Stan Geiger

Global Warming! Run for Your Lives!!

Don’t you love a white Christmas? It doesn’t happen very often around these parts. I’ve lived in Tulsa for 50 years. I’m sure I could count the number of white Christmases I’ve experienced on one hand. So it’s kind of cool to look at the winter wonderland that exists on this Christmas Day.

Of course, what you like is those big, pretty, snowflakes that pile up on roofs, trees and lawns while leaving the concrete alone. Last night, well, it kind of looked like Christmas in Greenland. Dude!

Oklahomans got a piece of a beastly storm that hit many. Oklahoma City, they say, got a record snowfall---not for the date but for all time.

A few days back, it was the heavily-populated northeast that was getting pounded by record snows. I found it ironic and amusing that the president flew home into that storm after leaving a global warming conference.

A couple of days back, I saw a national news report about people being stranded in the Chunnel because it was so cold the electric train engines froze. Old fashioned diesel engines were brought in to save the day.

Winter is just getting started, folks. I’m thinkin’ those global warming scientists that are growing fat on government grant money should go out and buy themselves Hummers before we all freeze to death.

I watch the local weather on most days. Records highs and lows for particular dates are noted daily. I notice a lot of record lows from the 1920s that are still standing. It seems the ‘20s was a cold decade around here. I remember seeing one record that grabbed my attention a couple of years ago. My mom was born, hereabouts, on May 15, 1924. I think it was a week or so after she was born that the temperature dropped into the low 40s.

I asked mom if she remembered. Oddly, she said no.

The 1930s followed the 1920s. I know! My grasp of historical sequence is simply amazing! But don’t let my greatness throw you off the rails.

The ‘30s was a very hot decade around here. If I’m not mistaken, 1936 is the hottest year on record for Oklahoma. It also quit raining for, like, 10 years. The world was barely industrialized at the time. Nonetheless, if Al Gore had been around in those days, he probably could’ve won himself a Noble Prize and become a multimillionaire screaming about manmade pollution and all.

If I’m not mistaken, again, 1980 is the second-hottest year on record in Oklahoma. I remember that one. I think there were some 60 days during that summer that topped 100 degrees. Rain was nonexistent. I was working on the golf course at Meadowbrook Country Club. Our ponds dried up. We were left to watering only greens and tees. By the end of the summer, the course was fried. I was fried as well.

I was happy to end my stint in Meadowbrook’s employ for a time and head back to Stillwater for some R&E (rest and education). When October rolled around temps were still topping 90. I was left to wonder if fall would ever come.

That year was in contrast to previous years. My stints of ’76-‘77 and ’77-78 were much different. They were cold. It seems it snowed or sleeted or something all through January and February of both those stints. In addition, Stillwater, believe me, is no place to be when winter’s cold north winds are blowing. I still recall walking OSU’s campus in the face of winter. Walking along with a building for a shield was fine. But when you walked into an urban canyon you found yourself taking a couple of steps sideways and wondering where the skin on your face went.

I chuckled a while back when I heard a football announcer talking about a game in Lubbock, Texas and how windy it was on that day. He said a local ol’ boy told him that when the wind started blowing in Lubbock there was little to get in the way but barbed wire. Stillwater is much the same.

My senior year in high school was little different. There is a picture in my yearbook showing an ice-covered landscape. And I certainly recall many a day when I ran from my car to the inviting doors of old Central High, beyond which I knew laid the warmth of the steam-radiator-heated hallways. It always felt good when I got there.

There was a particular day, however. I think it was December 5, 1975. I had been involved in a basketball practice late in the day. The practice took place in the basement of old Central High. Though in the basement, I could hear hail pounding the outdoors. After practice, I went outside to wait for my mom to come by and give me a ride home. It was strangely warm and humid. Little did I know a tornado was ripping through Catoosa at about that same time.

Putting the anomaly of 1980 aside, the ‘80s present some memories of tough winters. I recall tough winters all through the decade, in fact.

I think it was about this time in 1985 when a devastating ice storm hit town. Power outages were rampant. I went to visit mom, in the old neighborhood. It looked like Patton’s tanks had rolled through. Tree limbs, and/or trees, littered the streets. History repeated itself a couple of years ago.

I bought a house in Broken Arrow in the summer of 1986. I figured I would plant a few flowers when the following spring rolled around. I think I planted in late March. Sometime around the first of April, a cold front showed up. Temperatures dropped to 22 degrees one night. So ended my first planting of the spring.

And yet, watching the news over the past few days, I’ve seen reports of record high temps for this time in 1989. There were, apparently, a series of days in which temps topped 70 degrees.

I was working at Tulsa Community College in the mid ‘90s. It was in March of either 1994 or 1995 that I was walking from my truck to the building and noticed the heat. The temperature on that day reached, as I recall, 94. Dude, it was March!

General Omar Bradley wrote a book about his experiences during WWII. I read that book. One of the great complaints from generals in Europe was the weather. It seems that anytime an offensive got underway weather became an issue.

The Nazis were stuffed in their first blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. Why? Well, winter played a major roll. After the Allies landed in the west, their move eastward was constantly hampered by mud.

So, what’s my point?

My point is weather has always been weird. Weather does strange stuff; weather will continue to do strange stuff. That’s just the way it rolls. To kneejerk into spending billions and changing social policies because of a temporal shift in the weather is just plain stupid.

While hanging around at TCC, I took a class in meteorology taught by a fellow named Don Woods. If you are unfamiliar with the name, Don was a longtime weatherdude at KTUL. He had a little cartoon character he called “Gusty.” A Gusty, so I understand, hangs in the Smithsonian. I worked the poor man silly, forcing him to draw me Gusty cartoons. I put his left arm in an arm-bar and made him use his right arm to draw me a Gusty every night.

Actually, though I did overwork him, Don was very gracious. A number of his Gusty drawings are now framed and hanging in the homes of some of my relatives.

Academically, the class, though quite basic, was informative. I enjoyed it. Of the things mentioned in the class that has stuck with me is water. Water is the only substance found on this planet that naturally exists in gas, liquid and solid forms.

Water is the source of natural life. We currently have a bunch of NASA scientists spending a fortune in pubic money trying to find water on the moon or on Mars. They want to find water so they can disprove the existence of God. They want to prove life developed as a happenstance. Water found in the outer regions might help them do that.

Get over yourselves, ye men and women of great. You will never be able to disprove God. Try ‘til ya die; it ain’t gonna happen.

Anyway, back at the ranch, let’s talk water.

I’m no scientist. I’m no scientist by a damn sight. But Don said when water moves from one state to the other it releases or gathers heat energy from the atmosphere. When water moves from vapor to liquid or solid, molecules slow down and heat energy is released into the atmosphere. When water moves from liquid or solid to vapor, molecules speed up and heat energy from the atmosphere is absorbed.

If Earth gets too cold, water will regulate. If Earth gets too hot, water will regulate. Earth can’t get too hot or too cold because water will regulate. So runs God's system.

God built this world. This world will not cease unless God says it ceases. That’s the name of that tune.

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