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Or, how a bitterly cold December may in fact be one of the warmest.

A lot of you may have noticed that the weather as of late has been a little bit...chaotic. With snow, ice, and just plain cold weather blanketing the entire United States, as well as other parts of the world.

Many climate skeptics has said that this strange phenomenon flies flat in the face of global warming/climate change science. It seems logical after all, how on earth could the earth be warming whenever it's so cold outside?

Whenever NASA released a report stating that this October was this hottest on record, only to find out that it was unusually cold around the world, this only gave the skeptics more fuel for their fire
...
I'm saying that this December could be the warmest.

I imagine most of you have noticed by now the blasts of cold Arctic air that have been blowing through the continental United States. Every time it comes through, everyone is shivering.

Well, I live south enough in the United States where there's a brief interval between these blasts, and I noticed something unusual.
We were getting 60 and 70 degree highs.

I observed this in three towns. Two were in New Mexico, Clovis and Roswell, both located on the high plains, where the winter highs are typically 30 or 40 on an ordinary day.
This time, I'm seeing 16 to 20 degree highs on one day, followed by 60 and 70 degree highs on the next.

I took the time to examine another town, one in Texas that I used to inhabit called Amarillo. This town is far colder than the other two, with 20 to 30 degree winter highs, 40 if you're lucky.
I was observing 60 degree highs, the lowest high was 39 degrees.
On New Year's day, the high is expected to be 61 degrees, with a low of 39.

We wouldn't get that type of weather unless it was late February, or early March, not in the middle of Winter.

That's not all, though my mother's eyesight isn't too terribly good, she claimed to have seen a tree that was budding a pair of leaves. I thought I might've seen the same thing, though I pushed it away, dismissing it as an illusion.

Keep in mind, that while this is New Mexico and Texas I'm talking about, these 3 towns are all located in an area that receives a climate roughly equal to areas further North in the Great Plains.

What I would like to know though, is if anyone else has observed this same phenomenon, preferably in between these blasts of Arctic air that we've been receiving.

The implications are pretty dire. Experts have already predicted that all the snow and ice in the Midwest could melt and cause floods. But if certain orchard trees put out blossoms too early, only to succumb to below freezing temperatures, this could threaten the U.S. fruit harvest.

***UPDATE***

Today, as in December 30th, numerous record highs across Eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle were broken as the temperature went up into the high 70s.

I was making a trip to a nearby town in my car, and the thermometer read that it went as high as 79 degrees. Nearby banks said that the temperature was only one degree, sometimes two, lower than the reading I got in my car.

The previous records were made in the 20s and 30s.

Seriously who else is seeing this happen?

Huh, well that's unusual, but that not quite what I was looking for.

It's not the cold weather that's unusual, the cold weather seems normal to me.
What I'm worried about are the warm intervals in between. In between these blasts of cold air I've noticed that the weather is incredibly mild, almost like it's Springtime.

Though, getting snow that late into the Spring season is dangerous.
Actually, the snow is normal, it's supposed to stay moderately cool well into Spring, but with a warmer Spring season certain plants are tricked into waking from their dormancy and putting out blooms and blossoms, only to have a late frost kill off all the foliage and jeapordize the ability of certain plants to put out seeds.

Hmm, that may very well be the case for these trees then, I don't know, time will only tell as the months go by.

Oh yeah, happy New Year everybody. Let's hope that with a new, more environmentally conscious leader presiding over the United States, we will see a far better year than the one before.

Cross your fingers and hope that we don't see any more oil/gas landgrabs or coal ash spills this year.

this December 2008 has been the coldest on record for a long long time. Not to mention a record amount of snow.
Cold temps continue to linger.

I'm, in the Pacific north west too, up in Canada.