I am loving this winter so far, I know soon it will change and the layers will come on and the ground will be covered...On Saturday I wore a shirt, people were in shorts, I'm sure last year my back was aching from shoveling my car out.

As much as I like the warm weather, this season's weird trends are a daily reminder of global warming. Buds should not be bursting just as ice caps should not be melting.

Looking at that last photo makes me long for a real winter; we've been cheated so far! (Not to mention the fact that I have no room in my apartment to keep both summer and winter clothes out and at the ready. I want to wear my winter clothes, already!)

:)

Jane

while walking the dogs earlier today, i saw daffodil stalks popping up out of the ground!

jd-

I'm not arguing the global warming at all, but look at Denver, their winter is alive and well. I think this is more of an El Nino.

Ana's right, this weird (but wonderful IMO) weather is a result of el Nino.

Absoultely love the last photo . . . would make a great Christmas card or a blank note card.

How beautiful it may seem, it gives me the creeps. I live in the Netherlands, where temperatures where around 15° Celsius (Don't know in Fahrenheit). Normal for this time of year is at least below freezing. It's even scarier to see the weather is acting weird everywhere.

Umm...the prevalence of el nino patterns vs. la nina IS itself one of the signs of climate change. They are supposed to be equal in number over the long term, but we've basically had el ninos over the last ten years.

Just because the world is warming up doesn't mean its going to be hot everywhere all at once; it means the warmth is making the different weather patterns unpredictable and extreme in general.

We're all going to die. Dam global warming.

This is happening all across Canada as well. In Montreal where I live we are about 20 degrees (celsius) higher than our normal temperature, and in Winnipeg where I grew up they are about 30 degrees higher than their normal temperature.

This is the first winter in my 26 years that there has been no snow on Christmas day.When I was a child the snowbanks reached the eaves of my parents bungalow style house.

Something is definitely up.

Oh and a HUGE (as in the size of 30 football fields) glacial piece of northern Canada just fell off. Just fell off and floated away...

I'm certainly not disputing global warming but the climate of our planet does change over time, without any help from global warming. In the 90's we had several warm winters that were followed by below normal, icy, snowy winters. Getting hysterical about it is actually not going to stop global warming unless you actually try to do something about it.

some of us actually try to do something about global warming but our efforts are useless thanks to ignorant, selfish individuals, corporations and governments.

Actually, there haven't been a whole lot of El Ninos in the past 10 years, though there was an unusual string of them in the early 1990s. According to the NOAA's site (linked to my name), counting back to 1996, what we've seen is:

1995/6 = La Nina
1996/7 = normal
1997/8 = El Nino
1998/9 = La Nina
1999/2000 = La Nina
2001/2 = normal
2002/3 = El Nino
2003/4 = normal
2004/5 = El Nino
2005/6 = normal

That's four El Nino, three La Nina, and four normal years. But what happens is, every time there's an El Nino year, people get excited about global warming.

If you want to argue that temperature swings mean global warming, the 1970s had much more dramatic successions of El Nino and El Nina years -- from 1968 to 1978, there were no "normal" years at all.

I'm not saying global warming doesn't happen, but you're looking to the wrong data to demonstrate it.

Coming soon to a newspaper near you -- after posting the above, I saw an AP article (linked in my name) that states December 2006 was the warmest on record BUT NOAA's scientists don't know how much to attribute to global warming versus El Nino.

So the people paid to know haven't ruled out a role for global warming, but they don't see it as the sole cause of the hot spell.

"some of us actually try to do something about global warming but our efforts are useless"

NO effort is useless - it may seem useless to save only a miniscule amount of energy for example, when huge corporations are so polluting, but every single little effort each individual makes does indeed make a difference