What's With The Cold?

After a succession of mild winters, northern United States dwellers are biting their lips on the cold reality that has lately set in just out the door.  Things are cold, growing zones have been laughed all the way back to Washington, and everyone and their brother is suddenly looking to castrate Al Gore.  Then we have the mainstream media, with their horror stories of how awful this slightly difficult winter has been, and how freezing temperatures have made it all the way down to (gasp) northern Florida.  I have news for these people, I really do: It's been pretty cold in snaps as recently as 2012, that very same year where we thought we were going to all die from being consumed in a huge fireball of drought and intense heat:

That's a polite map too (I never took a shot of the map that we had back in 2011 where Miami clocked in at a lovely 32 for an overnight low), but it does tend to illustrate a point nicely.  In the west we see all sorts of blotches on the colorful landscape, indicative that there are some mountains there throwing things off a bit.  Not so back east, where we have a lovely arc heading southward, nearly uninterrupted.  The Great Lakes, at least in their southern reaches, seem to moderate things a little bit, and there is a discernible line of defense in Virginia and North Carolina where the cold seems to taper off in a sudden halted advance (those Appalachians are doing their work, yessir), but by and large the only thing stopping the onslaught is a very warm and moist Gulf of Mexico giving a punch back northward.  Without it, that 30 we see over in Laredo, Texas (right east of where the US-Mexico border curves southward again) would be a more familiar sight in New Orleans or Daytona Beach.

The last great glacial period of our climate was pretty much a situation where the Gulf of Mexico had the tar beaten out of it by a mile high mountain of ice that spent thousands upon thousands of years pushing south of it's chief rival, Hudson Bay.  Really, if we want to know what is with the cold, we can blame Hudson Bay, because it is inviting it's friend the Polar Air Mass/Vortex/Flavor of the month name south, and they then decided to crash a party over at Jet Stream's house, and... well, those are some pretty cold days we have been having lately, right?  Back in the late seventies, this sort of thing happened for a few winters, and combined with the cooling trend we saw from the forties until then, all sorts of scientists (many of whom now argue in favor of global warming) were thinking that our interglacial period was up.  What they did not know was that while things are quick to warm up (a melting glacier is like a runaway freight train that melts under itself and heats up by virtue of getting lower in elevation, melt-water heating the surrounding ice, etc.), the freezing process, at least in terms of climate, takes a lot longer.  That huge continental glacier still had to fight off summer melt, lower-elevations, etc.  Hudson Bay is the endurance fighter to the Gulf of Mexico's quick show, for sure.

Anyway, that could open up a whole other can of worms regarding Climate Change (gasp), which I am more than eager to jump into, but for this post at least, I will keep things simple:

1. We have seen this sort of cold before and this is not the apocalypse.

2. You can get a hard freeze as far south as Tampico in Mexico or Miami in Florida, simply because we don't have east-west mountain ranges to block off the Arctic air masses which Hudson Bay can send far more south than anything resembling similar latitudes over in frosty Siberia (which, as a rule, gets even colder, but tends to keep the freezer up farther north; they have forests which can see -70F in a normal winter while seeing 70F during the summer, while we have a much more southern treeline than they do, because Hudson Bay keeps us on ice longer).

3.  It's actually been uglier in some parts before:

4.  As you can see from the map, there are people in Montana and Alberta that have experienced in actual temperatures what we whine about regarding wind chill further east.  They have airports there too, not to mention freeways and schools, but manage to survive.

5.  Don't think this leaves us out of the water as far as "no more normal winters" are concerned.  We could very well have another scorcher of a summer with next to no rain, like California is current experiencing.  I think they got an inch in parts today, but you know what I mean.  A day of rain hardly makes up for a year without it.  What's that, you say, not every part of the world is frozen right now?  Indeed.  We are experiencing a lot of extremes.  Our continent is no stranger to periodic extremes, true, but prolonged?

6.  You can probably panic a little bit at that thought.  Still, wait to see how the next few winters turn out before declaring victory of your opposition in the climactic political game.  It's cold, but not outrageously so, nor is it normal.  This is a spike in overall trends.

Just throwing some of this out there... in the meantime we can explore more of what cold means.

Language In North America

This has been a long time in coming, but now seemed like a good time to discuss the matter of language on our fair continent.  First, a few key points:

1. The United States of America does not have an official language.  There are practical and historical reasons for this, which we will get into.  The state of New Mexico actually has two official languages, English and Spanish.

2.  Nearly a quarter of the people on this continent do not speak English as a first language, BUT:

3.  Many people in Mexico learn English, and as a second language, rather than as a foreign language, the most popular choice for which is French.  In my own experiences in Morelos, Guerrero, The Federal District, Chihuahua, and Baja California, I found that every person I ran into either spoke English or knew someone who did.

4.  English is not going anywhere, stop worrying.  People in China, which trumps our three countries in population all together, are learning it despite clearly being in a position where they now have the commercial and political clout to tell us to speak Mandarin and Cantonese. 

Feel better?

5.  Many of the founding fathers spoke multiple languages and considered a working knowledge of Latin and Greek to be an essential mark of a gentleman's intellectual prowess. 

6.  In present times, several hundred thousand people in the United States and Canada do not speak English, French, or Spanish as a first language, if at all, in daily use, and they have been speaking these tongues before speakers of those three tongues ever arrived on our shores. 

7.  Many if not most consumer products will have an instruction or warning label in our three predominant languages.  In Canada this is required by law; everything thus has French and English on the label.  In the United States, this is promoted by private businesses and often features multiple choices beyond even the big three.

8.  Of all the current political topics on the table, language is the one issue that seems to raise the ire in even the most politically apathetic people.  I have lost count of how many times I have been threatened with bodily harm just for speaking with someone in Spanish, or, heaven forbid, French.  

So let's start with those bold, declarative statements for now.  I want to be careful about how I introduce such a topic without causing panic (and why yes, immigration will also be on the table, probably next week) and to promote the fact that these posts, and this blog, is not attempting to be the grand avatar of some horrid political agenda.  Rather, I hope to bring some clarity to otherwise cloudy places of knowledge for you guys/you all/y'all.  I'm going to go slowly on this one, and break it down into digestible portions of history, politics, maps, etc.  Oh, expect maps.  Expect many maps.  I like maps.  Let's start with this one:

Source cited in image.  As we can see, Maine is clearly the coolest state to live in.  Not that I am biased or anything.

A nice map we have here.  Yes, we do see a lot of Spanish, but remember, this is a map with a title that should disarm hostile opposition.  In each and every one of those counties, excepting maybe some in the hinterlands and present political frontiers, English is the main event spoken outside of the home, and is definitely available even there.

Expanding the Horizon

The very first post on American Voyages defined North America as everything consisting of continental Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but technically speaking, such limits are not really being fair to what North America really encompasses.  In truth, our continental plate extends as far east as half of Iceland and as far west as parts of Russia and Japan.  Now of course, a blog about North American geography, history, etc. would be rather silly if I took some time to cover Hokkaido or Siberia, but my recent reading into everything botanical regarding Florida got me thinking about some of our outlying nearby continental islands, namely Cuba and the Bahamas.

Both places have been historically linked to the rest of North America, in some cases in far stronger ways than with the rest of their Caribbean neighbors.   Cuba was the departure point of choice of Spanish explorers and colonizers for expeditions into Mexico and Florida, and the island was lusted after for years by the United States during the late nineteenth century.  Though the current embargo keeps Cuba at arm's length from the United States, she has decent diplomatic relations with both Canada and Mexico.  The Bahamas pretty much experience economic vitality because of trade and tourism links with the United States.  Both nations feature a climate and biodiversity remarkably similar to that of southern Florida.  I have been fortunate enough to see this up close and personal in the Bahamas, but my only experience thus far of Cuba has been of a few distant glimpses of a mountainous coast from the Straits of Florida.  There are no reasons why we can't occasionally talk about her though, especially since I have some rather controversial posts about language coming up this week.  You know, posts about, gasp, that dreaded Spanish language everyone here seems to be afraid of.

Oh, and for those of us wondering, this would be where North America technically ends down south:

Thanks USGS!  This map and all sorts of fun stuff can be found here.

Palm Limits

Since I am absolutely geeked out over being able to use google maps in my blog, I decided to have some fun.

The bottom teal line is where native palm species naturally occur within North America.  The yellow line is where palms can easily be planted and left to their own devices.  The blue line is where the limits have been pushed with genetic selection and certain hardy species, but you will most likely not find any of them outside of dedicated gardens.