A news story from the Seattle PI on the a report detailing the costs of Global Warming to Washington State. There was also an article in the Seattle Times and it has shown up on other global warming related sites.

I'm glad to see it getting done. It does address some of the difficult challenges like sea-level rise. I hope that we see more and continued studies of this type. It needs to done, even though I'm sure it's not right. We don't know enough to get these things right, yet. After all, we've had the wettest and snowiest winter in the 13 years I've been here so far, which has completely gone against predictions (which were for a dry and warm winter, typical for El Nino conditions for us). Yet my partner's family in Kansas has seen a balmy winter and has tulips coming up already.

It also seems to me that we've had more interesting weather almost everywhere. The repeated snowstorms in Colorado, our wettest month ever on record (November, 2006), the ice storm that's sweeping the Midwest today. If anyone can point me to any statistics on this, I'd be interested. Are there really more rare weather events and record highs and lows this year than usual, or is it a function of the news that we just know about more?

As I write this, a day that was supposed to see "snow flurries" has had steadily falling snow for four hours. It's quite breathtakingly beautiful, and rare for us. And last summer was long, dry and hot. A set of seasons of extremes.