I woke up this morning here in Massachusetts USA, on March 30th 2015, to more snow coming down. A dusting, perhaps, but it served to remind us all that this was a record-breaking year for snow, colder than normal, and that winter isn’t ready to give up just yet.
It’s just cold and gray and dreary. Carping about the weather in early Spring is always a popular pastime in these parts, but this year has been really much tougher than usual.
Last year we had the ‘polar vortex’ which delivered some of the absolute coldest air to our region, so the back-to-back experience is one of relentless cold, snowy winters and short summers.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. At least, it wasn’t predicted to be this way. But changing weather patterns have meant cold and snow for us in New England while the West bakes under dry, abnormally warm conditions. Whatever has upset the system has gotten things so tossed around that yesterday parts of Antarctica were a full 30 degrees F warmer than where I live.
Now, it seems like we all may have to get used to these new patterns where too much cold and too much warm have settled into different places. I guess, on balance, I would rather be wet than dry. I’ll take too much snow over persistent drought, any year.
But all of these strange weather and precipitation patterns have me wondering if it’s even possible to prepare one’s garden properly for such strangeness. No delicate, edge-of-boundary plantings for our garden anymore…just the most hardy, ridiculously tolerant plants and varieties for us.
All we can say for sure at this point is that the weather patterns of old are no longer a useful guide. We now have to be ready for a much wider range of experiences and perhaps an increasingly wider set as time goes on.
Strange New Financial Patterns
Similarly, there seem to be a bunch of new economic rules that we have to adjust our thinking around. Whether it was Brian Pretti considering if global capital flows are going to increasingly “explain” stock market movements going forward, or Steve Keen explaining that the Fed uses broken models and has no clue — none — about energy or the environment anywhere in its iron-clad dogma, we are getting a taste of the possibility that new patterns are governing our daily experiences.
by arthur-robey-2