It’s not an ill wind that does this

Considering this cliché sort of stunt does nothing to inform viewers, and serves only to create some extra level of phony drama to weather that stands on its own for importance, I got a chuckle out of this situation.

Doppler, hell, he’s got spleen

Paul Smokov, a North Dakota cattle farmer, doesn’t bother with modern technology when it comes to forecasting the weather. He just checks pig spleens.

“It looks like a normal year with no major storms,” Smokov, 84, told an Associated Press reporter as he looked at a pair of the shiny, brown, foot-long organs on his kitchen counter.

Another school of thought presumes just seeing pigs wrapped in, say, a blanket — as seen here — might give you an idea that cold weather is a-coming.

Smokov, who learned his folk craft from his Ukranian forebears, says if the spleen is wide where it attaches to the pig’s stomach and then narrows, it means winter weather will come early with a mild spring. A narrow-to-wider spleen usually means harsh weather in the spring, he said. The spleens obtained by Smokov this year are pretty uniform in thickness, which means no drastic changes.

How accurate is he?

“The spleens are 85% correct, according to my figures,” he said. As for the weathermen, “Those guys aren’t any better.”

A meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Bismarck, ND, said the service’s three-month outloook is typically at least 60% percent accurate.

A DIFFERENT S-WORD COMES TO MIND

My mini-euphoria of the past few days was dashed when the sleet began.

Plants that had been peeping out from snowy shrouds, birds that had shown up obviously too early from warmer climes, people who were making plans for more walks all got coated with the stuff. Ice and snow, snow and ice.

I had been toying with the idea of actually saying “spring.” I said something quite different before I turned in for the night.

Perhaps I should follow the lead of Mr. & Mrs. McPussington, who share Weathering Heights with us. They take what comes at them from a comfy perch, such as this one near their favorite kitchen window. The birds do put on quite a show.

IT’S THAT TIME OF WINTER

This is one of those rare times I can appreciate the aftermath of icy rain.

The curving swaths of hard-packed snow are covered with a thick crust of ice, spread by winds with a knifelike sharpness atop the snowbanks like cake frosting, all hard and shining.

The park playground a few miles from Weathering Heights has become more an abstract metal sculpture than something that appears functional, bits of monkey bars and slides poking out of the piles of frozen water.

The small lake next to it has become too cold even for the hardy ice fishermen who had been visiting it each day before sundown. This is a time of winter best left to the wildlife.

I can see all sorts of tiny prints barely etched in the ice by rabbits, chipmunks and squirrels that keep venturing out to grab some seed that has fallen from the birdfeeder. No larger tracks, say from deer, on the property but I was part of a stop-quick maneuver by a line of cars on the two-lane road nearby when two young deer decided to vault the icy shoulder and make one of those dumb deer dashes across the road.

Tomorrow won’t be any warmer — the weatherbeings predict mid-20s as a high, and 2 or 3 above zero as the low. We can take it, though. We are, after all, northeasterners. Plus, we have great insulation in the house.

Snow going .. on and on

William M. Dowd photo

And so, we’re back to normal. Crisp, cold days, windy nights, and visions of crystalline sugarplums dancing in front of our eyes.

The Great Valentine’s Day Mess is over, and we’re digging out here in Upstate New York after several feet of snow enveloped us.

Nothing like our fellow New Yorkers a few hours’ drive west of here in Oswego. There, a lake effect snowstorm dumped a dozen feet or so on them in a two-day period, giving them unwanted national prominence. Our snowfall was, by comparison, springtime weather.

Of course, once all our snow is cleared away we’ll have to find other things to gripe about. Judging by the headlines, that won’t be difficult:

Virulent anti-Republican crank comic Al Franken running for the U.S. Senate, the African nation of Guinea appears on the brink of a civil war, Daimler Chrysler plans to fire 15,000 employees … .

Let’s get busy now and avoid the last-minute complaining rush.

A powerful reminder

I was recently in San Antonio, a place where it hasn’t snowed in two decades. They still were getting over the shock of an ice storm that effectively shut down the community a week earlier.

One young lady was telling me that her 18-year-old kid brother, a freshman at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, had never seen snow before this winter. The first time flakes fell on his new home he rushed outdoors to take pictures to send back to Texas despite being ribbed by his dorm mates.

Silly kid, I thought at the time. Snow is so common here in Upstate New York that we rarely give it a second thought.

Then two feet of snow dropped on us overnight and into the morning. Wind whipped the flakes around at such a pace we had a whiteout and couldn’t even see our taller neighbor, Bald Mountain. We’re staring at the snow, cursing it, in awe of it and … yes … we’re even taking pictures of it.

Sometimes the forces of nature that you know have you in total thrall but soon will go away always have that effect on us. Nice to be reminded.

Life is a numbers game

He, calling from San Antonio, TX: “So, what’s the temperature up there?”

She, answering from Upstate New York: “I guess 6 or 7. How about down there?”

He: “Same numbers. Just a little closer together, like 67.”

It’s a big country, room enough for all sorts of people and climates. When you travel a lot, that becomes clearer and clearer.

Little things such as what outerwear to choose when traveling from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt tells you that you’ll have to be adaptable. The leather jacket with the quilted lining that was perfect when you set out on your trek that morning becomes superfluous material to carry by the time you reach your southwestern destination that afternoon.

Once again, weather is a metaphor for life. Just as we make accommodations along the way for changing climatic conditions, most of us start out on some sort of journey — romance, career, grocery store choices, Christmas shopping — and wind up not precisely where we thought we would. It’s the adaptations we make along the way that create the outcome.

MOTHER NATURE IS TWO-FACED

Sitting next to one of The Other Beings that co-habit Weathering Heights with us, gazing out the window at the first sprinkling of snowflakes, the beauty of Nature once again made itself known last night.

Hours later, I had to drive through the crap to get to work. God, I hate snow.

My first indication we’d had more than a half-foot of it overnight was when I opened the front door to retrieve my morning paper and was hit in the face with a wind-driven bunch of snow. Even The Other Being who usually shadows my every step backed off, not wanting to get his dainty paws or whiskers all wet.

A 20-minute commute took in excess of two hours. People who know how to pilot a car on dry roads suddenly take leave of their senses when rain or snow fall — like the idiot in the Cadillac who decided to make a sweeping U-turn in front of me with no notice because he got bored sitting in a stalled line of traffic and thought my opposite-direction cruising looked more promising.

Once again I was daydreaming, as I sat there inhaling all the idling exhausts of the SUVs and other uselessly humungous vehicles stuck in traffic with me, of warmer climes. Of course, I do this every winter and have been doing so for so many decades I’m losing track. When spring comes, I’ll just suck it up, assume next winter will be better, and stay right where I am.

And, where I am has a much-improved outlook for tomorrow: partly cloudy, a high of 40° and an endurable low of 28°.

COOL IT ON GLOBAL WARMING

A year ago at this time, according to the archives we just dusted off up here on the Heights, the daytime temperatures were in the 40ish range. Now, they are the same. So much for global warming.

Alright, alright, it’s not supposed to be 40ish at this time of year, according to our experience. I know. I just have difficulty lamenting a change in global weather conditions we really can’t do anything about.

I have no confidence that removing SUVs and hairspray cans from civilization will cool down the world’s climate. In my view, based on eons of historic records, “global warming,” such as it is, is part of a natural cycle of hot and cold that our esteemed planet goes through no matter what we or any other carbon-based life forms may do.

The difficulty most humans have is that they judge such things by their own existence clock, forgetting that our lifetimes are less than a speck on the tail of a flea in comparison to the whole span of time.

For those of you who insist on looking at things in the short term, however, tomorrow’s forecast calls for a lot more sun with a high in the mid-40s and a low in the high 20s.

THIS JUST IN: PLAGUE AFFECTS CLIMATE

“Global warming” notwithstanding, this winter’s killer storms and sub-zero temperatures have wreaked havoc across Europe. Perhaps a few centuries from now, scientists will figure out why.

Why a few centuries? It took them that long to figure out that the “Black Death” — bubonic plague — that wiped out about a third of Europe’s population in the 14th Century may also have triggered what is known as the Little Ice Age, a 300-year period of markedly decreased temperatures.

Say what? Well, using what some may now label Chaos Theory, think about how small things can cause other things. The popular example is the movement of a butterfly’s wings eventually causing a storm a continent away.

With so many people dying, untended and abandoned farmland wound up going back to nature, with trees and bushes taking over formerly tended fields. Pollen and leaf data, researchers say, support the idea that millions of trees sprang up, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which, in turn, had the effect of cooling the climate.

A team from Utrecht University in the Netherlands notes that such a happenstance coincides with the drop in average temperatures across Europe at that time. Of course, not everyone believes in this latest theory. Tim Lenton, an environmental scientist from the University of East Anglia in England, told the BBC, “It is a nice study and the carbon dioxide changes could certainly be a contributory factor, but I think they are too modest to explain all the climate change seen.”

And Richard Houghton, a climate expert from the Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod, says that the oceans would have compensated for the change. “The atmosphere is in equilibrium with the ocean and this tends to dampen or offset small changes in terrestrial carbon uptake,” he explained.