And it's partly my fault....You see, we're having the strangest winter here. It's about 10C warmer than it usually is, and should be, in January. We're getting plenty of fog and a little rain, and it's supposedly the "dry season". Our wet season is summer, when it's hot hot hot. Our dry season is winter, when it's cool and arid. That's the subtropics. That WAS the subtropics. As we force-feed warming gases to our atmosphere, we start meltin' things. Right now, we're melting the Arctic most of all. I've been up there, and I can tell you, it's getting weird up there.
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| Arctic Hare, Feeling Weird (MR 2011) |
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Bizarre, contorted loops in the jet stream are to blame for the unreasonable cold in parts of the world that should be warmer, and the summery warmth here. The Wunderblog has a post on it today:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html
Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in the US thinks that the melting Arctic fuels these bizarre jet stream loops. As they get warmer at the North Pole, we get loopier down here.... So I'm running on the beach without a jacket in January....
And flowers that shouldn't even be in bud yet are nearly finished for the spring!
My Lithops really don't know what to think, and are going dormant, blooming, and showing their new leaf pairs, all at once. Awkward. Even the incredibly tough and resilient Mother of Millions is blooming early.
What a mess! Are the plants in your part of the world a bit out of sync, also??
The weather is totally messed up. You're getting summer weather and we're getting unusually cold, sunny weather, with frost that stays on the ground all day. It should be cool and rainy right now.
ReplyDeleteIt is truly messed up over large areas of the planet right now!
DeleteI love your "Arctic Hare, Feeling Weird". I feel like that about our weather but I can't complain about this cold and sunny stuff in the PNW. We really needed a break from the rain. We had about 12 extra inches in 2012. I've never seen so many different kinds of mushrooms. Gail
ReplyDeleteLots of rain and lots of fungi! I hope the mushrooms, at least some of them, were the edible kind.
DeleteThis last one pic is of a plant called Kalanchoe daigremontiana (Bryophyllum daigremontianum) with medicinal use ?)
ReplyDeleteYou are quite right! This plant is incredibly toxic to the animals that try to graze on it; causes cardiac arrest. However, clever scientists have isolated some compounds from it that seem to have sedative and cardiac effects. The compounds are called bufadienolides, but don't ask me how to pronounce that!
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