Remember back in October when I was lamenting the fact that we weren’t ever really going to get fall weather? Well…I guess in a way, I was right. We got a little bit of it in late November, but ever since then, our weather has been weird. The fall/winter/spring part of the year for San Antonio (October through March) usually goes like this: hot for the first half of October, then sudden cold fronts giving us a few weeks of fall weather, then suddenly it’s winter, which consists of alternating days that swing wildly from 30s to 70s or higher and days that stay stubbornly in the 50s. By late Feb, the temps are getting much warmer, settling into the 60s and 70s most days with some occasional trips into the 90s, and by the end of March, 80s are the norm. That’s not really how this year has gone.
This year, it was hot hot hot for ages, up until late November when we had a short autumn. Then we went to those resolutely 50s days, but they trended more toward high 50s, and our swing days were more like 40s to 80s, with occasional high-80s. February was pretty warm most days. And now in March, when we’ve already gotten out the summer clothes, we suddenly had a hard freeze, getting into the mid-20s (which has only happened a half-dozen times in San Antonio history, most in the last few years – thanks, global warming…) for three nights in a row and causing us to need coats for the very first time this season. And then it got up to 90 degrees the next day.
The excruciatingly warm winter – I was serious when I said we didn’t once need anything warmer than a jacket until this week – does not bode well for this summer. I expect there will be lots of 100+ temps in the forecast. I really hope I’m wrong and summer will be unusually cool!! But seriously, this global warming thing is insane. Weather has always been unpredictable on a day to day basis, but now on a season to season basis? Yikes. I worry what comes next!
The Zen Leaf 
I don’t understand how anyone can deny the climate is changing. Up here in Seattle, we were buried in snow for two weeks just a month ago (which is strange in itself) and then today had the warmest March/winter day in Seattle history at 78 degrees. I am also worried about our summer but also about the future. There are always flukes but I think this unpredictability is going to become the new normal.
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It makes me think of those infinity graphs, where the climb upward starts slow and then each jump gets larger and larger. These changes started small but now they’re coming in leaps and bounds. I remember back in college, I took a geology class from a prof who was obviously trying to deny climate change in retrospect. He told us that yes, climate change is real, but the media is making it out to be this huge deal when it’s really this incremental thing, a tiny point-percentage change each year, will take thousands of years to get to the place scare-mongering media claims we’re at. But of course, it’s tiny incremental changes that cause bigger changes until everything falls apart rapidly. It’s not a straight line, which is what he tried to tell us. It’s really terrifying to see how things have changed over the last twenty years.
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