Yes, it is that loopy time of the year
More than 200 Mainers Set to Take Polar Bear Plunge
With temperatures forecast to be in the mid to upper 20s, a group of dedicated Mainers will be taking a plunge into the Atlantic on Saturday at East End Beach in Portland to draw attention to climate change.
This will be the seventh year that Dr. Tony Owens, an emergency-department physician at Maine Medical Center, is taking the polar bear dip. He said all these folks braving the cold get people talking, and for some it may be the first time that they are talking about the impacts of climate change.
“My primary goal,” he said, “is to support that mission of highlighting climate change – global warming – and to try to engage citizens in supporting a sustainable environment.”
The event, which helps raise funding for the National Resources Council of Maine, kicks off with a 5-kilometer race at 11 a.m. and ends with a noon plunge into the Atlantic Ocean at East End Beach.
Emily O’Donnell, one of the more than 200 who pledged to dash and dip this weekend, said it gets family and friends to understand the depth of her commitment to getting the word out on the need for action to slow climate change.
Nothing says climate change like taking a fossil fueled vehicle to the beach to freeze your buns off. Warmists are rather amusing, though, in their spreading awareness silliness.
Owens, who also is a board member of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said that when they take the dip they will be at ground zero for one of the major local impacts of climate change: sea-level rise.
Oh, really? Perhaps the good doctor should have checked the hard data, rather than relying on scaremongering, in which we find for Portland, Maine: “The mean sea level trend is 1.87 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.15 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1912 to 2015 which is equivalent to a change of 0.61 feet in 100 years.” The other Maine stations are similar.
My mother’s side of the family is from Maine, with my grandmother being from Buckfield, and grandfather from Portland. I don’t remember all of the stories, but mom told us that they were about the only family that wintered over in Old Orchard Beach, though I’m not sure for how many winters that was the case.
Me? I spent one winter in Portland, when I was in the third grade. We’d get snow, and then it got so bitterly cold overnight that an ice crust would form. My younger sisters were able to walk on the crust without breaking through, but it would usually break through under my weight.
Kids would make snowballs, then put them in a pan and leave them outside overnight, at which point they became mostly iceballs; those things hurt!
But no, I never even heard of a polar bear plunge when I was a kid in Maine. I think that there’s s’posed to be a polar bear plunge around here in January, but no, I’m not
stupidbrave enough to join in.As for referring to the residents of Maine as Mainers, I believe that Mainiacs is the correct term. 🙂