Friday December 25th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: What A Difference A Year Makes…It’s A Cold, Mournful Christmas This Year
Dear Diary. I’m writing this post in hopes that Christmas 2021 a year from now will be much better for society than during this Christmas. During my 60 years I can’t remember a Christmas this sad with death knocking at the door this much like the ghosts from Charles Dickens’s novel visiting Ebenezer Scrooge. To top bad things off today I learned that a bomb was exploded in downtown Nashville..oyee. Christmas, after all, is supposed to be a time of birth and rebirth and not a time in which disease and death is on everyone’s minds.
Even the weather has turned cold and disagreeable across much of the eastern United States, included my home town of Atlanta where we are having the coldest Christmas in over thirty years, despite overall global warming. I suppose that for a some revelers the cold is getting them in the Christmas spirit, though. It seems like centuries ago that we were having a warm Christmas 2019, innocently not knowing what 2020 would bring. Check my old post out from a year ago:
This cold weather does give me some hope that our climate system is not broken beyond repair. Check out these readings as of mid afternoon Christmas Day from the Great Lakes south to the Gulf Coast. Brrr!
Still, this cold shot I’ve dubbed “Cold Wave Harold” coming in the wake of the Weather Channel’s Winter Storm Harold is not that historic since it won’t produce that many cold records. We’ve seen far more severe Arctic outbreaks during past winters. Will this be one of the most bitter cold of Winter 2020/21? We will see.
My worst fear for 2021 is not from a changing climate in the long run, but from COVID19 variants, which are mutating and springing up all across the planet. These mutations are beginning to prove to be more easily transmissible and deadly than the original virus. Christmas 2020 has brought us the gift and hope of many vaccine’s, which scientifically have astoundingly been developed in just a short few months after the pandemic became a true pandemic in early 2020. It is my true prayer that these vaccines can thwart all variants of COVID19. Of course, I’ll have some of the latest notes on the pandemic at the end if todays post as usual.
Anyway, I hope you are enjoying some time with your loved ones today while socially distancing. Also, take some time to remember those who have suffered and passed during this awful year. Give to those who are less fortunate, especially those shoved into poverty because of the pandemic.
Never give up hope. A year from now I wish to be blogging, reporting that the world is much better than on Christmas 2020, and that due to the Biden administration our prospects to get out of the climate crisis are better too.
Here is wishing and praying upon a star.
Here are some “ET’s” from this Christmas Day:
Here is more climate and weather news from Friday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
Now here are some of today’s articles and notes on the horrid COVID-19 pandemic:
(If you like these posts and my work please contribute via the PayPal widget, which has recently been added to this site. Thanks in advance for any support.)
Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”