Clark's Spot

Greetings and Happy Holidays,

Allow me to start with an explanation and apology. The tongue-in-cheek Christmas letter was long-penned by my better half. I know it was well-received by many as a way to lighten the mood of a stressful holiday season. I’m willing to give it a good attempt this year, although I’m sure that – much like her culinary skills – I won’t match up as her equal.

While 2011 was a year of just getting to the end, 2012 was the year we surveyed the wreckage.

The first major project for the house became a new heat source. While coal stoves are common in Northeastern Pennsylvania, I grew up in a house with geothermal – or as some people prefer to call it – magic. In brief, heat from several hundred feet below my back yard heats my house. (There’s physics and chemistry involved too, but that’s a little dense for Christmas unless we’re talking about the effects of gravity on Christmas trees and what to mix with your eggnog.)

When it came time to drill the well for my heat source, the drillers discovered an underground spring in my backyard. In the words of one neighbor, the 40-foot spray made it look like they struck oil. The drill rig sat in the backyard for more than a week, and other neighbors began to ask whether my geothermal was really an attempt to drill for natural gas. The project was also delayed while I demolished the coal bin in my basement after the help of family and friends in claiming and moving the coal.

Speaking of wreckage and landscaping, another year means another tree lost in the front yard to a hurricane. While the 2011 hurricane victim fell toward the house and hung suspended by dead branches of two other trees, the 2012 casualty fell toward the line that provides electricity to my house. I wasn’t surprised to lose power in the storm, but I was a bit shocked to see the very low hanging wire that I had to step over the next morning on my way to start the generator.

I’ve returned to the water for the first time since I was a teenager, this time competing in a kayak race down the Lackawanna River. The Lackawanna, not normally a large river, was particularly shallow that weekend. I spent more time in the river than in the kayak, and it had nothing to do with my ability to stay afloat. In fact, I never fell out without meaning to, and demonstrated my skills at water navigation by going through the rough parts, including a nice 5 foot drop over some rocks, backwards. Some of the people watching thought it clearly showed that I couldn’t control my kayak, but I knew I was just showing off for the crowd.

Finally, the house has been dubbed the beach house by a number of friends. While that elicits strange looks in Scranton, the repeated hurricanes, backyard spring, and general ambiance and decor on the sun porch definitely resemble a warmer locale with white sand and not the white powder that may have fallen since this was mailed.

Best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2013, and I hope this letter brings a smile to your face or happy memories of a better author. I promise to try to do better next year.

I’m not a golfer, but here’s something new I’m trying out. A few links for the weekend reading.

Bad customer service at Target. (I walked down to the aisle in time to catch the stock boy take the sale sign down. He told me he took it down. Not shopping there anymore.

What’s up with the Haiti seeds in Farmville?

You’ll have a long walk if you go to the Penn State game.

A worthwhile experiment – if you can remember to do it for a full month.

Pennsylvania’s new budget cuts funds for environmental projects.

Last year, we borrowed my father-in-law’s second grill. We put it to use and ended up grilling more than 60 times during the year. This year, we set out to grill out at least 72 times.

The only dry part of the Memorial Weekend cook-out was the grill lighting.

This summer has been particularly moist. It’s been cloudy and wet – half the days in July had rain. But my wife and I have done a good job sneaking in meals at the grill. It’s been a few more lunches than expected (and even breakfast one time). Our big Memorial Day bash was drenched – the out-of-town guests still said they had fun. We’ve dodged rain drops to grill and to pick and choose the days and meals we cook outside.

Earlier today, we grilled out for the 60th time this year. We’ve done the classics – burgers and hot dogs, steak, and chicken. We’ve grilled brats, salmon, tilapia, and pork chops. We’ve even grilled bacon and sausage (but not the famous explosion). And we’ve grilled countless vegetables as sides to almost all of these meals.

Summer is winding down. Fall weather is great – but it isn’t always the best for grilling. Grad classes start a little more than a week from now. That will bring shifts in our work and responsibilities. My wife and I have a busy few months planned – organizing and combining books and movies, scanning photographs, wrestling with boxes of files from one of the community groups I’m involved with. There’s also a handful of weekend trips – weddings and orchard visits among them – scheduled.

Here’s looking forward to at least a dozen more times over the grill.

I’ve been reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Tom Friedman. He argues that demographics and globalization risk making climate change more dramatic than earlier projected. He also expands climate change to be more than Global Warming. He terms it “Global Weirding” and writes that the impact varies from place to place. Some areas have higher temperatures while others have colder weather. Certain months are impacted more than others. Sometimes the result is more rain – other places report dryer conditions.

But global warming is how everyone thinks of climate change so Friedman writes about a series of interviews where his subjects talk about noticing warmer weather. Western ranchers talk about less snow remaining on mountain tops. Another person speaks about the number of record highs and lows set across the country each week. That left me wondering whether I could find any change in weather in my area simply by looking at record highs and lows and when they were set.

I checked the National Weather Service’s repository of record highs and lows for the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area – my current home. I used the tables from 1955 to present because they’re pulled from a consistent place (the airport) rather than the general area. I typed the date, record high (“maximum high”) and corresponding year, and record low (“minimum low”) and corresponding year into an Excel spreadsheet. It’s unfortunate that the records only cover 54 years, but they’re taken from a consistent area, which was more important to me than whether they covered 100 years worth of temperatures.

Because I wasn’t counting leap day, I had 365 days. The time period covered 54 years. Simple math says that if there are 365 record highs and 365 record lows, I should be able to expect about 7 record highs and 7 record lows each year.

If this covered two years – 1955 and 1956 – I’d expect half of the highs to be from 1955 and the other half to be from 1956. If it covered five years – 1955 to 1959, I’d expect 20 percent of the highs (73) to come from each year. Because I have 54 years, I expected 1.85 percent of the highs to have occurred in any one year. In a 365-day year, that’s 6.75 days. There were 365 lows as well – one for each day of the year. Odds say that another 6.75 lows – rounded to 7 – would set records each year.

I realize that some years just happen to be warmer or cooler than others, and so I wanted a way to lump years together. I decided to do it by decade. There were five years in the 1950s, nine years in the 2000s (the chart doesn’t cover 2009 temperatures), and 10 years for the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. So odds say that I should have 33 or 34 records from the 1950s, 60 or 61 records from the 200s and 67 or 68 records for the other decades. If my numbers were around there, we’d be setting roughly equal numbers of record highs and record lows each year – and you wouldn’t be able to track the weather getting warmer or colder.

I didn’t get those results.

As you can see, there were a lot more record high temperatures set more recently than record lows. In the 1990s and the 2000s, there were 77.8 percent more record highs set than record lows set. We were still setting record low temperatures, but we were setting new high temperatures much more often. While the 1990s represented 18.5 percent of the years in the study, 26 percent of the high temperatures occurred in that decade. The 2000s represented 16.7 percent of the years, and 21.9 percent of the high temperatures. The 1950s are 9.3 percent of the years in the study, and 5.5 percent of the high temperatures. That same decade has 15.3 percent of the record lows for the period.

We’re setting both new highs and new lows in each decade. But there highs are coming more frequently most recently. But how drastic is the change? It’s difficult to see because the 1950s and 2000s don’t have the same number of years included as the other decades. To have a better view of the trend, I divided the 54 years into nine groups of six years each: 1955-1960, 1961-1966, 1967-1972, 1973-1978, 1979-1984, 1985-1990, 1991-1996, 1997-2002, 2003-2008.

Odds should say that you should have roughly equal number of record highs and record lows set in each time period – just more than 40.5 each. (1.85 percent of the highs in each of the six years is 11.1 percent of the records, and 11.1 percent of the 365 days in a year is 40.5.) The final numbers didn’t match the odds. Remember, the number of records for both highs and lows should be right around 40.

I’ve been really surprised to see this result. I’ll take some time to look into individual months to see if any part of the year is more affected than another. But it turns out to have been pretty easy to chart the fact that’s it’s getting warmer in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We’re setting many more record highs than record lows.