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Subject: [IASCOTT] Changes in Climate - 1910 Book
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 15:04:16 EST

CHANGES IN CLIMATE

Mr. Sherier has consented to allow the addition of a paper read by him before
the Contemporary Club February 25, 1909.  It deals with the most useful
conversational topic in a manner at once scientific and colloquial.  The
paper was greatly enjoyed by the club and is now given wider reading:

"What has become of our old-fashioned winters?  Why do we no longer have the
waist-deep snows that covered the ground for months at a time a generation
ago, while unbroken periods of zero weather prevailed for several weeks
during each cold season?"

The representative of the Weather Bureau on duty at a northern station is
asked these and similar questions so often that sometimes he is half inclined
to wonder whether, after all, his records have deceived him and the climate
is really undergoing some change.  Along the south Atlantic and Gulf coasts,
however, one may hear it just as positively asserted that the winters are
becoming more severe; and, as proof of the correctness of this statement, it
may be pointed out, for example, that orange trees which are said to have
flourished formerly along the streets of Savannah, Ga., have been killed by
the low temperatures of the last thirty or forty years and few are now to be
found north of the Florida line.  It does not seem possible that a gradual
lowering of the temperature is taking place in the South and that, at the
same time, the northern winters are growing milder.  Upon looking over the
great amount of data that has been collected by the U. S. Weather Bureau and
by foreign meteorologists, the student can find little to sustain this
general impression that a permanent change in climate if taking place.
 Evidently the casual observer is at fault.

Those who have made an exhaustive study of climatology now generally agree
that, in most cases, the belief in a climatic change is tracable to the
tendency of the memory to dwell upon those events that produce the greatest
impression at the time of occurrence, to the exclusion of intervening
happenings of minor importance.  All of the cold winters, hot summers and
deep snows of a life time are recalled in porportion to their departures from
the averages for the place under  consideration, or according to the
attention these phenomena attracted when they were observed.  In reviewing
the weather of a generation, the most notable events merge, as one authority
states, in much the same way as do the telegraph poles in a railway
perspective.  The greater the period of time that is looked back over, the
nearer the deep snows and marked cold waves appear to be, just as the poles
seem to form a high fence at the point where the rails apparently come
together.


Debbie Clough Gerischer
Iowa Gen Web, Assistant CC, Scott County
<A HREF="http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/">http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/</A>;
IAGENWEB: Special History Project:
http://iagenweb.org/history/index.htm
Gerischer Family Web Site:
<A HREF="http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/">http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/</A>;

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