When is Everyone Going to Stop Raving About The Weather?

I've HAD it with people blithely exulting, "Beautiful day!"

It's March the 20th, for heaven's sake. I shouldn't be going to my physical therapy sessions in light shorts and a lighter blouse, because my regular exercise clothes are too hot.

Not that long ago, New Jersey's mid-March norm  -especially St. Patrick's Day- was a humdinger of a snowstorm.

There shouldn't be great egrets calmly feeding alongside the thousands of snow geese down at Brigantine Wildlife Refuge.

People shouldn't be calling this the "interface betweens spring and summer" when it isn't even spring.

It's way too early for crocus to have 'gone by' in sweltering heat.

White daffodils do not open at the same time as the yellow;  none of them should be out in the middle of March.

Forsythia doesn't go from bud to rampant flowers all in one day.

Every flowering tree in town shouldn't be blooming at the same time -- for a hundred reasons, only some of them aesthetic.  The flowers pf 2012 will roast instead of freezing.  Worse, they'll fall before the arrival of pollinators.  No pollinators -- no fruit.

Birds migrate by photo-period (length of sunlight in a day).  Their heroic flights are designed to bring them here when appropriate plants and insects are ready to feed them.  What will February and March heat have wrought with avian courtship, nesting, feeding of young and successful fledging?

You don't need me to tell you how odd this March is, to say nothing of the February immediately before it. 

Maybe you do need me to remind you, however, that its being nearly 80 in March bodes ill:

for glaciers, many of which are birthing internal rivers of ice-melt

for ice caps

for adult polar bears struggling to swim from floe to floe, needing floes to birth young

for changes in ocean salinity

for changes, therefore, in depth and energy of currents, especially the Gulf Stream

for sea level rise all over the world

for cool-weather crops such as lettuce, spinach and arugula

for orchards and cranberry bogs, blossoms erupting weeks pollinators can work their magic

and, above all, consider what these temperatures reveal about what we can expect of August

local state and federal governments have taught us to use the verb 'believe' concerning climate change

these temperatures reveal the truth

The Weather Channel increasingly re-runs tornado and flood sagas, determined to portray Nature as enemy

I was in high school when the Pogo comic strip said it for all time:  "We have met the enemy and he is us."

People far more renowned than I have warned, in the previous century, that our addiction to oil and all that it powers could activate some terrible (in the biblical sense) 'switch' where climate is concerned.   

2012's February and March reveal the folly of viewing 'the tipping point' as a future event. 

This is the real March madness.