Climate Change or Just a Very Warm Year?
By Josh Resnek
This week began real cold, much colder than all of this winter so far.
It is the dead of winter but there has been no snow.
It sometimes seems as though it won’t snow this winter. We assure our readers, it is destined to snow; the only question: how much?
This unusually warm winter, with average year round temperature of 52.4 degrees in Everett, was the warmest year on record, according to the Boston Bureau of the National Weather Service.
The warmest winter follows what was the warmest summer since records first began being kept in 1872.
Coastal waters are said to be heating up.
You wouldn’t know this by how long it takes us to summon the bravery to jump into it during the summer or the winter. The L Street Brownies in South Boston did their yearly winter swim over the holiday weekend. Normal people can enter a state of shock once they’ve gone under the water on January 1 in Boston.
The continued burning of fossil fuels is apparently the culprit.
The warming of the oceans, the melting of the ice caps, the rise in the level of the seas are a continuing part of a general warm-up that most scientists believe is the precursor to serious environmental difficulties that lay ahead for mankind. The warmer weather is taking a toll on the region, although in Everett, there are many sighs of relief among homeowners and apartment dwellers that heating our homes during the winter won’t cost as much as time goes by.
That thought is short shrift to those younger people and most clear thinking scientists who believe we are destroying ourselves by ruining the climate and making the earth uninhabitable.