Cars with windows rolled down....short-sleeve t-shirts....the occasional jogger in shorts.
It's hard to believe it's January in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire Public Radio's Dan Gorenstein reports, you aren't alone in thinking this winter's mild temperatures are out of the ordinary.
Seniors remember winters with brutal winds and snowdrifts you could lose children in.
95-year-old Rose Lenier.
T.12
4:45 years ago, when we had winter, it was winter. Didn't have nice days like this. I can remember that. It would stay cold until almost April, it was terrible, never warm up. But never missed school. Didn't close for snow in those days.
3:55 there's some truth in those anecdotal stories....
That's state climatologist Dave Brown.
....if you look at the temperature record for Concord. What we see is a very clear warming trend from the 1970's. And globally we continue to set all time records every year...we are seeing warmer years, and warmer winters than we did 50 years ago.
Brown says the temperatures recorded in Concord this past December are the warmest since anyone started collecting the data in 1921.
He explains the unusually warm weather is a result of what's called the North Atlantic Oscillation, or NAO.
Brown says the NAO prevents the colder jet stream from swinging this far south.
But the climatologist says the North Atlantic Oscillation isn't responsible 30-plus years of warming weather.
5:02 all of our model projects that go out 10,15,50 years all point to warming trend, and they are all linked to increased carbon dioxide and increased methane. I think as much as anything we need to point to global warming being one of the main drivers of what we are seeing here in the northeast.
Brown isn't alone in thinking that this season's winter is part of global warming.
National Weather Service climatologist Steve Capriolla says the state's average daily temperature in 2006 likely will top the typical year by about 2 degrees.
But global warming isn't the only factor.
Capriolla points out that Concord has seen warm trends in the past.
7:57 mother nature can go through these warming trends and these cooling trends. We've seen that with ice ages coming and going. We know that mother nature can change temperatures on its own. So it could be doing that now. The question is, is man adding to that? And how much is he adding to that?
It's clear to Dartmouth Earth Science Professor Eric Pausmontier that man is sufficiently adding to climate change.
But New England getting a few degrees warmer due to global warming is the least of his concerns.
7:13 when we talk about global warming we usually are referring to this gradual process that maybe is a century and warms the planet a few degrees. But there have been in the past tehse sudden climate shifts and that concerns me even more that we would be shifting the mode in a matter of decades.
State climatologist Dave Brown says he finds the warm weather disturbing.
7:46 I think this 30-plus year trend that we are seeing, I do think that is sounding alarm bells...clearly the changes that we have started to see, heavy rainfall events...we've seen in the last 18 months, these are the things that affect people's activities, economic interests...there is no precedence for this kind of trend in our modern climate record. And the kind of rain storms we've had, there is really no analog for those...this is something that is sounding a lot of alarm bells in people's minds, mine included.
Even with those alarm bells sounding Brown guarantees that the state will still get its share of cold days and heavy snowfalls over the coming winters.
But they might not be the same November through April winters that so many people fondly remember.
For NHPR News, I'm DG.
