except that it's so gorgeous out this week.

i got some sleep this morning, and i think i needed that.

i'm going to slow it down a little, but i don't want to waste the weather. it's not a predictive statement, but, statistical norms being what they are, it seems more likely than not that the second half of summer will balance out the first; otherwise, this is going to be a scorching summer.

does any of this have to do with the sun?

well, we've seen some signs of the magnetic reversal that these solar cycles are really about, and that i keep pointing out is really what i'm talking about. and, the shift in the jet stream that is responsible for this heat is consistent with what we expect to see with a more active sun. however, the model that suggests that colder temperatures over landmasses in the northern hemisphere are correlated with lower sunspot activity (due to the effects of the fields created by the sunspots on jetstream activity) also suggests a fair amount of variability and that, due to the nature of what a jetstream is, a cold area over one part of the hemisphere will generally be offset by a warmer spell in another. so, you don't have this iron law that says "if low sunspot then cold in canada and russia", but rather a tendency for that particular pattern to be dominant over other weather events (like hot air masses moving north) when the sun is in that configuration.

the reality is that we haven't seen any actual substantive solar activity yet, just some burps. but, i feel we should be finding ways to measure the effect of the sun's magnetic field, itself, regardless. we might find out in the end that the sunspots are an effect of the correlation, rather than the cause of them. so, maybe we've flipped over but can't see it yet, and we're already into the stretch of warmer years, where the habitable part of canada escapes this protective bubble that's shielded it from the most dramatic effects of the warming.

or, maybe it hasn't flipped over, and it's just variation. and, maybe the polar vortex has suffered a devastating blow, in the face of global warming.

what i'm concerned about is not wasting the heat, just right now.