It was 52 degrees F today where I live. The day before it was in the low 20’s until the evening when temperatures and winds rose dramatically. The accumulated ice and snow on my roof began to melt rapidly.
About 9:00 P.M. it started leaking through the ceiling of our kitchen and down the where our kitchen table lamp was located at the prodigious rate of about a gallon an hour. Called a roofing contractor who got rid of the melting ice and snow which was causing the leak. He told me repairs to the roof and gutters and siding to prevent future “ice dams” would cost $900. I have no idea what the damage to fix the ceiling will cost which is soaked and bulging and brown stained all to hell.
Tomorrow morning it will be 11 degrees F when I wake up. I live in Western New York. This is not normal (normal being the weather I remember from the late 80’s when we first moved here), but then the last 15 years of weather here in the wintertime has been less and less normal.
Last year while heavy, record snow devastated Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. and NYC, we had little if any snow and one of the warmest winters on record. This year our temperatures have been colder, but erratic, and I often find our temperatures have been warmer, and our snowfalls have been less, than people I know who live hundreds of miles to the south or west or east of me. That’s not the way it used to be, not by a long shot.
You can call climate change a hoax. You can say the thousands of climate scientists are left wing alarmists. You can dismiss all the evidence that rising global temperatures have led to more and more extreme weather events. You can believe what you want.
I believe my own eyes.
