Spero Consulting

It has been very cool and very rainy in West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia dur­ing the past few weeks, and the fore­cast calls for day-​time high tem­per­a­tures to remain in the sev­en­ties – with lows in the 50s – for the next week or so. It’s early July near the 40^th par­al­lel, and nearly all the win­dows are closed (and we are at an alti­tude of about 1,200 ft, not 12,000).

For nearly three months we’ve been ther­mally com­fort­able but have used nei­ther the heat nor the air con­di­tion­ing at world head­quar­ters, which makes us a par­tic­u­larly green con­sult­ing firm.

We did heat the pool on one occa­sion in early June – antic­i­pat­ing that with a solar cover we would be able to main­tain a com­fort­able tem­per­a­ture through­out the sum­mer. Alas, we we’ve been sorely dis­ap­pointed. The lack of sun­light and the cold rain have com­bined to decrease the pool tem­per­a­ture about ten degrees from our com­fort zone ( in the high 80’s). Yes, we under­stand that such incon­ve­nience is minor and is far to the left in the range of human suf­fer­ing, but, regard­less, the water is cold.

How­ever, except for one fac­tor that we men­tion below, we’re not really com­plain­ing about the weather. Instead, we find this sum­mer – like last sum­mer – to be one more sea­son when we can say, “Thank God for global warm­ing. Can you imag­ine how cold it would be with­out it.”

Yes, we’ve heard that global warm­ing can make things colder so that now colder weather than “nor­mal” pro­vides more evi­dence of global warm­ing, but as we’ve men­tioned in the past, we’d like cli­ma­tol­o­gists to under­stand the affects of both short-​term and long-​terms shifts (cycles) in the earth’s axis – in the range of 17 to 22 degrees – before they out­law our Sub­ur­ban and attempt to reduce our car­bon buttprint. (Al Gore’s is much, much big­ger than ours.)

More­over, as we wrote last autumn in Global Warm­ing and the Mort­gage Cri­sis, there are no good mod­els; so, indi­vid­u­als agree to use mod­els already in use (as a val­i­da­tion for their choice). It’s like the old joke about the drunk look­ing for his keys under the street light. Did he lose them there? No, but it is the eas­i­est place to search.

So, whether it’s silly cli­mate “research” or silly asset-​backed “research” or the ine­bri­ated impulses of a drunk, huge dis­crep­an­cies are ignored when they don’t fit with well-​known, (relatively-​easily) cal­cu­la­ble mod­els. (That is the cal­cu­la­tion with­out thought at which we sneer and attempt to avoid in our own life and engage­ments.) New vis­i­tors can search the archives for our many posts on that topic, par­tic­u­larly as it per­tains to risk management.

We do find it amaz­ing that for all of the increases in knowl­edge and tech­nol­ogy through­out his­tory, humans – espe­cially the prac­ti­tion­ers of such sci­ence – remain such a super­sti­tious and inse­cure lot. But note, that’s not a com­plaint; it’s an oppor­tu­nity to gen­er­ate revenue.

Our only weather-​related com­plaint is minor: when liv­ing here, it is usu­ally dif­fi­cult to deter­mine the longest day of the year. The weeks around the sum­mer sol­stice seem to coin­cide with the rainy sea­son, and because of the near omnipresent cloud cover, it can often get dark an hour or so before the (tech­ni­cal) sun­set. So, other than the chirp­ing birds wak­ing us in the very early morn­ing, the height of sum­mer seems no dif­fer­ent than early May.