If This Is Global Warming in North Dakota --- I Don't Hear a Lot of Complaints

Link to this Dickinson Press story.

The newspaper reports on a very mild January just completed and a forecast for a very mild first 10 days in February.

I took a long walk this a.m. in Boston; it is very, very mild; a great day to take a walk.  Actually, it was last night when I was taking another walk when I got to thinking about "global warming."

A lot of one's thoughts about any issue has to do with one's personal experience. I'm thinking of the school advisory coming out of McGrath, Alaska (school stays on regular schedule down to 49 degrees below zero) and my own experiences growing up in Williston. I remember walking to school in weather that had a wind chill of 40 degrees below zero.

I remember one day, in first grade, it must have been 20 degrees below zero and all of us little "South Park" look-alikes were standing, huddled, in front of the elementary school (at that time, part of the high school complex) shouting in unison, "let us in, let us in."

We were freezing; we had walked to school and had arrived five to ten minutes early.

I remember vividly a school official coming out and telling us all to go home and come back in ten minutes when the doors would open. I think he "yelled" at us. We were so loud, he had to yell. He said that we had arrived too early and it was our own fault that we were standing out in the freezing cold.

So, we all turned around, and like a "flock?" of colorful penguins trekked back (toward) home. We were all afraid to actually go back home where our parents would yell at us for being back in the house, so we just went to an open field, and continued to freeze, estimating the ten minutes. Even if we could tell time, we had no watches, and even if we had had watches, no one was going to roll up a parka sleeve to see what time it was. Assuming the hands were even moving in weather so cold.

So I digress. The point I was going to make -- and I'm amazed I still remember the point -- when you grow up in extremely cold weather, it's hard to get excited about stories that say the temperature of the earth is going to increase 0.6 degrees over the next century.

But if you are the urban elite where you never experience such cold, but notice that the glaciers are not as big as they were twenty years ago when your folks took you on the annual European tour, you start to get concerned that, "OMG, the earth is heating up."

Didn't someone once say that where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit.

And growing up in North Dakota, I sat in some miserably cold weather.

I do remember sitting behind the prettiest girl in second grade, though. Maybe that's why I came to school ten minutes early.