As I wrote earlier this week, we anticipated our first snow of the season last night — and it arrived. Officially we were supposed to get a mix of snow and rain, but as you can see in this video, the Twin Cities got enough snow that it stuck to the ground through the mid-morning. When I shot this off of my deck, the temperature was still at 29.5 degrees, which is rather crisp for the 19th day ofautumn:

Every time I post about this, people send me e-mails saying that “of course the weather changes from day to day — that doesn’t prove anything!”  Well, that’s exactly my point.  Weather gets warmer and cooler every day, month, year, decade, all the way to ages and eons, and has long before mankind began releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

However, the trend for the past eleven years has been cooling, not warming, which tends to disprove any relation to CO2 release and warming temperatures.  We had the first summer in recent memory where Minnesota did not sustain high temps of 90 degrees for any extended period, if we hit it at all.  We have had two cold and long winters in a row, and today indicates that 2009-10 will be longer and colder yet; last year, we didn’t get our first sticking snowfall until the end of October.

Technical notes: I shot this with my Flip Ultra HD, which was my first outdoor use, and it looks pretty good. I edited two clips into one movie, added the titles, and uploaded it to my YouTube channel with the FlipShare software, which made it pretty easy.  Just for the FTC, no one compensated me for this message.