My wife and I were having a conversation about the weather/climate of our youth. What brought the conversation up was the fact that I was mowing grass in our yard on January 11 as the temperature approach 70°. I commented on the fact that when I was a teenager in the late 60’s the autumns were much cooler than they have been in years. I remembered pick-up football games after school in October where the temperature would leave your throat tingling with the cool evening air. Now days, those temperatures don’t show up until winter.
Sherry was reminiscing about how after we first were married in the late 70’s we didn’t have AC. We cooled our first house in Pasadena with an “attic fan”, also known as a whole house fan. It was a large fan sitting in the ceiling of the hall that sucked warm air out of the house and brought in cooler air from outside. We lived with that fan for almost 10 years before we put in a couple of window units. What I recall about that time was we slept under the same bed coverings in summer and winter…It was that cool with the night air moving across the bed. I don’t think I would even attempt it today.
And then I saw this chary:
It pretty much says it all. Those cool evenings I remember were in the later half of the 60’s. The 70’s and the 80’s were when we lived without AC and didn’t really miss it (much). But ever since…Well it hasn’t been pretty.
Related articles
- NASA Predicts Massive Climate Change Impact For Canada (huffingtonpost.ca)
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When I first moved to Houston, in 1971, I actually lived in the Medical Center. It wasn’t nearly as built up, of course, but I especially remember how beautiful the autumns were – and there was a real winter season. I was back in Houston for the terrible freeze of 1983(?). The pipes at my apartment complex froze, broke and flooded the enclosed courtyard. Voila! Instant ice skating rink – and we did. Had to haul water from the swimming pool for toilet flushing, too.
One other bit of anecdotal support for the “it’s getting warmer” business. When I began varnishing in 1990, I worked easily through the summer. The last five summers have been hellonwheels. Even adjusting for my increasing age, there’s no question things have changed.
I remember the winter of ’72-73 when we had (if memory serves) four separate snow events in the Houston area. I was living for part of that winter in the woods south of New Waverly when the first one happened. Four inches of snow on a full moon night in the middle of the piney woods was magical for a boy of the Texas Gulf Coast.
I also remember well the week long icebox we lived through in 1983(?). Hwy 225 in Pasadena was a sheet of ice for miles. Everything was shut down for days. We huddled in our house and kept what heat we had going for all it was worth. No snow, no magic…Just cold.
It was ’92 when we moved to this place in the country. The house at the time had a central air unit that was so ancient and in such bad shape that I didn’t even try to use it. So for a number of years it was back to the past here with fans and open windows. As the years went by we were forced to move into the present and install AC. Then we had to replace the central unit just to keep our insurance in effect. Insurance companies really do not like space heaters…