After today, I've played golf in Minnesota in every month except January. General impression: the ball does not go as far in chilly air, but it rolls farther over frozen ground, and, since the latter effect is stronger than the former, I see even more of the untended parts of the course than usual.
Could have played in January, too. Probably would have had to subject arthritic knees to limping the course, however. "A nice walk ruined" is the title of a book about golf, but I prefer to ruin a cart ride, and it's not even altogether ruined as the carts have cup holders. Though you don't get as thirsty in 50 degrees as you do in 80. Anyway, it's been warm for so long now that things have dried out and you can ride again.
I think it was 56 in the Twin Cities yesterday, a record high temperature for the date, and it was 50-something again today. The fellas who crow about the "hoax" of global warming every time there's a cold snap have been quiet for awhile. Maybe they play golf too, but I think they're more likely to be snowmobilers, in which case they should have time on their hands.
The Power Line blog is my window on the right-wing zeitgeist, and it's sort of fun to use the search engine they supply to track their history of error on climate change. The authors are lawyers, not scientists, and back in 2007 one of them, John Hinderaker, set about the lawyerly task of finding an expert witness who would say, with him, again and again and again, and again, that the real problem was not the warming earth but another Little Ice Age that was coming at us. And he found one, R. Timothy Patterson, a Canadian geologist who warned:
... by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world....
Hinderaker then comments:
Will it happen that way? I don't know; ask me in 20 years. Climate science is, as Dr. Patterson says, in its infancy, and nothing is settled. It is unquestionably true, however, that the threat posed by global cooling, should it occur, exceeds any possible danger of global warming.
Since it was in 2007 that he was putting forward the heterodox views of this one scientist, the 20 years aren't up yet. But I'm ready to make a call. We're four years past 2020, when we were supposed to be experiencing the onset of a new Little Ice Age, and the ten hottest years on record are . . . the last ten. In other words, every year since 2014 has been among the ten hottest on record. (Last year, 2023, was the hottest.) It seems the hoax is walloping the dreaded Schwabe solar cycle.
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