Frosty the ... sun man?

About this time of the year, by now we would have had quite a few frosty nights and mornings.  And dense fog.  My first November here fifteen years ago, the temperature one night dipped down to 16 degrees.  Thanksgiving days have always involved chattering teeth and icy proximities.

This past November has been awesome.  As we walked up to our friend's home for Thanksgiving, I joked that it is great to have Thanksgiving in the summer.

We are not the only ones to experience such above-normal temperature.

Nearly every corner of the country is warmer than normal.

How much warmer?

Temperatures in the Rockies, for example, are more typical of mid-June than late-November. On Monday, Denver reached 81 degrees—some 34 degrees above normal and warmer than Los Angeles, Houston, or Tampa, Florida—the warmest temperature ever recorded there during the month of November. On the same day, it was so unusually warm in Salt Lake City that the city broke its record high—at 2:20 a.m. Tucson, Arizona, set record highs all four days of the long Thanksgiving weekend, peaking at 92 degrees on Sunday—the highest reading ever measured there so late in the year.

No wonder the camelia that blooms in late fall has been going strong this year.  The flowers keep on coming, and we are already into December!

The warm weather isn't just confined to the U.S. Parts of Australia, China, and the Arctic are all experiencing similarly intense heat waves. In Greenland, temperatures on Thursday are a whopping 36 degrees above normal.

Wait, what?  36 degrees above normal?

Why are the seasons becoming so confusing?

There's some science to what's happening here. Human-caused climate change is shrinking the duration of winter around the world, with cold days arriving later in the fall and not persisting as long during early spring. Winter is the fastest-warming season for most of the U.S. in part because, as snow packs shrink, darker surfaces like soil and plants are able to retain the sun's energy better.

What a scam.  Our president has assured us that climate change is a hoax.  If only he can get rid of all these fake news, so that we can all go about grabbing p*s in the warm December days!