Winter Redux

The sun was out yesterday, the daffodils and hyacinths were in bloom, and the birds were singing.  And it was as cold as an Eskimo's kiss.  It may have  looked like spring, but it certainly didn't feel like spring.

Temperatures in northern New Jersey were expected to barely make it to sixty degrees (Fahrenheit) yesterday and the day before.  They couldn't even reach fifty degrees.  I actually had to go out Thursday morning wearing winter gloves.  Some locations in northwestern New Jersey, where a cousin of mine lives, reported snow flurries, and there was a freeze warning over much of the state for two nights in a row.

It's all part of a persistent weather pattern that has been in place over the American Northeast since September 2013.  Temperatures have been below normal all that time, thanks to a diversion of the jet stream that has diverted much-needed snow from the Sierra Nevada (which, ironically, means "snow-covered mountain range" in Spanish)  in California and sent it over to New Jersey, New York State, and New England, as anyone in Boston will point out.  It's supposed to remain cooler than normal all the way through July.  The price we in the Northeast pay for a summer without so much heat or humidity may be another brutal winter in 2015-16, maybe one that's colder and snowier than the previous two winters.  This will assure not only a white Christmas but probably a white Easter, which we ended up avoiding this year after all, as well.  (Easter falls on March 27 in 2016.)   

So when will temperatures in the Northeast stop running below normal? Well, that's the clincher.  This pattern might not be abnormal; it's likely to become . . . the new normal.  The Northeast is likely going to go from a temperate climate to a sub-arctic one.

In other words, the climate . . . is changing.

To hell with you, James Inhofe!