Weather or not!

From time to time, I will take the privilege as being the creator of this blog, to take a completely different tangent from the story at hand to give a personal opinion or insight on a subject that may or may not be apropos to the main direction of this blog.

This entry is about "Weather"! Whether you want to read it or not is up to you, (lol) just had to throw out that "pun" it was just too obvious!

During the course of the journey we will be taking, weather will play a very big part of the atmosphere of our trip. (Sorry, about the secondary pun!)

I would venture to say that with most certainty the condition of our weather is the number, one topic of conversation that we deal with on a day to day basis. Whether it be with our closest confidants, or complete strangers. Weather impacts all of us. On a subliminal level it can also control us!

It is not my intent to make this blog entry political in nature, but I do want to point out what I think is an interesting point of view. Most of us have heard the sage advice about how we must know our history, or we will be doomed to repeat it, or something of that nature! So too, is our need to know about "Weather". However weather is much easier to understand, from a simplistic point of view, most know basic history, but few know the basics of weather.

Many years ago, I had a great interest in weather and thought that I would like to have a career as a weather forecaster, like many things in my life, it was a passing fancy and I moved onto other things. But during that time in my life, I was able to distill a broad picture into a small picture.

In layman's terms, or my point of view:

Weather is nothing more than the earths attempt to maintain a constant temperature of 58 degrees fH. This average temperature has been proven by modern records, as well as by other means of determining weather readings before modern recorded times. That is it in a basic nutshell. For those of you that would question my simplistic explanation, let me put it to you in formal terms.

The earth maintains a relative constant temperature by being in a radiative balance between the incoming short wave solar radiation and the outgoing long wave infrared radiation. Each of these, short wave and long wave, are modulated by clouds, the atmosphere, and the earth's surface such that a balance is achieved. We as humans have no real impact on these basic principles.

Or do we??? Just my opinion!