I am proud to say that Burlington, Vermont is my home town. Why? For a lot of reasons. First of all I grew up here and it is a small city with a cosmopolitan feel, being close to Montreal, Boston, and even New York City. It has a deep, rich history that stretches back to the American revolution. It is a sister city and safe harbor for refugees from dozens of countries all over the world. It has amazing and varied architecture and talented and wonderful people who are politically active and concerned for the well-being of all. It is one of the healthiest cities in the U.S., sitting next to a beautiful lake, and minutes to the mountains, ski areas and great hiking. There are more reasons I love Burlington but I don’t want to make it sound TOO appealing! It will just be our little secret!

Church Street, presumably named for the Unitarian Church that guards the north end of the street, includes several blocks of shops and eateries and blocked off to vehicle traffic. Today the downtown was decked out in preparation for the annual Mardi Gras, sponsored by Magic Hat Brewery, a Burlington institution.

Living out west for a couple of years gave me an appreciation for the stunning architecture in Burlington. Seen here is the Abernathys building, which was a local department store back in the day when I was a boy. In my mind at least, it compares with some of the most beautiful old landmarks in the country.

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Image: glennfay36, flickr

The aging Nuke Plant Vermont Yankee needs to close before it implodes the Vermont economy and poses a real public health risk. We have written several blog posts about the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant, which has been in the news because of its maintenance record, issues with lying to the legislature, plus unsafe and expensive radioactive waste storage as well as other topics. The Vermont Legislature is now debating whether to extend the plants license past the 2012 expiration date and will likely vote on Wednesday, in a non-binding referendum on that fate. The local CBS WCAX News reported tonight that legislators are hearing from Vermonters with a 10 to 1 margin asking them to shut down the plant. We believe that the majority of Vermonters have the right idea, despite the fact that 30% of Vermont’s power comes from Vermont Yankee. Here’s why.

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Come On In, The Water’s Fine!

We notice the sun coming up earlier every day ad it even stays light ill almost 6 pm! Birds flocking and becoming more active are another sign that winter’s snow flurries, freezing temps and ice have nowhere to go but down hill soon, at least in the valleys. The mountains will have a snowpack for months!

One of the great advantages to living in western Vermont is enjoying views of the New York Adirondack Mountains. Here they are tentatively illuminated on a Saturday morning.

Along the edge of the New York side is a 200 foot cliff wall, known as “The Palisades” and home of eagles and towering over shipwrecks in the 200 foot deep water below. Here we see waterfalls frozen in time, for now. In the spring as we paddle our canoes and kayaks on the Vermont side we will see them and hear them spilling cold mountain water into the lake.

Near the mouth of the Otter Creek and historic “Fort Cassin” which, it turns out is not really a fort, sits Diamond Island, a small pair of diamond-shaped islands. You can see them almost in the center of the picture. It is very unusual for the lake to be open this time of year, especially in the narrow part, where it is only a mile or two across.

Throughout the winter, bays will freeze, then crack up in heavy rollers during a storm. Here we see a few ice chunks melting in a very cold, but still largely open lake. They remind me of stories I heard growing up, of ice fishermen getting caught stranded on drifting ice, away from would-be rescuers, never to be seen again.

A legendary stone house built in 1790, the Hawley House, serves as the anchor for a Vermont State Park, known as Kingsland Bay. It is a wonderful visit any day of the year. It is constructed of native Panton limestone.

There has been lots of controversy in the press lately about whether the extreme weather and snowstorms on the middle eastern seaboard are proof that global warming isn’t real. Here is a a short video with weather and climate experts explaining why the storms are happening. It shows an arctic air oscillation is unusual and is creating abnormally warm temperatures which are 10 – 15 degrees warmer than normal in northern Canada and other Arctic areas, as well as places like Melbourne Australia near the Antarctic. More record highs are being recorded worldwide as the Earth continues to warm, even though we may see cold regional weather.

We need to keep in mind that weather is the local or regional conditions while climate is the long-term average conditions. Be wary of those who claim that their particular local or regional weather is an indication of the global weather or climate!

Video: greenman3610, youtube

Ice is Cool

My friend who grew up in Pennsylvania used to ask “How is life in the great frozen north?” Much as I would laugh about this he had a point. Burlington IS a pretty frosty place after October. the ground freezes every winter. How deep the soil freezes depends on how close you are to the lake, if you have sun to warm, or snow to insulate the ground from inevitable frigid air temperatures. And of course it depends on how much polar air rolls down off the arctic and Canada.

This is not an exceptionally snowy or cold winter so far. That said, we did have the biggest snowfall of all time, but not much since then. We did have a frigid few weeks in December, but since the temperatures have been close to average. One thing is for certain, when you get into the woods you will find ledges and outcroppings on hillsides that collect ice from melting snow during the day then freeze at night. Over a few weeks or months, the ice builds up into some pretty cool formations (please excuse the pun)!

Hard to see in these pics but there are some shades of pastel golds, blues and greens from minerals in the rocks with copper, iron and other elements, imparting their brush strokes to the canvas in the waning afternoon light. The lichens and moss add an extra refreshing sight, with hope of more greens to come soon, don’t they?

Image: NASA

“The most pervasive impact of global temperature change will be to increase the chances of extreme events… heat waves, droughts.” “When the atmosphere warms, so does the temperature of the sea. As the seas warm, … hurricanes, typhoons… tornadoes, heavy winds, untimely frosts, cold spells- these can strike one part of the country while others bask in sunshine.” (pages 106-107, The Next 100 Years, 1990). These predictions were based on climate modeling from independent scientists in the 1980′s such as Syukuro Manabe from Princeton, Kerry Emanuel of MIT and climate expert Stephen Schneider,

All-time record snowfalls in Washington D.C., Burlington, Vermont, incredible rains on the west coast, record cold in Florida, droughts in some places, and polar ice melts are all extreme weather events. Yet this is a time when climate change skeptics are having a field day trying to convince people that their local cold weather can’t POSSIBLY be due to global warming. And no one, even the biggest climate change advocate, wants climate change to be true. My theory is that the American public, who now is beginning to believe that human-induced climate change is a hoax, is trying to will itself out of the reality.

The fact is, long before Al Gore polarized the country along political party lines on climate change with his Nobel Prize-winning video, An Inconvenient Truth the foremost independent climate scientists published juried papers describing data and computer models suggesting that carbon dioxide was producing accelerated warming worldwide. They also showed that the models predicted an increase in the El Nino phenomenon. El Nino of course is an abnormal heating of the surface of the Pacific Ocean, which in turn produces, large-scale rainfall on the west coast, abnormal snowstorms in some places, droughts in others, etc.

Scientists by nature are very conservative about going out on a limb and declaring causal links between events, for example, between humans actions and climate shifts. This has led some leaders and the public to believe that they are doubt their data is correct but this isn’t so. They are simply leaving the door open to the possibility that climate change might not be happening because they cannot prove it, no more than they can prove the theory of plate tectonics, but it is widely accepted to be true. The fact is, these scientists are leaving the door open a crack, because they are scientists- and that’s what scientists do. Since they are talking about unknown patterns in the future, they want to be extra careful. There is no hoax in the ice core record that dates back several hundred thousand years. The fact is, regardless of the bitter political battle over climate change now, there has been compelling scientific data that extreme weather is a pretty clear symptom of climate change.

Read interviews with independent scientists from back in the 1980′s long before the conjecture on climate change was removed from science and became a political battle, pick up a book called “The Next 100 Years” by Jonathan Weiner. Read the research and interviews for yourself from back in the day. It is not a gloom and doom prophecy. It is a book that unravels what the scientists were finding about changes in the atmosphere, the complexities of modeling and what their research and models showed. Let me know what you think after you read it!

There are plenty of people who have good reasons to want to convince you that climate change is not real and it is usually in their best financial interests. Hopefully before thinking people make up their minds, they will stop listening to economists, physicists and politicians and instead learn as much as they can about ecosystems, weather and climate from unbiased science sources such as NASA and NOAA before jumping to conclusions. The stakes are too high to get shookered by vested interests.

Up here in the north country cabin fever sets in this time of year real bad. Since late November you have endured a month of waning daylight until winter solstice, then over a month of still short days and long, cold nights. At this point on the calendar people begin to notice it getting light by 6:30 am and staying light until 5:30 pm! I know this sounds like a small victory for anyone living south of the Mason-Dixon line, but for us, more light opens the door to the possibility that we MIGHT be able to enjoy long days in the warm sun soon. How do we keep hope alive?

One of the surest ways is to head out to brunch at a place like The Village Cup in Jericho and have a heart-warming feast. Even though the car thermometer says 5 it’s warm inside next to the pellet stove and at least it’s not -5. They have remodeled the old building to minimize environmental impact and save energy and 2.5 million gallons of water a year!

Next, we are off to downtownBurlington to check out August Firstan outstanding bakery and deli and buy a loaf of their artisan 7 grain bread. Hmmmmmmm. Very friendly and happy people here. Next stop?

The Architectural Salvage building antique shop almost next door on Main Street. These folks are the ultimate recyclers with all kinds of distinctive ‘formerly owned’ furnishings at very reasonable prices. I will return when I am ready to stock my vacation home (heh heh).

No trip to Burlington is complete for me without my pilgrimmage to the waterfront to absorb the raw beauty of wind, waves and mountains. This place is a spectacular, year-round, and today is no exception. It has warmed up to 19 with a stiff breeze off the lake but my heart is warm and the sun brightens my soul.

All photos glennfay49, flickr

Early in my career we used reel to reel tapes to show “movies”! How far we have come in 30 years. It seems now that technology is changing so fast that it is getting hard to predict what we will be doing in a few years. Streaming content instead of TV? Blue ray being replaced by something better? Our children will have even more adapting than we have, as technology changes faster and faster.

Here is an amazing video on the progression of information technology by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman. If you have your own children this is the world they will face.

What’s In A Name?

When Apple chose the name for it’s newest product, the iPad, what were they thinking? Did they want endless jokes about every permutation of pad in the world, as good publicity? Maybe so, if this hilarious MadTV video is any indication. More ironic is the fact that this skit was written and performed long before the iPad sprang to life! Go figure- only the marketing folks know for sure! What do you think bout the name? What do you think about this skit?

Video: ElCuCuy23, flickr