Next Meeting, Tuesday, August 4, at the Coliseum Restaurant & Bar, at noon. This will be one of our famed Business Meetings, minus the monkey. Unless, of course, IPP JACK HEIM, who has regressed to his former role of TailTwister, is present, which he usually is. Make sure you have your wallet.

We expect that Pres. MIKE will run the meeting, which suggests a varied agenda. He has a light but quick hand for the bell, but everything after that is freehand. There never seems to be any shortage of business to discuss, however. We are about to Stuff The Bus, and then next week we will sort the Stuff from the Bus so it can be doled out to the schools. JODI BURMESTER will have the latest on that one, and in her new position as Second Vice for the District, she has all the latest scoop from group about what Lions are doing, and/or are supposed to be doing. If she is at the meeting, all of the information will be firsthand.

At the last meeting Pres. MIKE opened the meeting, Father SCOTT GROVER gave the invocation, and TT JACK HEIM fined himself $2 (an exorbitant figure) for not having the brass Lion with him. As there appeared to be no business to discuss he then switched caps to Program Host, and as such launched immediately into the introduction of our speaker, Prof Jonathan Martin from the UW. Somewhere about then it dawned on the Editor that in addition to Prof. Martin's position at the UW Atmospheric Sciences Dept., he is also one of the two guys who write the weather column that appears regularly in the Wis. State Journal, providing explanations of items of interest in the weather and climate areas. The column is usually at the top of page 2. The editor missed his chance, however, to ask a question that has bothered him for years. What are meteorologists talking about when they use the term “monsoon” to describe weather in the US? In India it means “raining like h---”, but what does it mean here.

Prof. Martin opened his talk by remarking that a Lions Club sponsored the baseball team he played on as a kid, and then went on to discuss a variety of subjects on weather in general, and in the Midwest specifically. He said that the composition of the atmosphere regulated the amount of heat incoming from the Sun, and also the radiation of that heat back into space. “Greenhouse gases' are transparent to solar radiation (they let it in) but translucent to infra-red heat radiation (they won't let it go back out). With an atmosphere, the average temperature of the Earth's surface is 57°F. With no atmosphere, the average temp. of the Moon's surface is 0°F. Water vapor, which is heat transparent, persists in the atmosphere for about 9 days - carbon dioxide (CO2) which is not, stays for a year. Scientists have developed a way to track the history of the Earth's atmosphere far back before any written records, by analyzing the air trapped in Arctic ice which has been there for hundreds of years. Observations have been taken on Mauna Loa in Hawai'i for 50 years and show a huge increase in CO2. The amount of elemental oxygen in the atmosphere has been decreasing, and at the same rate as CO2 has been increasing. The main source of CO2 is the burning of fossil fuels.

Differing temperature observations all show the same trend line in recent years. Madison lakes are freezing about a week later and opening 10 days earlier and Lake Mendota is now frozen 15 days less than 50 years ago. Prof. Martin studies the atmosphere over all the northern land masses in the Northern Hemisphere, sort of looking at the Earth as from directly over the North Pole, and in that area since 1949 there have been 140 record high temperatures observed at various locations, and zero record low temperatures. (!!) This was a highly informative and convincing program, and if you missed it you missed a really good one.

Your editor has a personal recollection that follows all the others - when he first started growing roses 50+ years ago the final step in winter protection was to put hay over the beds, which could not be done until the ground was frozen. You can't put the hay on before the freeze, or you have just created a winter resort, with salad bar, for the mice. I used to do it on Thanksgiving morning, to work up an appetite. Now, the ground is not frozen until the second week in December.