quare id faciam?

Winter whither

Some parts of the country are experiencing a fairly impressive winter, I hear. Around here, meanwhile, as January gets under way, it seems a stretch to call it a winter at all. In suburban Baltimore County we've hardly needed so much as to pull out a windshield scraper this year.
 
Since I'm not a student of earth sciences and don't have a post-colonial, post-industrial political axe to grind, I'm not going to hazard any guesses about what this may have to do with the grand narrative of global warming. It happens, in any case, that this hasn't been the mildest Maryland winter-thus-far of recent memory (of the past 35 years, to be exact, which is to say a little more than the practical extent of my own memory in total), but only the fourth mildest. But in the context of frequent news items about vanishing polar bear habitat and so forth, there's something more-than-usually unsettling about going out in short sleeves in January even so.

posted by paul bowman @ 7:05 PM