I remain fascinated by the weather; it is so wonderfully variable. I recall a meteorological reference to the weather being, “normal; chaotic.” Every year presents its own unique events. This year we’ve had a lot of up and down, especially recently.

In general, I don’t like summer. To me, no day can be deemed acceptable if the temperature exceeds 89 degrees. So, I watch the temperature closely in August, hoping that we’ll have cold spells as we await autumn. And I’ve been pleased to note that we had exactly that during August. Yeah, we had a number of unfortunate 90 degree days, but in the middle of those we had some nice cool stretches. And around the first of September, we had a long cooling off period, in which the temperature stayed in the 60s and 70s. And then, when 80s resumed, another cool period arrived, in which the highs were again only in the 60s (and the low the morning of Sept. 10, was 36). Back came a couple of 80-degree days, but then on Monday, Sept. 12, the high was only 49, I believe. Wow!

Another interesting aspect of the weather is how our topography affects the variations in temperatures. Down in the Basin, we only saw some rain and cool temperatures. But when we traveled to Sheridan on Sept. 9, we couldn’t help but notice that much of the Big Horn Mountains had turned white in the higher areas.

We first saw snow on the ground around Meadowlark Lake (elevation 8,500 feet); it was in sheltered areas, such as the shade of pine trees. But when we arrived at Powder River Pass (9,666 feet), it was lying generally across the landscape. And looking up at the high peaks, you could see that some heavy snow had fallen.

When we drove back the next day the snow had receded quite a bit, though there was still a lot at the higher elevations. If the weather remained at a seasonal norm, then all the snow would soon melt. But now, with the prediction of a 90-percent chance of precipitation in Worland, and a low of 38 degrees, it looked like the mountains would really get dumped on, and the high peaks would assume a white mantle not retreating until, say, July 2017. [It didn’t turn out that way; the snow quickly melted.]

Of course, this interest in the weather is a time-honored one. The saying used to be that, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” These days, however, some folks are trying to do something about it, most concretely in the form of actions with devastating effects on Wyoming’s economy. But I can’t see that the knowledge about the weather during the next 100 years has been nearly so concrete.

I remember that during the time of the Paris Climate Talks back in late 2015, a British journalist (Matt Ridley) noted that the science of climate change is still “pretty vague.” His evidence for that was persuasive, as he observed that “the U. N’s own climate change panel can’t estimate with any certainty how high temperatures will rise by the end of the century – their predictions range all the way from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. That means that world leaders are about to pour billions of dollars of emissions cuts down the drain over only a speculative chance of catastrophe. That’s a costly gamble to make when ‘there are a billion people with no grid electricity whose lives could be radically improved’ by the energy provided by fossil fuels.”

I assume that if high temperatures rise 4.5 degrees Celsius (about 8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the next 86 years, it will bring on some of the very drastic effects environmentalists threaten us with seemingly every day, such as rising sea levels, an open Arctic Ocean, etc. But if they only rise 1.5 degrees the results will not be so drastic and the economies of states such as ours will have suffered immensely for no good reason. And the folks living on the east and west coasts who have been most insistent about the “critical” need for change will have suffered hardly at all.

I won’t be around to see that, but I don’t like the idea of my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren suffering for what may well not be good cause.

John Davis was raised in Worland, graduating from W. H. S. in 1961. John began practicing law here in 1973 and is mostly retired. He is the author of several books.