This is the time of year I just turn off the local weather stations. I just can’t stand all the political correctness.
No, it’s not a liberal vs. conservative issues, or even Democrat vs. Republican. The kind of PC speech I’m talking about in the Kansas City TV market involves snow. And cold. And winter weather.
Here it is in a nutshell: Warm weather good. Cold weather bad. Snow very bad.
Sure, you may get the occasional forecaster who grudgingly allows that there should be a little snow. At Christmas. “For the kids.” Once in a while maybe someone will say that they miss the wintertime. But then the other anchor will quickly step in and get the last word about the badness of snow, perhaps adding how dangerous and injurious winter storms can be.
It’s too bad. Because in being so politically correct, our local weather forecasters are missing an opportunity to show people why their job matters, and how the weather impacts us all, directly and indirectly.
From the Kansas City TV weather perspective, this winter has been GREAT! Only the tiniest hint of snow. Temperatures in the 50s in January, even.
And I won’t lie–I did enjoy the lower-than-average heating bill that came yesterday. But from a gardening perspective, warm winters are not such happy news. The plants and insects that live in our latitude have evolved for and expect winter. When we get spring temperatures in January, it sets the stage for a lot of heartache.
Fruit trees come to mind first. Keep the temperature high for long enough–and right now we’ve had a lot of 50s and some 60s punctuated only briefly by seasonable 30s–and you get premature buds. Unfortunately, we’ve lived here long enough to have seen some other Januaries where people wandered outside in shorts, and we know where it leads. No spring here ever starts in January. In March, when we expect it to be warmer, we’ll have a string of cold that kills all those early buds. And all hope of apples, cherries, pears, etc. for 2012 will be lost.
“A green Christmas, a white Easter,” as the saying goes.
Then, there are the bugs. Insect life cycles often include a dormant period to coincide with winter temperatures and lack of food. If we have spring all winter, that can mess things up. And if there’s one more thing I don’t need in the garden, it’s an unbalance in the harmful vs the beneficial insects. Or even an invasion from who-know-what-kind-of southern insects that usually can’t survive here.
Even a little snow cover can sometimes act as insulation against a brutal cold snap later on.
Our deck last year. Let we forget.
La Nina gets a lot of the blame for this year’s warm winter (as well as a drought in the Southwest). From the looks of it, La Nina is on its way out of here by early spring. And some colder weather is supposed to be on the way sooner, but not until Thursday. So there’s hope for all us un-PC winter lovers.
Posted by: Roxie
