Over the past 14 years I visited four countries in South America 14 times but always in September or October during the Southern Springtime, going from darkening, and cooler days at home, to lighter and warmer days down south, not to mention confusing reversals in different daylight saving times. This year I reversed the process going from Northern Hemisphere Spring/Summer to Southern Hemisphere late Autumn/Winter. And I imagine you are confused already!

Last November, after years of missed leads, mistakes and comical misunderstandings, I gained access to a large stack of boxes filled with notebooks, large registers with neat rows of numbers, and rolls of ink tracings on graph paper that I thought might be of great value to science and not just for historical value! One-hundred and two continuous years of Southern Hemisphere weather data painstakingly gathered by 5 Italian "worker" priests of the Salesian Order in the same place, Punta Arenas Chile, the southernmost city on the South American continent.

I only had a few minutes to take about 24 digital images of various pages of the records, at that time, neatly piled the floor of the storeroom of the "Museo Maggiorino Borgatello" which adjoins the large, imposing, Roman Catholic Church of Maria Auxiladora, about 500 meters from the north coast of the Strait of Magellan.

When I showed the images to leading scientists from the American Geophysical Union during the annual meeting of that organization in San Francisco in December, there was genuine enthusiasm, but more questions than I could answer. There were lots of helpful suggestions, but it was obvious more information was needed and when it came to money and assistance to digitized and analyze the data ... well ... nothing! The hesitancy of course was completely understandable.

Besides, no one was sure how much, and to what extent, the director of the museum, or the church fathers, would cooperate. My personal efforts came to nothing in 1992 when someone in authority said "no" to a friend of mine, an 80 year old Slovenian priest. I tried again in the year 2000 when a scientist I met in Buenos Aires expressed interest in troposphere ozone measurements from 1888, that the old priest told me were in the data, but by 2000 the priest was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and no one from his Liceo knew where the records were. In the interest of brevity I am leaving a fuller description of the weird details of my mistakes and miscommunications for another time.

So, in 2004, with the project stagnating, I flew from Northern Spring to Southern Winter for the first time, with the intention of personally setting up a small workstation and making a commitment of a modest amount of money to be paid monthly to the Museum's director to hire a local person to begin protecting and ordering the data. This way I might-just might-be able to have something in digital form to show to interested scientists during the west coast Geophysical meeting in December 2004.

The director of the museum, a professor of philosophy of Italian descent, was friendly and cordial and agreed to my proposal. After all, I was making him a "no strings," unconditional offer he could hardly refuse. I was risking just a few thousand dollars as a micro-mini-philanthropist. He risked the gift of a new computer.

But my history of misunderstandings and comical mistakes continued, since I had allowed for only a week in Punta Arenas. I hadn't allowed enough time. I hadn't wanted to spend too much time in a freezing cold place even though I brought warm woolen clothing that keeps me warm in upstate New York in January (Northern Hemisphere) and even served me well in Alaska at 20 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero.

So, imagine my surprise when, instead of snow and ice, I found mild, pleasant weather. "Is this normal?" I asked a friend. "No es normal," she said. One friend, a concert pianist professor of Electrical Engineering said, "There is no normal anymore. It used to snow in May." So, I never got to wear my woolens and long underwear and I could have spent more time there because I had trouble buying the equipment, but that too is another story!

A dear friend of mine, an English orphan who was raised by Chileans on a huge sheep ranch, an Estancia, in Argentina once said to me, "We used to have lots of snow and no one knew how to ski. Now everyone knows how to ski but there is no snow."

There is little doubt that the climate has warmed at high southern latitudes-and northern too-but there are exceptions.

In 1995 a severe snow storm killed an enormous number of sheep and cattle. Instead of calling the storm "nevazon" (blizzard) the storm was called "El Terremoto Blanco," the "white earthquake" for all the destruction it caused. That storm also ended a project I had to see if indeed there was a high incidence of blindness in Patagonian sheep which might be attributable to increased ultraviolet radiation form ozone depletion, that is, from the Ozone Hole that comes near, or over the region several times a year. The storm killed most of the sheep.

I left on my rigid schedule and went further north along the Pacific coast to Valdivia and Concepcion, both cities founded over four hundred years ago by Spaniards and destroyed several times by earthquakes, tidal waves and English pirates, one of whom was knighted and has a high school and a main road named after him in Marin County California.

Some 44 years ago, on the first day winter, May 21, Valdivia was shaken by a series of earthquakes, 6.5, 7.5,7.8 and 7.5 on the Richter scale. Early the next day a tremor of 7.5 hit and 28 seconds later the largest shock recorded by instruments hit, 9.5. The land around Valdivia sank about 4 feet and further up the coast rose some three feet. Nothing happened while I was there.

It wasn't really cold but Chilean hotels are not exactly over heated. In Valdivia. One evening I went to see the Hollywood film "El Dia Despues de Ma–ana" about catastrophic climate change triggered by "global warming": super hurricanes generate super tornadoes that destroy Los Angeles and a super mega blizzard buries New York and New Yorkers and triggers an Ice Age.

I liked the film despite almost everybody in the Northern Hemisphere getting flash frozen like vegetables and shrimp in supermarket freezer boxes. Love, self sacrifice and loyalty, especially family loyalty, are dominant themes and there is no human violence that I can recall: no cannibalism or zombies, no mega maniacs although the closed minded, anti environmental vice president seems suspiciously like Dick Cheney.

There was an unusual note of racial cooperation in the film and I was particularly pleased to see high achieving high school kids get some attention, particularly the technical accomplished geeky black kid who can do something besides shoot hoops, drugs and people. I sort of wished the closed minded vice president had frozen to death instead of the president but even in fantasy, you can't have everything. (By the way, the movie cost me the equivalent of US $1.56 and a bag of popcorn .78¢)

As usual, the Southern Hemisphere is totally ignored by Hollywood, and since the earth is always depicted with the Northern Hemisphere "up," the lower part is not shown or is darkened or airbrushed out, just like photos of nude males-not just Iraqi prisoners. You don't see or think about what's below the waist.

The Southern Hemisphere has less land, fewer people, much less industry and is mostly ocean. It is cleaner and less polluted and has a long history of being conquered, despoiled and exploited by people from the north. Since it is cleaner than the northern half and does not have a protective shield of sulfate aerosol filth, it is warming faster than the north and since its ozone layer has been depleted more than the north (6% vs. 3%), more ultraviolet radiation penetrates to the surface. For some reason, this doesn't seem to bother people down here.

The "happy ending" of the film has maybe a few hundred people from New York trudging on the surface of the hundreds of feet of snow and ice covering New Jersey, southward to Arizona and Mexico which now, presumably, will have the climates of North Dakota and Minnesota. I thought it was a good film, and or course, you look at, and feel, the weather a little differently-at least for a couple of days.

Down south there is an energy crisis: gasoline prices, much higher than in the US, about 33% higher, have risen higher. Everyone seems nervous about the violence in Iraq, instability in oil exporting Venezuela and US foreign policy in general.

Shortages of natural gas caused Argentinean officials to cut back on gas exports to Chile, seriously affecting industrial production and it is a good thing the weather has been so warm, or home heating would have been a problem. When Argentinean authorities agreed to increase gas exports to Chile, Bolivia, with large reserves of natural gas and long standing claims against Chile for territorial loses suffered in the War of the Pacific in 1879, threatened to reduce gas exports to Argentina, sort of acting like Republican congressmen.

The Mapuches, the indigenous peoples of Chile, never conquered by the Incas, or the Spaniards, and subdued only in the 1870s by Chileans are acting up. So are the Aymara and the Quechua speaking people of Bolivia. This is definitely a phenomena to watch. Next thing you know the Dakota, the Navaho and who knows who else, will want independence without casinos!

And, as Santiago was warm, so too was Buenos Aires. After a delicious steak dinner (the waiter cut the steak in half with a spoon), with tomatoes that taste like tomatoes, crispy lettuce and garlic parsley potatoes, I was leaving with my light jacket in my hand-not on-when I asked the waiter if the temperature (72.5 F officially) was unusual for the first day of winter and he said, "No se–or. No es normal".