I am not a fan of the Global Warming School, mostly for the simple reason that I don’t care for deliberately perverting scientific theory in order to advance an ideology. 

That being said, I do recognize that the climate does appear to be somewhat erratic, for whatever reason, and that it may be more erratic than it has been in the last century (a blink of an eye for the climate time scale). The case in point: a dry, snowless winter, followed by zero rain in March, the watercourses look like it was August.  Additionally, the temperatures rose well above seventy for two weeks in a row.  Followed by an overnight drop to nearly eighteen.  The result is not unexpected.  We are now back in ‘normal’ March weather of forties, windy, and finally a small bit of rain.

Many of the New England native plants are hesitant, they respond to daylight length more than temperature, so if the dry spell has really ended and normal rainfall patterns occur they will be alright.  Their main growing period is April, the dry winter will stress them but not unduly.  But anything from farther south, or other continents, will start growing in March here, if the temperature is high enough; additionally such plants are utterly unable to deal with a hard freeze.  This includes: peaches, magnolias, forsythia and numerous garden plants.  Whether or not the peach’s blossoms have been killed by the freeze earlier this week is as yet unknown, one has to wait a week or two.  Most people’s magnolias, and some forsythia, have turned a rather unattractive brown, however.  Also stressed by the lack of March water and accelerated by the heat are the various bulbs: crocus, daffodils, tulips, snowdrops.  The hard freeze didn’t hurt them, but their bloom time has probably been halved.

So, I am complaining about flowers, nice to be me?  Well, yeah. I’m lucky, it could be a tornado or severe drought, I know that very well.  But, if the peach tree is frozen, that is about two hundred dollars of peaches and 24 pints of canned peaches that won’t happen.  It is a maple syrup run that was the same as last year, despite an extra 150 taps.  It is an unexpectedly frozen faucet and burst pipe, it is damage to plants that would otherwise not need replacing.  This is how the cost of climate change begins to add up, even amongst the Western world’s middle class.