What goes up...
Perhaps only someone who spent most of their childhood in Tornado Alley can completely comprehend how literally unnatural it is to have cyclones there in the dead of winter - we who had tornado drills regularly along with our fire drills in grammar school, who knew the drill for what to do to give yourself a ghost of a chance if you lived in a house without a basement, or were caught outside, and also learned that Tornado Season ran from May till October, or from the time it started heating up into summer (summer comes early away from the sea, and closer to the tropic) until the time it started cooling off enough that the nights weren't a tepid bath of humidity.
We have been having alternate record snowstorms with record high temperatures, resulting in warm rain falling in December and January on top of ice and snow - a bad combination when it comes to flooding, and also not something I've seen in 28 years here; we've had warm, wet winters (my first here was one such) and cold snowy winters, by turns, but the oscillation from extreme cold to extreme heat in a single winter is something that is new from within the past ten, along with cold dry winters without any snow, and summers so hot and dry that towns have had to introduce water rationing for the first time on record, and summers so hot and dank that old hardwood trees have sickened and blighted with mildew, as well as autumns so warm that there has been no fall color, insufficient frost to catalyze the sugars of maple and beech and birch--
But, despite all that, a local store has had "GLOBAL WARMING MY ASS" on its letterboard for a while, due to the heavy snow, and despite the warm rains and sweater temperatures following upon it; and this attitude is a pretty common one, even among young liberal hipster Dems, who fail to understand something rather basic about the planet we live on - namely, that it is a planet, which means that just the other side of that blue sky is the vacuum of space, which is according to NASA, absent any other factors, 2.7 degrees K, or -270 C, or -455 F, or in other words, Pretty Damn Cold.
One thing growing up in Tornado Alley with a scientifically-literate family meant as well was that I got to see giant thunderheads forming like cosmic cauliflowers, or maybe some alien overlord's flying fortress of organically-grown foam, and the up-to-golfball-sized hail that could form in them - right in the middle of August, when the ambient temperature was (literally) 90 in the shade, when ice cream would start to melt and leak in the few minutes you stopped your car and carried your grocery bags into the kitchen, when tar on the telephone poles and roads would soften so that you could peel it up into nasty gummy lumps and throw them at each other as a kid - and have the process explained to me by my elders, how the thunderhead was so tall that the ice crystals which formed inside it would begin to fall down, but be caught in a wind tunnel effect due to the difference in air temperature from top to bottom, and blown back up inside, where they would gather more ice in a layer outside and thus start to fall, but be caught once again and pushed back by the updraft, this cycle repeating until the weight grew too heavy for the winds inside the cloud to bear it up and then it would fall as hail - the traces of this being evident in the pearl-like layers of a split hailstone of sufficient size.
So. The earth is a basically-enclosed system, like the thunderhead - or like a pot on the boil full of macaroni with the lid on - and you introduce heat to it, and stuff moves around, because heat increases motion, all that basic elementary school science stuff - and yes, heat rises, but again we're talking closed systems, the thunderhead or the saucepan or the planet with its cover of atmosphere on the other side of which is bitter, bitter cold of practically limitless extent - so when the heated stuff rises, be it bits of dirt that are floating around in the air catching moisture or pieces of dried pasta or masses of damp cohesive air, it first goes up and then it cools down when it gets away from the heat source, be that heat source a warmer spot inside the cloud or a burner on the stove or areas of land that absorb heat from the sun and hold it in better than the surrounding geography, and when it cools it falls, no matter what it is, because what goes up must come down, and that fall not happening in a Leucippan void but a Democritan it's affected by other bodies moving around and also is affected further by new applications of heat and so you get hailstones or pasta that swirls around and around the pot until it's finally tender enough for you to take it off the burner, or moving fronts that turn into storms.
The more heat you introduce to your cookpot, the faster and harder it boils - but it sometimes boils over. The fact that the noodles that come up to the surface cool down once they hit it, doesn't mean that there isn't an increase in the overall water temperature, either...
It's not rocket science - but grade school science is apparently beyond even a lot of college graduates (at least when it might require something of them, some price of action or self-denial to pay.)
We have been having alternate record snowstorms with record high temperatures, resulting in warm rain falling in December and January on top of ice and snow - a bad combination when it comes to flooding, and also not something I've seen in 28 years here; we've had warm, wet winters (my first here was one such) and cold snowy winters, by turns, but the oscillation from extreme cold to extreme heat in a single winter is something that is new from within the past ten, along with cold dry winters without any snow, and summers so hot and dry that towns have had to introduce water rationing for the first time on record, and summers so hot and dank that old hardwood trees have sickened and blighted with mildew, as well as autumns so warm that there has been no fall color, insufficient frost to catalyze the sugars of maple and beech and birch--
But, despite all that, a local store has had "GLOBAL WARMING MY ASS" on its letterboard for a while, due to the heavy snow, and despite the warm rains and sweater temperatures following upon it; and this attitude is a pretty common one, even among young liberal hipster Dems, who fail to understand something rather basic about the planet we live on - namely, that it is a planet, which means that just the other side of that blue sky is the vacuum of space, which is according to NASA, absent any other factors, 2.7 degrees K, or -270 C, or -455 F, or in other words, Pretty Damn Cold.
One thing growing up in Tornado Alley with a scientifically-literate family meant as well was that I got to see giant thunderheads forming like cosmic cauliflowers, or maybe some alien overlord's flying fortress of organically-grown foam, and the up-to-golfball-sized hail that could form in them - right in the middle of August, when the ambient temperature was (literally) 90 in the shade, when ice cream would start to melt and leak in the few minutes you stopped your car and carried your grocery bags into the kitchen, when tar on the telephone poles and roads would soften so that you could peel it up into nasty gummy lumps and throw them at each other as a kid - and have the process explained to me by my elders, how the thunderhead was so tall that the ice crystals which formed inside it would begin to fall down, but be caught in a wind tunnel effect due to the difference in air temperature from top to bottom, and blown back up inside, where they would gather more ice in a layer outside and thus start to fall, but be caught once again and pushed back by the updraft, this cycle repeating until the weight grew too heavy for the winds inside the cloud to bear it up and then it would fall as hail - the traces of this being evident in the pearl-like layers of a split hailstone of sufficient size.
So. The earth is a basically-enclosed system, like the thunderhead - or like a pot on the boil full of macaroni with the lid on - and you introduce heat to it, and stuff moves around, because heat increases motion, all that basic elementary school science stuff - and yes, heat rises, but again we're talking closed systems, the thunderhead or the saucepan or the planet with its cover of atmosphere on the other side of which is bitter, bitter cold of practically limitless extent - so when the heated stuff rises, be it bits of dirt that are floating around in the air catching moisture or pieces of dried pasta or masses of damp cohesive air, it first goes up and then it cools down when it gets away from the heat source, be that heat source a warmer spot inside the cloud or a burner on the stove or areas of land that absorb heat from the sun and hold it in better than the surrounding geography, and when it cools it falls, no matter what it is, because what goes up must come down, and that fall not happening in a Leucippan void but a Democritan it's affected by other bodies moving around and also is affected further by new applications of heat and so you get hailstones or pasta that swirls around and around the pot until it's finally tender enough for you to take it off the burner, or moving fronts that turn into storms.
The more heat you introduce to your cookpot, the faster and harder it boils - but it sometimes boils over. The fact that the noodles that come up to the surface cool down once they hit it, doesn't mean that there isn't an increase in the overall water temperature, either...
It's not rocket science - but grade school science is apparently beyond even a lot of college graduates (at least when it might require something of them, some price of action or self-denial to pay.)