Hubris, Weather, and Climate

ProfessorRoush and his lovely wife, Mrs. ProfessorRoush, were in a Topeka restaurant Saturday evening around 4:15 p.m. when the wind-caused whipping undulations of the umbrellas outside the nearby window captured my attention.  Something about their flapping pattern and my years of prairie-honed instincts said "storm", even though the sky out the window was light blue and cloudless.    

I did not recall any forecast chance of rain at all and a quick check of the Manhattan weather on our iPhones, 50 miles west of where we sat, showed no chances of precipitation for the evening, but I was still uneasy and a further look at the regional radar showed a thin squall line of strong storms west of Manhattan and bearing down.  Quickly estimating the speed of advance and distances involved, we paid our food bill and hastened to the Jeep, in which we proceeded, sometimes slightly above the speed limits, to head with all due haste for home.  

A nail-biting and knuckle-white drive commenced.  I glanced repeatedly from radar to road as the western sky darkened in the direction I was driving and the increasing winds rocked the Jeep.  And I'm happy to shorten your suspense and report that we beat the storm, pulling into our driveway just as large drops began to pummel the windshield.  The only one of us, Jeep, driver, or passenger, to suffer the storm was Mrs. ProfessorRoush, who got a quick drenching as she quickly took Bella out to potty before some light hail commenced.

That was it for the time being, 30 minutes of storm and then calmer winds and skies and clear radar from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.   During the night, though, a repeated series of storms formed directly to our west and periodic rain and thunderstorms crossed over us heading to the northeast throughout the night.  All that time, the weather apps forecast a lack of precipitation or else, while it was raining, the rain ending soon.  The last rain was still falling as I ate breakfast at 7 a.m.     

I relate all this not to gain any admiration for my prediction prowess and impressive weather intuition (I self-admired enough at the time), nor to rant again about the constant surprises of Kansas weather, but merely to point out, despite all the advances of modern science, that experts still can't accurately forecast weather an hour ahead, let alone a day, a week, or a hundred years into the future.  My head is not in the sand and I don't deny the possibility of climate change, but it's a much longer stretch for me to take on faith 100-year or even next-year forecasts when weather forecasters repeatedly fail on the next hour's weather.   

I understand satellite maps and El Niña and El Niño cycles and receding glaciers as well or better than the average educated person, but it takes only a season in Kansas to expose the audacity of anyone who thinks they have all the variables of climate accounted for, the solar cycles and the CO2 levels and the effects of increasing expanses of pavement and population bombs and pandemics.  Millions of predictions can be instantly dispatched by the next unpredicted volcanic eruption which can alternatively either throw up enough dust to shade the planet or expel enough CO2 to shame the entire output of the industrial revolution.  

I swear I am not prone to jumping onto every conspiracy.   In fact, I'm not quick to jump on any wagon at all until I'm certain the axles will hold.  Too many old, rickety, hay wagons have been under my butt in my past life as a farm boy to not remember the bruises.  My words today will not please some of my readers, but I'm bone-tired of experts who can't say "I don't know."   Whether it's COVID spacing or climate change or the dangers of avian influenza, human hubris holds us back from the real truth.  Those in authority should learn to say these important words and mean them; "I don't know, but we'll keep looking."  It's okay to admit uncertainty and we can all handle the truth better than adamant speculations that are ultimately wrong.   And even dangerous. 

 I believe in science, the real science where you can freely question anything and seek truth through experimentation and gain knowledge through experience.  But I'll believe the climate and weather predictions when they can beat the marrow-held instincts of the dirt- and wind-sniffing farm boy.

(Some may be asking, what does all this have to do with the daylilies pictured here?   And the answer is: "Nothing.  They are just pretty pictures to keep you calm and happy."  Which makes me just one more person who can't say "I don't know. but it seemed like a good explanation at the time.")  

Rant over....now back to your regular programming.  I hope, as someone just told me, you could hear the smile in my voice" while I ranted. 

Who's Tired of This Crap?

Seattle, up there with the most snow in 50 years, are you tired of this crap?  Texas, covered in snow and freezing temperatures, how about you?  Upper Midwest, reaching streaks of record subzero days, are you about done shoveling the white stuff?   Well, guess what, ProfessorRoush is not near done.

I'm not near done because, with classes cancelled tomorrow, I can use it as an excuse to pick up groceries and supper and come home still early enough to see the sun cause a snow rainbow at 5:06 p,m.  I took this picture from the window of my Jeep just before I turned onto our road.  How rare to see a partial rainbow here in the dying light of a snow day; rarer still on a snow day where there was no snow predicted at all.  With all our science, with all our computers, we still can't predict snow 12 hours ahead.

I'm not near done with this crappy weather because exactly an hour later, at 6:06 p.m., my neighbor called me on the phone to make sure I looked at the sunset, a sunset with a magnificent pillar of fire leaping from the sun to the sky.  I hung up on him so I could snap this picture on my iPhone camera.  So that, gracious be God, I could capture the heavens and earth in golden embrace as the clouds turned pink in embarrassed glory.  I'll trade a so-so day of 20ºF temperatures for another subzero morning if I have any chance at another picture like these.  

And I'm not near done because I want, frankly, all the global warming fanatics to reap the whirlwind.  I've heard it up to my ears with global warming causing unstable weather patterns and cold days instead of hot ones, and I'm flabbergasted every time I hear that we've only got 20, 10, 5 years left before global warming climate change caused by industrial pollution cow flatulence ruins the planet.  Guess what; the Arctic still has an ice cap and Polar Bears are not yet extinct.  I haven't yet had the July Kansas sun cause blisters on my arms, but I'm pretty sure if I stuck my hand out the door for 10 minutes right now, I'd be pecking at the keyboard tomorrow with fists instead of fingers.  Tell you what, how about an experiment?  Let's all take off our clothes this May and live outside in the back yard for a year and see whether we die of heat or hypothermia first?

Ewwww...strike that thought.  That mental image is not a pretty Kansas picture like the ones above.  How about we all just live and let live, turn down our thermostats and our emotions right now to save respectively a little energy for our neighbors and a little angst for ourselves, and just calm down and enjoy the sunset for awhile?  

Please, Fall, Come.

ProfessorRoush is absolutely, assuredly, positively, unquestionably, and undoubtedly ready for Fall.  Things out there in the greater garden are looking bedraggled and I'm decisively ready for Fall.  I'm tired of mowing the lawn every week without fail and I'm surely ready for Fall.  The lilac leaves are mildew-ing and dropping and both they and I are conclusively ready for Fall.  Everything is overgrown and I'm losing to the weeds and I'm categorically ready for Fall.  Come on over, Fall!

I woke this morning to the perfect hint of Fall, but I have yet to be convinced that we will see it.  There was moderate fog around and I love the fog for its dampening of sounds from town and the sense of isolation it brings.   The view above, straight into the garden and lacking the usual houses on the horizon, takes me back 10 years in an instant, to a time before those houses were built and it was just us and the sky to the south.  Click on it and dive in with your soul.  And the view below, at a slight eastern angle to the first, picks up the longhorn cattle grazing in the pasture and my neighbor's pond beyond.  Serenity at its finest.  Don't you feel calmed by the scene?

It has been such a weird gardening year with the rain and all.  If you knew anything of Kansas, you should know that the garden above should be browning by now, if not completely August-drought-dry.  Instead, the growth is nearly as green as at the beginning of spring, as it has been all summer long, just beginning to show the changes of grass color to the reds of fall. I've never, since moving to the prairie, mowed every week all summer and by this time of year I'm usually able to cut every other week if not just once a month.

I checked on Friday, and through that day, we've had 42.18 official inches of rain in 2019, an increase over average rain of 14.76 inches, or in other terms, 54% more than the average annual rainfall through September 6th!  Climate change or coincidence?  Just for those following the fictions of Al "the Arctic will be ice free by 2014" Gore, the high and low temperatures here for September 6, 2019 were 94ºF and 68ºF respectively.  The records for that date are a high of 106ºF set in 1913 and a low of 42ºF set in 1962.  If climate change it must be, I think I'd prefer the extra rain and today's temperatures versus the high of 1913.  In fact, even 1913 seems to be a weird record since the majority of the high temperature records in this area were established in the Dust-Bowl 30's. 

The strangest part of this year, to me, was that because of all the wet weather, my garden's fairy ring never materialized.  I have an enormous fairy ring in my garden, which I've never written about but have intended to.  In recent years, it has approached more than 50' in diameter, old and growing every year.  Instead, I waited and waited and they almost never came.  These two mushrooms above, the smaller posing for a close-up in the photo below, just popped up in the fairy ring yesterday and are the only two I've seen anywhere in the garden this year.  Since the same official rainfall records note that we are -0.72" behind our annual average rain for September (making the earlier part of the year even more wet in comparison), is it that this fairy ring only dances in drought times?  Inquiring minds would like to know.

Winter On!

If you are wondering about the title, I'm shouting it in a tone similar to urging you to "push on," "plow through it," "soldier on," and so on.  Because we don't really have any alternative during this seemingly ceaseless season of snow and suffering, do we?

My photo today is the most garden-ey thing I could find related to the outdoors right now; the salty paw print of my precious Bella as she pads back in from the salt-strewn pavement out our front door.  It is pretty tough on Mrs. ProfessorRoush to see these paw-print-ey trails across her oak floors and likely the salt is tougher still on the sensitive toe pads of poor Bella. 

The rest of my garden is still in the deep freeze.  Here in Kansas, on February 19th, we've had 20.6 inches of snow already this winter, with 3-5 more predicted tonight and two more days of snow in the ten-day forecast.  It does melt off between snows here, with the result of leaving the gravel road leading to the house in the worst condition of the entire time I've lived here. Still, our average snowfall by this time each year is 13 inches according to the KMAN news article I linked to.  Yes, I know, that the 58% increase in snow to this point is JUST WEATHER, not global climate COOLING.  Keep telling yourself that for another few years.  All this gardener knows is that this time last year, I was outside on the weekends clearing garden beds in shirtsleeve weather.

 ProfessorRoush, he just keeps staring from the windows this year, primarily assessing whether the straw over the strawberries is still undisturbed and counting the upended garden ornaments in his back garden.  Sooner or later, I suppose the weather will warm and we will receive sunshiny hope again.  After all, I've seen bluebirds looking for nesting sites recently.

I know I haven't been writing much, but I have resolved, in my discontented winter's mood, to try something new this year in the blog; shorter, quicker updates on a more daily basis during the growing season with the goal of placing you beside me whenever I putter back into the garden.  A Growing Season in the Life of ProfessorRoush, as it were, beginning whenever the weather warms enough for the ground to thaw.  You'll have to let me know sometime if you liked it.

Fall and Winter

'John Cabot'

Where to begin?  It's been so long since my last post.  I had the desire, I had the need, but I lacked the final urgency to blog.  There was always something more pressing, more distracting, more immediate.  Excuses aside, by late August, I gave up on the garden and its Japanese Beetles and its drought. I was trying to ignore the actions of some unknown burrowing creature that was attempting to dig half of the garden up and I was disgusted by the lack of blooms and wilting daily along with the flowers.

Renewal, however, is always just around the corner in a garden.  There were always bright spots, refreshing moments like the 'John Cabot' rose (photo above) trying to climb through an old sitting bench near it.  The spray was half eaten away, but it still shone like the entrance to heaven from halfway across the garden.  I rallied in time to purchase a couple of dozen daylily starts at the local sale and gathered the energy to water them enough to keep them alive.   And the irrepressible  crape myrtles bloomed on time and gave way to panicled hydrangeas and late summer shrubs in their due time.

Sweet Gum

By September, we had a deficit of 10 inches of annual rainfall, almost half of the normal total expected.  Then, in a single night, the drought was extinguished by a deluge, parts of Manhattan were temporarily under water, the farm ponds filled and overflowed, and the ground cracks disappeared.  Over the following 2 weeks, three separate rainfalls added another 11 inches to the total, a year's rain in less than a month, and the world was mud.

Fall was nice while it lasted.  My young Sweet Gum, Liquidambar styraciflua (above, left), won my undying gratitude for its glowing orange fall foliage, and the prairie began to greet the sun every morning with its own display of gold and rust (below).  There are many here who believe fall is the best season on the prairie, and I can scarcely find any reason to quibble.

Despite the rejuvenating rain, the garden had little time to respond, as fall was short-lived.  On October 15th, two weeks earlier than any I've seen in 30 years of living here, we got a heavy wet snowfall of 3 inches.  While it made a winter wonderland of the landscape, it was an early finish to the annuals and the sedum and the chrysanthemums.  You can call it "weather," instead of climate change, all you want, but a record-early snowfall of decades, to the garden and to me, suggests that things are getting colder, not warmer.  We've already had 4 separate snowfalls in the last month, another anomaly for my scrapbook.  My unscientific conclusions were also bolstered by the "climate" of last weekend, as we smashed a 110 year old record overnight low for the date.  Maunder minimums, meet the 3rd millennium!  

I'll leave you, here on the 2nd day of December, 2018, with these last two pictures to ponder.  The first, taken at 7:52 a.m last Sunday, was my back garden at the start of a day of incoming climate.  The second, taken just after 11:00 a.m. through the same window, the frozen tundra that was previously my back garden.  That morning, if a mastodon had come lumbering out of the gale-driven snowfall, I wouldn't have batted an eye.  Except for the 4 foot drift on my front sidewalk, which I shoveled away while I composed a spirited few words that might have taken Al Gore's name in vain, most of this snow is already gone, feeding the prairie grass roots deep in the saturated soil.   This year, at least, I won't have to worry about the lack of soil moisture available for the shrubs as the ground freezes and churns.  Climate-change has its own little gifts, I guess.

At last, daffodils!

I say, "at last," like they were incredibly, irresponsibly late, drowsy, dilatory delinquents holding up progress, because I've been waiting and waiting, wondering if they were ever going to bloom.  I think I'm getting impatient in my old age.

After checking my notes, this spring IS a week or so behind the spring of 2012, and perhaps 2 weeks behind the springs of 2016 and 2017, BUT it's on a par with the opening dates of daffodils in 2006, 2008, 2014, and 2015.  So, my mid-winter melancholy is mildly misplaced, since the "climate" here seems to be within normal fluctuation.  Perhaps the two most recent springs have thrown my inner clock off, winding me up to be disappointed by frost and arctic blasts.  Or perhaps I'm getting impatient in my old age.

My Abeliophyllum distichum ‘Roseum’, my pink forsythia, is blooming well now, but it is a full two weeks behind the March 5th day of 2016 that I noted as a "peak" day for it that spring.  No yellow forsythias are blooming here yet, also seemingly late, although some buds are showing a little color on those plants.  I suppose I should be merely hoping for any bloom at all, since I noted in 2017 that no forsythia bloomed last spring, due likely to either a very cold spell in the winter or a really hard freeze at opening.  Where forsythia is concerned, perhaps I should just be thankful to see any yellow cheerfulness before June's daylilites and I should not be so impatient in my old age.

Yes, Size Matters...

...for rain gauges, anyway.  I have no experimental data regarding other subjects.

ProfessorRoush has always been a purchaser of those little cheap 1 inch diameter rain gauges, both for price and for their ability to be mounted easily to a post.  I always wanted them cheap because, as often as not, I leave them open-side-up a little too long and lose one to frozen shatterage nearly every year.  For ages, I had one down at the garden and one up by the house, the nearest for convenience on cold rainy spring mornings and the farthest because the rain in Kansas is so spotty that I thought the second often might have differing readings (though it doesn't).

Then, a couple of years ago, I purchased a 2 inch rain gauge that stuck into the ground on a little metal stand (pictured at left) and I immediately noticed that it commonly registered more rain than the smaller gauges, sometimes double the amount of rain.  What the heck, an inch is an inch in regards to rain, right?

Recently, on an experimental whim, I purchased the rain gauge pictured at the right below this paragraph, which is about halfway between the two previous sizes.  And in the recent rains over several days, the tally was; Biggest gauge, 3.4 inches, medium gauge, 2.7 inches, and two small gauges, 2.1 and 2.2 inches respectively.


What I neglected to previously consider was that rain never falls straight down in Kansas.  It commonly sweeps in at a 30º angle to the ground.  Sometimes, it seems to be completely horizontal and never actually reaches the ground, or thereabouts.  I'm pretty certain that if my face didn't sometimes intercept the path of rain, those individual droplets might make it as far as Missouri before they fell.  So a simple explanation might be that some of the rain is hitting the side of the gauge instead of dropping into it.

Of course, any decent mathematician would have calculated in seconds that the area of a 1 inch circle is πr², or 0.785 square inches.  Held at a 30º angle to oncoming rain (and estimating by eyeball), the apparent opening of the now ellipse is 1 inch X 0.6875 inches.  The formula for the area of an ellipse is πab, or π(semi-major radius)(semi-minor radius).  In this case, that is π(0.5)(0.3438) = 0.54 square inches.  The same amount of rain just doesn't have the same target area, so the gauge doesn't fill as much.  Voila!

Of course, the real "angular diameter" of the gauge to rain that falls at near subtornadic velocity has a more exact formula  (δ=2 arctan(d/2D)), but then you get into arctans and deltas and other things that I don't want to spend time relearning. I'm still confident enough to put the validity of my crude explanation and estimates of rain depth up against the likely validity of a specific 20-year future climate change prediction by any scientist, "settled science" or not.  Bigger IS simply better, regarding rain gauges, and I'm sticking to it.