Hamlet’s famous soliloquy ponders mortality through the filter of our insufferable experience, littered with brief moments of joy versus the mystery of what awaits us in death. Or, something like that. The inner voice explores existential crisis.
In keeping with my impromptu (as in unplanned) climate content Friday, while reporting this morning on the demise of Climate.gov’s cadre of Winston Smiths being let go, I was reminded to check the precipitation numbers for May. We got a good bit of rain, and I was curious to see how it compared.
May 2025 was the fourth wettest on record for New Hampshire—nearly 8 inches of rainfall, well above the 120-year mean and the trend.
The 12-month annual total ending in May 2025, however, is just above the 120-year mean and below the trend.
This is an amusement and a meaningless statistic because we don’t “count” it like that. We calculate these things by calendar year. And in 2024, New Hampshire had 45.73 inches of rain, above the mean but below the trend.
As I’m fond of reminding people, most of the state’s wettest years have occurred since the social construct known as global warming or climate change emerged. Yes, the climate changed, it always does, and our paltry sampling of it has little bearing, but quite frequently during this period of exceptional wetness, we’ve been branded as in drought more often than makes sense! The most recent was declared over after the May 2025 deluge, and you’d be right to ask how it was that 2023 was the 8th wettest on record and 2024 was above the 120-year average.
That’s not how they do it, is the only answer I can come up with, accepting that at some point in the Granite State’s past (maybe 17,700K years ago, give or take) it was completely covered by ice. No drought. Since then, there has been a lot less ice and a lot more whining about warming and drought, regardless of how much precipitation we receive; a lack of concern is mirrored in local housing policy. Odd-even outdoor watering (ban) days persist for decades, so let’s add thousands of new apartments and houses.
Very smart people they are.
Anyway, the abundance of water has had another endearing effect. I pay more per month or municipal water than I used to pay every quarter. The excuse for that is that we need to make sure we’ve filtered out any forever chemicals.
This more often than not from those who insisted everyone get the mRNA vaccine, which has forever chemicals in it, as well as some known to cause cancer.
Very smart people. Political people.
Maybe we’ll get a break from some of that for a few years, but probably not.
