Soooo, the snowmageddon is all Globull Warming’s fault…
“It’s cold because it’s hot.”
Today Show weather presenter, Al Roker, said that the reason it has been so cold in the U.S. over the last several weeks is not in spite of, but rather because of global warming.
His explanation is riddled with numerous unforced errors. First, he confuses the tropospheric polar vortex (TPV) with the weakening of stratospheric polar vortex (SPV), the latter of which has been strong all winter (i.e., donut-shaped ).
From Chris Martz on X, HERE.
Among other things, I ‘like’ how the TV weather types, especially in Europe show cooler temps, but in RED to scare the public.
It’s the frikkin WEATHER people! Weather doesn’t read the papers, it does what it wants, when it wants to do it! Yes, we’re in a La Nina situation per NOAA, HERE. Of note, even the so called experts at NOAA cannot actually explain ‘why’ La Nina weather patterns change like they do…
We were ‘supposed’ to have a low of zero last night, but when I went to bed it was only 9 degrees, and the weatherguessers were saying a low of 5 degrees Sunday night! So everything is shifting to the right. And we’d had less than an inch of snow (not that I’m complaining) over 1/4 to 1/2 inch of ice.
I only saw one vehicle out yesterday, and that was a 4WD pickup that stopped at the stop sign (surprised the hell out of me), and took a while, spinning all four wheels to get going. As he went down the street, he was dancing side to side on the ice.
We still had power when I went to bed, and no burst pipes, so I’m a happy camper. Yes, I know a lot of folks have it worse than we do, but I dare say they are better insulated and better prepared (like real snow removal equipment, snow blowers, etc.) than we are. Everybody in the group is okay so far, and we check on each other routinely.
Oddly, the phones have been ‘weird’ all day, a lot of no connections, some really scratchy vox when it does connect, but texts are getting through fine. I can’t help but wonder if the ice on the tower ‘petals’ is having a blanking effect???
Anyhoo, y’all stay safe and hunker down. The way this storm is extending, it may stick around through the middle of the week! Sigh…
“We still had power when I went to bed, and no burst pipes, so I’m a happy camper.”
Excellent news. I’m glad things are still working well for you there.
Glad you have power and no frozen pipes.
Here in East Idaho we haven’t had appreciable snow in the valleys, some in the mountains, this winter. High temps in the 20s and 30s, predictions into the 40s by next weekend, in January, just wow. Summer water usage looks grim unless we get more snow in the mountains.
Same on the west side. Winter? What’s that?
Sunrise Saturday hit -13 in the lakeside Illinois/Wisconsin area. 5 today. We’re see some snow now but we generally know how to deal with this stuff. Heart goes out to all the folks not used to the misery of snow and ice. It’s no fun at all. Thoughts and prayers…
We had between 5 and 12 inches of snow forecast here. This morning it looks more like two, which I’m fine with considering. Temperature is another thing however. It’s current 4° and is only supposed to reach 14° today with a projected overnight low of -3°. Spring can’t happen soon enough to suit me.
I remember the winter of 1977-78, when the Elkhorn and Platte Rivers froze, Omaha was below freezing for six weeks, below zero for one of those weeks, and my parents took a photo of me in the snow. All you can see are a pair of mittens sticking up. I had my hands over my head.
1973 was the last winter the Texas Panhandle and adjacent areas had snow drifts that blocked the first floor of houses, and people were coming and going through upstairs windows.
No thank you!
I remember that winter. We had moved to the county. Had some nice apricot trees that produced well the summer of ’77 and froze to death that winter. All of ’em were done for. It was blistering cold. Carried water to the barn from the pump house for the cows. The five gallon buckets would rub on the snow crust and splash on my pants. Pants were solid by the time I dumped the buckets into the trough. The snow drift on the south side of the house went from the peak out into the yard about 100 feet. Dad’s car was completely covered. He told about the winter of ’38 (IIRC). Cows walked over the fences on the snow. Entire hills were drifted so it looked like flat ground in SW Oklahoma. His neighbor told me that one farmer’s herd was drifted over in the lee of a river cut, and he had to drop bales of hay through a hole he chopped out. Feb ’83, we got about 30 inches of snow over two days in Abernathy. It took a month or more to melt away… Winter happens. Always has, always will.
East of the Cascades in Very Southern Oregon (yay Greater Idaho!), we’ve had a fairly dry winter. A bolus of rain at the beginning of January, and a few inches of snow, but light even for our semi-arid climate. OTOH, last year we had 4′ of heavy, wet snow in the course of a week. A few houses and many outbuildings succumbed to the load and gravity, as did way too many of our pine tree branches. I had to call in pros to do the tree cleanup, but got another year or five worth of wood for the stove in the shop/barn.
I’m not counting on another snow dump, but I can’t rule it out. I’ve heard tales of the snow tunnels in use in the late ’40s and into the ’50s, so $TINY_TOWN will get whatever the Lord wants us to get. I’m prepared, I think. We usually have ice between us and Flyover Falls, so studded snow tires are a must. They help. Usually.
Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get. – RAH
Our forecast went from 15″ to >18″, to dunno mix, to some ice and now it’s raining going to 40s and the ground is visible. E TN valley.
I’d be surprised to see actual weather worse than the forecast.
I learned years ago that with weather and hurricanes, forecasters give the worst possible forecast rather than the middle case they normally do, because few complain about bad weather milder than forecast but the opposite will generate lots of complaints.
And anyway, weather and baseball are the only places in life where you’re a star if you’re right 50 percent of the time.
Temps have been above zero but Monday night the forecast is for 12 hours of temps as low as -18°.
My apartment is on the 3rd floor of a 4 story building and stays warm so no worry about burst pipes so long as my furnace is on. Unfortunately, some apartments are vacant and some residents are away. We have had burst pipes in the past.
All- Thanks, and yes, things HAVE been worse! I was 10 when we got a foot of snow in Texarkana, 1960 I think. Much later, I was in Misawa, Japan during the winter of 76-77, we got 72 inches of snow in February, I remember walking to the hangar kicking the TOPS of the six foot high snow poles. We’ll deal with what we get, as best we can. All we can do.
For a while I was really confident that the dual dynamo solar model was better than the best climate modeling.
Then I decided that I saw a same potential flaw in both models.
Anyway, these days I am no more confident in someone else’s magnetohydrodynamics sim for that case, than I am someone else’s fluid mechanics inspired model for the Earth climate case.
But, the dual dynamo modeler was predicting decades of colder.
I’ve actually gotten interested in the remote sensing problems for ice cap estimation, as something I can explore. My current intuition is that if I got anywhere, it might help me sort out my feelings on accuracy issues at near earth scale. (Of course, I think I found a way to look at the ice thickness estimation problem that is stupidly complicated, and perhaps unlikely to work.)
Which is not to say that I have any idea what I am doing, or that I can actually do the hard things better than other people can.
Freezing, because it’s hotter. Uh uh.
Continuing to winter is caused by Globular Wormening is what’s known as doubling down on stupid.
There’s a reason a forecast is an estimate, not a certainty. Prepping for snowmageddon turns an extreme snow event into a PITA rather than a catastrophe.