Keeping Warm in a Cold Maine Winter

In Maine, this winter began early. In fact, it began almost four and a half months ago. That's the entire month of November plus December, January, February, and a week and a half into March. It's not over yet but tomorrow's forecast is looking like the first actual mild almost spring-like day since this whole long winter fiasco began. Here in the highlands we've had more than our fair share of cold, more than our fair share of wind, and more than our fair share of snow. The snow has to be somewhere close to four feet deep in the woods. The snowbanks are huge. There's snow on the ground that fell early in November along with snow that fell nearly every week since. A winter like this leaves me almost unable to remember what a warm day actually feels like.

So I thought it might be interesting to demonstrate one way we Mainers remember what the word "warm" means...

There are two Maines. There's northern Maine represented by the Bangor Daily News and there's southern Maine represented chiefly by the Portland Press Herald. I live in northern Maine. Here, we tend to think of that other Maine as just an extension of Massachusetts which we can get away with doing because most people down Portland way either think of us as their playground or don't think of us at all, off the radar screen entirely. So I'm speaking here of northern Maine. Winter is a whole different ballgame down there. They actually get frequent breaks from the cold and snow. We haven't seen bare ground since last October. They have.

So here's something I recently noticed in the Bangor Daily News reminding us northern Mainers of how warm nature is:

From last weekend's Bangor Daily News, Maine lobster harvest value jumps by $46 million
This article points out that 120 million pounds of marketable lobsters were hauled in by Maine lobster fishermen (and women) last year, up from 112 million pounds in 2017, a figure far higher than back in the late 1980's when roughly 20 million pounds per year were being reported. The article goes on to suggest this level of harvest is likely not sustainable but here's the thing. It's not overfishing of the resource that's the problem. It's... here it comes... because of "climate change" which we all know really means Global Warming!

So with the intent of blogging about that little ditty, while Googling I discovered another little ditty:
From BDN's glossy print magazine Bangor Metro, January 23, 2019, Warming ocean could force lobsters to migrate out of Maine fishing range, author says
That one speaks for itself.

So it doesn't really matter which way you take this news. If you accept the warming ocean perspective, you can be comforted in knowing it's just a freak winter. There's still hope for a warmer future. But even if you don't accept that notion you can get warm or even hot under the collar when you see "news" like this attributing the expected decline in a Maine resource not to its actual likely cause, overharvesting, but rather to this Socialist-perpetrated myth called "climate change".