MARCH 17, 2026 – I was a fourth-grader—our granddaughter’s age—when the famous St. Patrick’s Day Blizzard slammed Minnesota. School was canceled, mostly on account of the travel hazards facing school buses that ferried all the “farm kids” (whether they lived on actual farms or not) to and from schools in town. We who lived inside the Anoka city limits walked to school and were accustomed to leaning into all kinds of harsh weather. Our tacit motto was the U.S. Post Office slogan, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” (Supposedly, that line was borrowed not from some American poet of the late 19th century but from The Histories by Herodotus, in which the ancient Greek historian described Persian couriers. Speaking of Persia, more on Iran below.)
On that “snow day” of yore, I remember spending a good half of it outside playing up a storm within the blizzard. By evening I was a spent force, and despite my rugged adventures and snowbound expeditions during the daylight hours—fortified by regular intakes of hot chocolate—I wasn’t yet too old to be comfortable sitting with my mother in the den lounge chair. I marveled at the patterns in the snow that winds had blasted onto the windows. A native of New Jersey, Mother claimed she could never fully adapt to Minnesota winters, but I remember that she took the St. Patrick’s Day Blizzard in stride—at least from the comfort of the inside of our house.
Eventually, of course, all that snow melted—producing the record floodwaters that spring (see last Friday’s post, “How the Girl Scout Cookies Crumbled”). The record snowfall and the Great Flood were only the half of it. What lay ahead was May 6—the Night of the Tornadoes—when six twisters wreaked havoc in nearby Fridley, killing 13 people, shattering homes and leaving everyone in the area shell-shocked. We spent much of the evening hunkered down in the basement with flashlights. Then came the big brouhaha in the state legislature over the hugely divisive issue of daylight savings time—the axis of polarization back in the day. By the time the state had to contend with the annual insurgency of dandelions, it was said that the definition of a Minnesotan was, “a person whose driveway is full of snow, whose basement is full of water, whose roof is gone, and who doesn’t know what time it is.”
If the local weather events of 1965 qualified as “extreme,” we certainly didn’t associate them with climate change. Even if climatology had been a widely recognized discipline back then, I’m guessing there weren’t sufficient data to detect any connection between extreme weather and anthropogenic climate change. Given how the data since suggest a hocky-stick increase in both causal and correlative relationships between the release of greenhouse gases and climate change, the frequency of extreme weather—temperature extremes, downpours, violent storms—is empirically irrefutable (see NOAA; WMO (World Meteorological Organization); EM-DAT (International Disaster Database)).
Thanks to the current regime’s fetish for extreme distractions, climate change has slipped to the figurative back pages of the daily news. To our considerable detriment we allow this loss of priority to continue. The Middle East War, however, is an immediate reminder of our vulnerability to disruptions in the flow of Persian Gulf oil. Ironically, the global economy is being threatened by an interruption in the supply of a commodity that ultimately threatens the global economy: the burning of fossil fuels => release of greenhouse gases => global warming => climate change. The Strait of Hormuz is a vital strategic geographical formation because of that precious commodity: oil. Though many people have known that for generations, as Jon Stewart quipped recently, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Given Trump’s complete lack of a cogent plan, we are left to assume that in accordance with his life-long pattern of shooting first and never aiming, the president has no plan and indeed, no means, for opening the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.
What’s doubly ironic about this state of affairs is that the master of cerebral chaos has a deep-seated psycho-emotional reaction to wind turbines, even when out of sight of land. Today The New York Times reported that because federal judges halted five attempts by the current regime to halt construction of offshore wind farms, Trump is offering to pay a billion bucks to cancel the wind energy companies’ leases. One of the projects would power up to a million homes; the other would provide electricity to 300,000 homes and businesses—no small potatoes when it comes to replacing fossil fuels . . . and reducing the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz.
Call it a hat trick: A. Waste, fraud and abuse on a billion-dollar scale, B. A punch in the gut in the fight against anthropogenic climate change, and C. Perpetuation of the Strait of Hormuz as a global economic chokepoint.
It’s all a long way from the St. Patrick’s Day Blizzard of 1965, but it’s a much shorter line to the extreme heat in the American Southwest today, with more in the offing. What the world could use right now—and beyond today—is the luck of the Irish.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
