When I was a teenager during the 70s, the summers didn’t seem so bad, but that is because we were all going through Global Cooling and the ‘Glaciers were coming!’ I thought that it would be great to take a vacation up to Kansas and play on the Ice sheets. What can I say, I was only a teenager.

As I said it is HOT here ‘this time of year’. Come, late October we will be experiencing Texas Cooling.  It wasn’t too hard to understand even as a teenager that the earth’s weather (Climate) goes through seasonal variations (Change) everywhere, with the exception near the equator. Isn’t it nice to have seasons? I think I learned in Junior High or maybe even in Elementary School that the earth goes through seasons because the earth’s axis of rotation is tilted with respect to the sun. It is not tilted because of CO2 or any other naturally occurring gas. And even as big as Al Gore is, with all his beefy stature can't alter the tilt of the earth. Therefore, since the beginning of Texas, Texas has gone through hot summers and cool to cold winters. There will be rain and wind in the spring. There will be storms, some quite strong, in the spring even through June. July, August, and September will be hot and usually DRY. Near the last week in October we will have a cool or cold front dip into Texas from the northern territories. That has nothing to do with CO2 either. Then comes November, December, January, and February when it will be damp to wet, cool to cold, sometimes bone chilling cold. Sometimes, we even get that cold white stuff down here in Texas. Then spring arrives again and we get storms to fill our lakes and reservoirs.

That cycle has been going on since I was born. My mother said it has been going on since she was born. Her mother said… you get the picture. It is a cycle. The Seasonal Cycle and we can all thank the good Lord that he tilted the earth so that we wouldn’t be bored with endless droughts, or endless rains, or endless snows, or endless heat, or endless cold. I do feel sorry for you folks down near the equator, but the Lord has given you some really pretty water and beaches to look at. Plus the Rotational Cycle I mentioned earlier keeps the equator covered with clouds so the sun doesn’t beat down on you all as severely. I am rambling now.

Back to my point: The second of sixteen cycles that dictate the weather, climate change, is the seasonal cycle caused by the 23.5 +/- 1 degree tilt of the earth’s rotational axis. In Texas, during the summer, the sun stays up a long time—from 6:30 am to 8:30 pm. More Sun equals more CO2 which equals more heat. Oops, that is not correct. More Sun equals more heat. CO2 has nothing to do with it. In the winter time the Sun refuses to rise before 7:45 am or later and then it takes off early and sets before 6 pm. Less Sun equals more CO2 therefore more heat. Oops, I did it again. That isn’t right either. Less Sun equals less heat. Go figure.

There is also an interesting thing about the path that the earth travels around the sun. This I learned in High school, public high school, so that no one, with the exception of flunkies and politicians, are without excuse. The earth travels around the sun in an elliptical orbit. That is an eccentric circle for you non-mathematically inclined people.  The eccentricity of Earth’s orbit today is 0.0167. (a perfect circle has an eccentricity of zero.) That means that the distance between the earth and the Sun varies between 91,397,488 miles and 94,510,588 miles.  It just so happens that on July the 4^th the earth is farthest from the Sun and closest on January 4^th. So what does this mean to you, you might ask. Well, it means that during the winters in Texas and the northern territories the earth is closer to the Sun by 3.1 million miles than it is during summer. Let me tell you—that means a lot to us here in Texas, in the heat of summer. If we were 3 million miles closer to the sun can you imagine how much hotter it would be.

‘Get that boy a bigger glass of iced tea!’

Now for you folks down under, I am sorry about your situation. You see, you guys are closer in the summer and further away during the winter. I guess that is why most of Australia is a desert even though is resides at about the same latitude as Texas and the northern territories (them other states north of the Red River.)

Can you imagine being so stupid as to think that climate change is due to an extra 100 parts per million of an odorless natural gas. I think Al Gore and his cronies have been in the sun too long. Oh, I digress again.

Tis the Seasons.