I keep being told over and over again that it is wintertime. Tomorrow, according to the calendar, it the official start of winter, and on Thursday we will experience the winter solstice—the day the earth is furthest away from the sun. People keep telling me that Christmas is coming, they keep telling me that I need to put a jacket on. After all, it is late December!
But who are they kidding? It just isn’t that cold out in the Hamptons, and quite frankly, it is freaking me out. Not that there is anything that I can do about it.
Last year, winter was cold, really cold. It snowed a great deal, I frequently had to dig my car out of the driveway, and, in general, I pretty much stopped believing in global warming.
But this year is different. I walked outside last Saturday in a t-shirt. And it is happening all over the world, apparently. I’m no scientist, but I happen to know that THIS AIN’T RIGHT.
I try to enjoy the fact that Long Island and the Hamptons are having unusually warm weather for this time of year. Yes, it is definitely nice to not have to deal with snow, but it’s hard not to think that maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss global warming and that the world could be coming to an end. But I’ll try to enjoy it.
(A little bonus science for you: The winter solstice occurs exactly when the axial tilt of a planet’s polar hemisphere is farthest away from the star that it orbits. Earth’s maximum axial tilt to our star, the Sun, during a solstice is 23° 26′. More evidently from high latitudes, a hemisphere’s winter solstice occurs on the shortest day and longest night of the year, when the sun’s daily maximum elevation in the sky is the lowest.)
