As I figured a few posts back, I jinxed Yeosu by talking about the nice spring-like weather. Sure enough, we had around an inch and a half of rain yesterday. Though it was warm while the rain was coming down, as soon as the front passed through, cold air followed. It was near freezing this morning and a vicious wind snapped at me as I walked to work this morning. The skies are clear and the sun is shining brightly right now, but the temperatures are still somewhat low and the wind is still whipping around. Sigh. In reality, spring doesn’t officially arrived until the 21st. Hopefully, we’ll see the permanent arrival of spring soon, but rain and cooler temperatures are forecast for the upcoming weekend.
Meanwhile, I’m sure the people in South-East Asia could use some of our rain. They’ve been experiencing one of their worst droughts in decades, with the Mekong River running (barely, in places) at its lowest levels in memory. You can read about it at the The Voice of America website: and in another article, Drought in the Mekong Basin. I talked to my friend Nai last night, and the drought is affecting him and his family. One the one hand, they have a water pump (courtesy of yours truly) to bring water to their crops; on the other, there is sometimes no water to pump. He tells me that the cost of drinking water and electricity has shot sky-high, and many Lao people are putting the blame on their government (for the prices) and on China (for all their dam-building upstream on the Mekong). Then there’s the heat: I check the Vientiane weather every day, and for the past several weeks, except for a few days last week, the daily high temperature has been in the mid-90s to low-100s. Hopefully, they’ll get some relief soon, and I’ll continue to help them out when I can.
Then, there were the series of snowstorms in the eastern and north-eastern areas of the United States this past winter. A lot of people who think that there’s no such thing as global warming going on, such as Sen. James Inhofe, seem to think that all the snow and cold disprove global warming. Yet, at the same time the east was being buried, Canada was experiencing it’s warmest winter ON RECORD. You can read about that here at Dr. Jeff Masters’ weather blog at Weather Underground. Not that either of these events proves or disproves anything–I’m just sayin’.