmest December On Record, Not One Outdoor Skating Rink In MSP Open - Star-Tribune

[hatrack]

As the sixth-warmest December on record faded to gray, Kate Kelly was, of course, thinking about the weather. "My favorite story is the weather. 'Whether or not?' is the question," said Kelly, president and chief executive officer of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, which is scheduled to open Jan. 26. "We're certainly hoping the weather does turn."

January, of course, is famous for deep cold, black ice and whiteouts. But recently it has plagued Winter Carnivals with melting ice sculptures and a lack of snow. Last year, in the warmest January in nearly 150 years in the Twin Cities, ice on Lake Phalen was so thin that a Winter Carnival ice-fishing contest had to be moved to land.

The tepid run-up to this January seems to promise more of the same. The National Climate Prediction Center's outlook for the month is leaning decidedly toward warmer and drier than normal conditions for the region.

Last winter, the popular skating rink at Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis never opened. As recently as Friday, none of the public outdoor skating rinks in Minneapolis or St. Paul was open yet.

EDIT

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/908302.html

[baldguy]

1. My parents used to take me and my brother & sisters skating in the park the day after Christmas.

I told my niece that and she couldn't believe it. Its been in the 40s and 50s this week.

[displacedtexan]

2. I was in MSP the first week in January a few years ago.

My nose hairs froze.

[pretzel4gore]

3. God's telling us 'you're on your own'

the only place in entire universe where temp/pressure norms allow water to exist in liquid, gas and solid states SIMULTANEOUSLY is the planet earth, and still the pig is allowed to put 7 BILLION METRIC TONNES of carbon into earth's 12 mile thick atmosphere every year! Something is wrong with people who poop in the babies food, and poison their babies air....for profit

[msongs]

4. can't be global warming if it was also this warm 150 years ago.

so why was it this warm 150 years ago? global warming then also? and since then, temps have gone down or back to normal for most of the years evidently so this year is a fluke but not without precedent.

or part of a trend.

our winter so far is typical and average, just lots of sunshine and...wind :-)

Msongs
www.msongs.com
batik & digital art

[Bjornsdotter]

5. I took it to mean

...that it's the warmest its been (since they started keeping records) a 150 years ago.

Cheers

[Boomer]

6. It's not about one warm winter

One unusually warm season is not a sign of global climate change.

But when the majority of warm winter records are clustered within the last decade, THAT is a sign of global climate change.

This winter continues a recent and escalating pattern, and it's the pattern that is unsettling.

[hatrack]

7. So tell me, do you bother to read the other posts on this board?

Don't just look at the current page. Go back into old pages and into the archives. If you do so, you'll find hundreds and hundreds of posts about new records for temperatures for given dates, months and years in locations all around the world.

You'll find post after post after post about record low levels of Arctic sea ice, record levels of glacial and icecap melt in both Arctic and Antarctic realms, as well as in mountain ranges across the planet. You'll finds posts about entire coral reefs which have been alive for tens of thousands of years which have died in just the past decade, bleached into extinction with an intensity not seen in millenia.

You'll find post after post about migratory animals that no longer need to migrate, about plants emerging in December and January that for centuries have emerged in March and April. You'll find post after post about tropical and Mediterrenean fish showing up in the English Channel and the North Sea, and about robins appearing in the Northwest Territory - where the natives, who've lived there for about 20,000 years, have no name for them.

You'll find post after post after post about record low rainfall records, or rainfall totals so big that they swamped entire cities like Bombay in 2004, or sandstorms that stretch from Inner Mongolia to Korea.

You can read about weakening ocean currents and an entire ocean basin - the Pacific, to be specific - which is now about 25% more acidic than it was only ten years ago. Why? Because much of the CO2 which we put into the atmosphere which was once considered "missing" has been found - in seawater, where if current rates of CO2 deposition hold most sea organisms at the phyto- and zooplankton levels will die by the end of the century, their shells dissolving around them.

But it's much easier to do cute little drive-bys blathering about how it's all just part of the natural cycle than it is to get a handle on what's going on, isn't it?