I remember one night we had to push my car from the parking lot into a back garage at WGN to allow it to warm up. As you walk to it in this bitter cold, you’d hear cracking buildings and trees. You would leave work at night, and I can recall leaving WGN, and go out to a car that would not start. I really wonder how the population today would handle it. I’ll tell you, it’s indescribable these cold surges. So I’ve been here in the Midwest - except for a stint down in Jacksonville, Florida - since. I went to school up in Madison at the University of Wisconsin. I was born in Pittsburgh, my dad worked in New York City for 13 years, then we moved out to Aurora in 1965. That was my first year working in media in Chicago. You couldn’t drive down a side street here in town and they were running out of places to put the snow. Oh my gosh - you realize what a different world we’re in today.įor people who’ve moved here since, what was it like to live in Chicago during the 1979 snowstorm? And, I’ll tell you, you hark back to those bitterly cold episodes in January of 19. So, these extremes that we are seeing are part of this changing climate regime that we’re in. And that’s the same area that was up over 100 degrees two summers ago, in 2021. I mean, they had a temperature over the weekend of 80 below zero in Siberia, which broke a record there. Climate change is alive, well and ongoing as with planetary warming and you can still get cold and snow during planetary warming - it’s just that you get it less frequently over less area. We don’t get that anymore.Ī single cold spell or any weather event doesn’t prove or disprove climate change. We’d have these incredible snowstorms and then they’d be followed by these sieges of subzero weather. I don’t know if you remember the 1970s, but those winters were barbaric. Last time I looked, our winters are running more than 3 degrees on average warmer than the winters of the ’70s, which is a big change. While the decade of the 1970s was the coldest and snowiest on record, we have warmed precipitously since then. If you don’t believe climate change is at work, just look at what’s happened to the character of our winters around here.
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