We have had March weather for the first three weeks of January here in Albuquerque.

Those are snowdrops, peaking up through the detritus of last year’s iris.

When I say “March weather,” I am speaking empirically, not rhetorically. The average overnight low for the first three weeks of January has been 31.3 F here (a tad less than O C). That’s a normal March 1 temperature. Normal for now is more like 23.3 F (-5 C). Daytime highs have been well above normal too, though the gap is a little less. Overall, though, it’s the warmest first three weeks of January in Albuquerque records going back to 1931.

Snowdrops are usually the garden’s first bloomer. But this is ridiculous.

Since I know there are some climate weenies who read this blog, I will self-consciously point out here that I am not making any assertion about global warming having anything to do with my snowdrop. Chalk it up to a persistent ridge of high pressure over the intermountain west. But I would be remiss in not pointing out that the subtext of the numbers above – overnight low temperatures rising more than the daytime highs – is consistent with the anthropogenic hypothesis. This is the “diurnal temperature range”, the gap between day and night temperatures that is one way of fingerprinting greenhouse warming.