Weird weather!

[cowman]

Well just when I thought I'd seen it all we get 3 inches of standing snow! I guess beggars can't be choosers and if we have to take it in solid form, well we will.
Now I'm going to keep a close watch on the hills in case one of them erupts into a volcano! I think we've pretty well had everything else this year.

[yonzie]

Chance of frost tonite, couple nites
ago was at 0, and down to -3
Spiritwood.
dale

[ianben]

Here in UK we just had four days steady rain with high temp. Peas and canola sprouted in the pod, wheat not quite ripe but bet hagbergs wrecked.
Not quite up to 3ins of snow but enough to show who is in charge.
If you find a replacement hobby when you sell those cows, cowman , let me know!!

[kam]

It's snowing in Alberta? Uh...maybe I'll reconsider the idea of moving there. It's been oppressively hot and humid down here in the States...but I'll take that over snow. Wheat harvest is done. It was decent, but no bin-buster. Now it's just the challenge of getting all the straw baled so we have a place to spread manure.

[cowman]

I am looking forward to the day I don't own any cows even though it will be a big trauma the day they go. I've owned cattle just about my whole life...I bought the milk cows calf before I started school! In the summer it won't be a problem as I'm busy as a bee. I've always enjoyed making things in the shop(used to drive my Dad crazy because I was always on the welder using up the welding rod when I was 11!) and I've got a few creative things I look forward to trying. Going to build a small greenhouse and I've been working on some various wood/oil burning/boiler type things. I have all the "shop toys"...it has always been my passion or my curse!
Hoping to take a couple of weeks in Peuorto Morales, Mexico this winter.

[carebear300]

Weird is the understatement!!!!! What a year, and it isn't near over yet! It started out cold, windy and dry this spring. Then just in the nick of time when you thought it could never rain, it rained three inches in ten days. Then it turned hot and dry for a month and it couldn't rain again. Then in the last 75 hours we have had 3 and a half inches of rain and it is still raining as I speak( I mean type lol). I had a decent lentil crop that I had just started to swath will be full of mold now. I just can't win, maybe should start drinking and stay drunk, then wouldn't have to worry about it. Not a chance tried that once,won't go back to that garbage, life is to short. But after thirty years of farming on my own, I sometimes wonder why I keep plugging away. I guess I must like it. When you think of it after all that I have went through anything is possible in this country. Sorry that I bugged everybody with my problems but feel better about things now. The one good thing that I have found out is that the roof doesn't leak. Always have to look at the bright side, my mother's old saying.

[rookie]

My old saying to get through those crappy days " sometimes chicken, sometimes feathers..."

[edbaker]

Hicarebear300,

Bitch if you feel like it. We can listen. It's better than eating it - gives one ulcers.

While I was a bit too young for the army in W.W.II, they used to say that while the soldiers were bitching, things were O.K.

When there hadn't been any bitching for a while - look out!

The barnyard by-product was about to hit the fan, big time.

[Deb]

Global warming equals climate change equals unpredictable weather extremes!

[carebear300]

Deb I am concerned with the pollution that has been going on in this world and do believe that it has to be stopped one way or the other. The trouble will be who will suffer the most in the meantime. I think here again the farmer will be the only one that is not able to pass on his extra costs associated with this. If our neighbours to the south do not comply like we do then the canadian farmer will be at a disadvantage even more so. I have one more sort of somewhat relevant information for everybody to think about. I think that I recall reading years ago about the Vikings settling in Greenland, much before they did the north america thing. While in Greenland they were able to raise livestock because of the large hay meadows that abounded in the country. Then the ice age came and no more livestock production. Is there any chance that we haven't kept records long enough to know what is normal and what is abnormal? Could there be such a thing that the weather we are having is really just a normal cycle? Is it possible that the pollution isn't the major culprit in this scenario of fluctuating weather? I hope that somebody out there can clear up my uncertainty.

[Deb]

It is true that there have been many ice ages here, and the last one that covered about all of Canada was between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago. It was one of those brief periods of cold which gave way 12,000 years ago to the interglacial period of warmth in which we live, which is getting really hot, really fast.

Carbon, methane, water vapour and some other chemical compounds hold the solar heat in the atmosphere. Scientists have been measuring the carbon content for decades and get their earlier data from gas frozen in glaciers, etc. The levels of carbon dioxide have risen quickly since the 1800 when the industrial age began and we started seriously using the carbon stored underground (coal, oil, gas)to fuel our industries and homes. In fact the temperature has risen so quickly that nature's organisms have not been able to adapt quickly enough. I have the recent publication of "Climate Change Impacts on the United States" from Cambridge and it says the average annual temperature in the US has risen by almost 1 degree F (or 0.6 degree C). Precipitation has increased nationally by 5 to 10%, mostly due to increases in heavy downpours (read floods!).

According to the scientists who spend their lives studying global warming, the temperature in the States will rise by about 5-9 degrees F (3-5 degrees C) on average in the next 100 years. The temperature in the last ice age was only 5 degrees C lower that today, so you can see how hot "warming" will get. I wish I could show you the graphs in this book. It is amazing to see how fast the levels of carbon dioxide and the temperature are rising in tandem. The scenario I mentioned is what will happen if nothing is done to slow our consumption of carbon fuels like coal, oil and gas which once lay beneath the earth holding carbon out of the atmosphere. We've opened this "Pandora's Box" of carbon-laidened fossil fuel for two hundred years and brought trillions of tons of carbon up into the atmosphere where it now acts as a powerful Greenhouse Gas. It would have been better to let things lie unerground.

The US did sign the original Kyoto treaty years ago and Bush (the oilman, as are most of his people) reneged. California is doing its own thing and promoting hybrid and solar cars like crazy. The rest of the world is busy finding ways to reduce our addiction to fossil fuel, too. There are dinosaurs and they live in Washington and Alberta (land of fossils and fossil fuel). I forget the other questions you had but I hope this answers most of them.

[carebear300]

Thanks Deb!!!!!!!