Industrial Disease

I look out of my window and see the sad, dirty and minimized snow banks. The streets are bereft
of ice and snow. Even the rooftops are bare. Come on! this is Big Snow Country, the turf of rough, tough snowmobile-rs, athletic Nordic and downhill  skiers, snow- shoers and kids building snow forts. (For some reason unknown to me I have not seen kids participating in snowball fights in many years..)

It is a downright dismal landscape, the likes of which I've not seen during January. A wise old fellow yooper told me these January thaws are normal. Well, I'm a yooper too, maybe not so wise, and I recall many a January thaw, but each with an ample reserve of snow.

Someone told me that the warming trend of the globe is cyclical, undulating, that this is normal and mere man could not cause it with smokestack or tailpipe emissions. The person is also a 'young-earther', but I'll only say that I believe that scientific evidence points to the contrary. I believe in undulation of the earth's temperature, but not to the extent that we are witnessing now.

Horrible storms have ravaged our country, causing a wake of billions of dollars in damages. It snows heavily in the Ohio valley and in Tennessee, Kentucky and even North Carolina. The northeast has been walloped by blizzards as well as Hurricane Sandy, dubbed as a superstorm.

Something is dead-wrong when all the major blizzards go to central and southern states.

When I was a lad we had at least three snow days a year. It snowed so furiously that I could not recognize anything across the street. Blizzard wind gusts made the house crack and creak and then  when the blizzard ended the polar express roared in, chilling us to as low as minus thirty degrees.

Snow was a novelty then and blizzards exciting, seen through my youthful eyes. Until recently I groused about each storm and the hype preceding each one. Just more work to do. A nuisance until January 2013.

I would rather have had 18" of snow than the rain and the icy conditions for pedestrians. The lack of snow is crippling our fragile local economy based upon the above-mentioned sports.

My thoughts lingered on the ice core samples taken from the polar regions. Evidence of air-pollution spiked with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and has since worsened. The Greenland glaciers are melting, as well as those of the Swiss Alps. Polar sea ice is disappearing rapidly, creating an impact for wildlife with a polar habitat.

Something is dead-wrong when I pray for snow.