The killer flu strain going around SIUC came home with Kate and got me last Friday. I haven’t had a fever since 1980, but this weekend I went between 97.5 and 103F several times, whew. The fever finally broke last night. The first night I had high fever, I composed a movie plot (a good one) while semi asleep and the last two were all about a single blurry spreadsheet on LRRD finances, with only one distinction, that Barack Obama stopped by to help me a bit.

The temperatures in southern Illinois are also on a roller coaster. We have crazy weather in Carbondale–nearly 6 inches of a sleet snow ice mix that shut everything down this morning. SIUC was closed and a lot of people were without power. The initial sleet fell last night and was accompanied by serious thunder. At 26F, something I’ve never witnessed. Kate’s out fetching a friend’s kids in our Subaru now. Here she is sliding around with our dogs this afternoon. There’ve been many long power outages, pretty much everything canceled. SIUC hasn’t closed like this since the 1980’s.

Our current weather may or may not be important, but climate change is here, and will have a huge affect on rivers and people. I found a few good websites following changes in the science/politics stew. I like Desmogblog.com, which has the great idea of writing a letter to your grandchildren, Grist’s How to talk to a climate skeptic, and most of all the site realclimate.org, which has the most scientific bent and a very good list of links. A recent post, “What if you held a conference and no (real) scientists came?” gives a very powerful (and fact-filled) view of the politics of this issue. There are $10,000 honoraria out there for papers that favor a certain viewpoint.

People are doomed without sustainable living and growth, and an understating of these climate process, especially for river science, is essential. I’ll leave it to them for now.