Dallas Ice Dome; Is There Winter Anymore?

Dallas, TX, home of the Super Bowl this weekend, and home of the avalanche roof over the stadium.  Did you watch the video of the avalanche?  Maybe they should rename the stadium or the bowl as the Avalanche Stadium.  It’s just another sign, this frigid winter, that it is all Green Bay, the Packer’s Stadium and not Cowboys Stadium!  Go Packers!  I was glad to see all legacy teams in the championship games this year and would have been happy with any of the four final teams in the Super Bowl.

Back to the weather.  I have really been stunned by how the weather and news media represented this recent storm, as if nothing like it had ever been seen before.  We went through a period of time when winters were very light, with few blizzards, and this has caused our often short-memoried citizens to completely forget reality.  Weren’t we supposed to have record hurricanes this last season?

In the 1980’s, the last decade with real winters, it was common to drive on snow-packed or icy roads.  18-Wheelers carried chains on racks under the trailers so they could put on the chains when snow became too packed or there were icy conditions which required them.  People kept candles, snacks, water, and pocket heaters in their cars and trucks, just in case.  Remember snow tires?  Remember studded tires?  They weren’t just for Alaska, North Dakota, and Montana, we used them in much of the northern half of the country prior to the “global warming” of the 90’s and 00’s.  Ski areas didn’t make their own snow back then, not just because of the technology, but because there was no reason for it, since it snowed.

We are snowed by our own short-mindedness.  There are not enough lessons in a modestly educated life span to allow for people to know what to do as the longer-term cycles of planetary change take place.  We are fooled into believing nonsense like global warming, even as we know that such things have happened repeatedly over time.  We are fooled into believing nonsense like “personal carbon footprint” is destructive and yet the evidence of the falseness of the presumption occurs frequently enough as volcanos erupt more toxic waste into the atmosphere than all of humanity combined.

We have forgotten that it snows, even in Dallas.  The engineers who designed Cowboys Stadium should have known to prepare for potential heavy snows.  It’s easy to forget the power of weather.  If we know that the only manmade object visible from space is the Great Wall of China, then we should realize how much more powerful the planet is.

How should we have known all this history of previous hot and cold climate changes, the power of weather, and how to be ready?  What’s missing in our thinking, in our education system, which allows us to remember only the last 10 years or less?

No wonder we end up with the political leadership we have, since we can’t seem to remember the ones we had before.  It’s snowing.  It still snows.  You have to think long-term enough to weather the storms.