HOLD THAT WRECKING BALL, HERE COMES THE SUN!

I´m not here to debate changes in the global environment. Let´s just say that this was the first spring I can remember riding the Harley in 80-degree weather, and the following week I was mowing the lawn, and the week after that I was shoveling 14 inches of snow.

Not really that unusual for New Hampshire, where "nine months of winter and three months of poor tobogganing" has long been the outdoor living mantra.

That does bring us, however, to what we won´t debate: the difference between weather and climate. We can all agree that weather is the six inches of partly cloudy when it's in our basements, and climate when it´s our attics.

Those of us who began as children and stubbornly refuse to give up those origins, all have stories about the "normal" outdoor seasonal conditions when we were kids. "When we were kids," we would say, "the snowbanks were up to the window sills."

"When you were kids," our mothers remind us, "you never came out of the basement." Funny, because we remember it as the attic.

I recently watched a TV show called "The Imploders." This may be the most unintentionally hilarious reality program ever produced, as I watched a family of "demolition experts" travel around the country and "bring down buildings."

My favorite was not the usual bang-boom application used to pancake an obsolete structure, but rather the "tripping" method. At one locale, the Imploder clan did it this way because the city couldn´t afford the explosives; it was saving that budget for the 4th of July.

I understand. As municipal cost-cutting goes, where better to trim the fat than from urban destruction funds, especially if it means a few more skyrockets? I mean, how hard is it to knock something down on the cheap? I once watched my neighbor tip over his garden shed with his riding mower, and he wasn´t even trying.

When "tripping" a building, the whole thing is weakened by cutting holes in it. No one in the crew could agree on how many holes were needed, or where they should be placed, or how big they should be, and I began to get this sinking feeling rising in my skepticism. They would then tie a cable to it (using the aforementioned laws of willy-nilly physics) and pull it over. Simple enough. Right?

My favorite part was when the crew chief, whose knowledge of building-pulling was seemingly based on his frat house prank days of attempting to stuff a grand piano into a shower stall, said to the guy operating the building-puller: "Hey! If she starts to go, get out of there!"

(WARNING: When someone needs to tell or be told this, they might need another year of postsecondary bathroom piano-stuffing before they start flattening buildings that could … well … flatten a building.)

They combined all these eyeballing scientific methods of wreckification, and applied them to an old paper mill near here in Lincoln, and all the locals came out to watch the spectacle and re-live their attic-dwelling childhood roots.

When the time came, we watched them give it a mighty non-explosive heave and, voila! It shuddered a little and stood there. Someone, apparently, had forgotten to make the stress cuts in the back, and the resulting tug was like trying to horizontally raise the Titanic with a rubber Slinky.

This is where I stand with weather forecasters and climate change experts. Their collective expertise alternately tells us that we´re either in for a light sprinkle or a re-enactment of Noah´s maiden voyage. Here, this usually translates as a foot of snow.

Who should we believe? Should we entrust our Icelandic retirement plans to an "expert" who says things like "inter-glacial warmth is driven by orbital mechanics"? Or, should we accept that if we wait long enough, we´ll be low & dry because of the old New England salt´s riposte, when asked if it will ever stop raining:

"Always has."

One scientist says that "we should not stop breathing, even though it would be one of the most immediate steps to slowing CO2 emissions." I do love egghead humor, but I´m not convinced he was trying to be funny.

Or, as the well-seasoned North Country sage would offer, "If you don´t like the weather, wait a minute."

I think I´m going with the time-tested building destructor´s code: "If she starts to go, get out of there!"

I´m not sure where "there" will be when it arrives, but if we can get to it from here, we´re packing up our waders and our sunscreens and heading way up northeast, just south of the western skyline.

Either that, or it´s back to the winterized subterranean attics of long-past summers. Happy 4th of July, all!

Syndicated columnist B. Elwin Sherman writes from the New Hampshire north country. Copyright 2010 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used here with permission. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary internet links to this column at B. Elwin's website may be distributed without written permission.