It's Friday and the sun is out for the first time in a week.  Not only has it been gray and wet, it's been cold.  Jay turned the heat on in the house the other night.

IT'S LATE JUNE AND THE FURNACE IS ON.

This worries me.

Not because I've suddenly jumped on the 'climate change' bandwagon with the rest of the losers too stupid to notice what the weather has been like their entire lives but because of the articles I've been reading lately regarding sunspot activity.

There isn't any.

We know very little about the sun.  We can only study it from great distances of course, so we can only tell what it's made of by some sort of scientific scope that can read the makeup of gases based on what color they'd be if we could see them.  For all I know (or you either) scientists made all this stuff up.  The sun could actually be a big ball of burning pizza cheese.  We can't get close enough to it to tell for sure.

Assuming anyone knows anything, the sun isn't that different from anything else that burns; it occasionally pops.  These pops are called 'Sunspots' and their activity is cyclical.  We've just come out of an eleven year cycle of high sunspot activity, which is why we've had really hot summers.

Got that?

Hot summers may have been caused by the sun, or they may have been caused by too many baby polar bears, exhaling CO2.  Which seems more likely to you?

Which brings us to why I'm worried.

If lots of sunspots cause hot summers, and there's no sunspots at present, and the weather has been cold, wet and depressing....

Logic tells us that it may not get better.  We may be in for a whole summer of cool, wet CRAP.

Now, we may not.  This could just be a cool, wet spring.  June is historically a wet, lousy month. This year, April was still winter and May sucked the big one.  Usually, we can rest assured that by July, warm sunny days were ahead.

But what if the lazy sun is cause of our heavy skies?

The  reason I never bought the global warming scare is that I can remember back when I was a kid.  I remember long, hot summers where we spent every single day at the pool.  I remember cold brown Christmases and years with no snow.  I remember springs where the inch worm infestations made going out side in May and June a nightmare.  I remember droughts that had Lake Harriet so low that we needed a ladder to get from the deck of the sail boat to the dock.  I remember the torrential rain that filled the lake back up in two days.

And I remember environmentalists trying to scare the crap out of everyone over these normal weather events so as to use them for their own political power.

Extreme weather doesn't feel normal while it's happening to you but to the planet, extreme is the norm.

Think of it this way; you don't feel 'normal' when you have a severe cold, but catching colds is normal.  Everyone does it, sometimes more than once a year. 

Here's why I'm worried; I remember the first two summers we moved back to Minnesota from Montana.  It was 1990 and 1991.  Those summers were cold and gray, all the way through to winter.  I remember because I had three little kids who thought we'd moved from hot, dry, cowboy country to a land where all it did was snow.  Even in summer.

I remember telling my kids that it wasn't always like that; that when I'd grown up, we'd had summers where every day was hot and sunny and my siblings and I spent the whole time in the water.

"Right, Mom." they snorted, as though I were tying to convince them that the Easter Bunny was real.  (Tyler had figured out the EB was most likely a guy in a suit by the time he was four.  What's even funnier than the idea of a bunny hiding eggs and candy all over your yard?  A guy, dressed like a bunny, doing it.)

I remember feeling outraged and totally gypped by those summers.  After a Minnesota winter, even a mild one, without much snow, we need summer!  We deserve summer!  We'll all turn into psychos if we don't get us some SUMMER.

And this winter we just came through was not mild.  We got a ton of snow.  It wasn't all that cold.  I only remember a few weeks of subzero temps.  To the rest of the world, freezing may be cold but up here in the North Country, if there are two digits in the temperature reading but no minus sign?  It ain't that cold.  I know people who don't bother with a winter jacket unless it's below zero.  I know people who fish through the ice when they aren't even starving to death.  They think it's FUN.

Yes, those people are crazy and irritating but that's not my point.

My point is that this was a long, cold, snowy winter.  We got twenty wet inches in November and it never stopped.  Spring came and it still kept snowing.  It got above freezing and the snow just turned to rain.  Up until about a week ago, I realized that every time it rained (that would be every damn day)  I half expected the rain to turn to snow.

And there's no sunspot activity.

Today the sun came out for the first time in six days.  It's supposed to get up to seventy some degrees.

This may be as good as it gets all year.

And the chances are real good it'll be gone tomorrow.

 

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