I woke up this morning to find 3 feet of snow on the ground. The storm had been blowing for a couple of days so it wasn’t a surprise. Since I live off the grid, getting to my ground mounted solar panels is rather important if I want the electricity I need to participate in the pie fights here at DKos.
Now a 3 foot snowfall somewhere in the Colorado front range foothills, isn’t all that unusual. It probably happens every couple of years or so.
EXCEPT: it was one year ago almost to the day when we had a 4 ½ foot snowfall. Now that’s pretty unusual but it’s not unheard of. But to have 2 really big spring snowstorms in the same spot a year apart, and we’re getting a bit weird.
EXCEPT: 2 years ago on Mother days (the first week of May) we had another 3 foot snowfall. A 3 foot snowfall in May is getting pretty darn strange. Again it’s not completely unheard of, but to have these 3 really big weather events happen in the same place 3 years in a row and we’re talking it’s time to start thinking about lottery tickets.
EXCEPT: 2 ½ years ago, Colorado experienced historic floods up and down the front range. They were devastating and no one alive had ever seen anything like them before. Now we’re getting into the twilight zone area.
EXCEPT: 3 years ago in the spring Colorado experienced the most expensive forest fire in it’s history. It was the most expensive fire but it wasn’t by any means the worst fire year in the states history but we considered it pretty bad.
EXCEPT: 4 years ago Colorado did experience one of it’s worst forest fire seasons in history where fires burned 224,559 acres. I was able to see smoke from 3 different wildfires in Colorado and Wyoming.
The point of all this is that it’s really hard to blame any one unusual weather event on global warming. We often measure the severity of weather events as something like that event was a once in a decade or once in a hundred years… But what happens when these unusual weather events seem to be happening a LOT more than they should?
While many may think that Global Warming means ocean waves lapping at their front door, in the mean time, the severe weather event Climate dice are loaded. It’s the environmental extremes that ruin the food crops, that impact the economy, that disrupt entire communities and sometimes nations.
The odds are always controlled by the house. The problem is, we are the house and the ones with their futures on the table are our children. We get to control the odds with each election. We can stay home and let others load the dice against our children, or we can get involved and stop gambling with the future.
Voting matters!