Weird Weather – Multiple Double Digit Snowstorms in Annapolis, Trucking in Snow for Winter Olympics in Vancouver
It has been one really strange winter here in Annapolis, Maryland. We have already had two snowstorms that each dumped something close to 20″ of snow. My wife and I just finished digging out from the most recent one yesterday afternoon, but we are now under a winter weather watch with a prediction for another double digit snowfall starting this afternoon. Right after coming in from a couple of hours doing the county a favor by shoveling off our unplowed street – with the help of our neighbors – we turned on the TV to get an update on the Winter Olympics. You can just imagine how humorous we found it to hear the announcer talking about the massive effort to truck in snow.
I think she even mentioned that there was some snow being flown in, but by that time I was laughing too hard to pay close attention. My lovely wife, who has not yet forgiven me for moving her to Annapolis FROM Florida started looking for a contact number she could call to volunteer to send some of our snow out for the ski events.
Of course, when the weather is cold and snowy outside, it is hard to imagine how the scientists can be correct with their predictions about global warming – which is also called climate change. Conversations about the topic often stray from the kinds of rational, science-based discussions that I enjoy to conversations that use words best used in church, like “I believe…”
However, I just came across a great link that helps to explain what is happening to the highly populated regions of the world in the temperate zones in North America and Europe. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Watch Magazine on an article titled Arctic Air Ushers in Chilly December contains a terrific graphic image that really does show why a picture is worth 1000 words. The image shows regions of higher than normal temperature versus those with lower than normal temperature. I highly recommend that you go and read about Arctic Oscillations.
In the meantime, I need to go shovel some deep snow off of my deck before the next storm hits. I do not want to mess with a collapsed deck.
Hat tip to Karen Street at A Musing Environment for the link to NOAA’s Climate Service.
You do realize that these arctic oscillations are natural, don’t you? For fuck’s sake, you realize there is massive politics at work to blame everything and the kitchen sink on global warming, and to bury every admission that it’s not the cause, right? Like here http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1113-nasa.html
Seriously, how can someone bemoan how the anti-nuclear retards blame everything on nuclear plants and then in the next breath do the exact same thing on global warming? Do you evern appreciate that the biosphere’s role in climate, responsible for the majority of the effect, is largely unknown? And NOT ACCOUNTED FOR in those pinheaded fluid dynamics models laughingly called “climate models”?
The atmosphere, and everything that feeds into it like the biosphere, was not made to be simple and understandable by humans. It’s not a nuclear reactor Rod. It’s not something that you can itemize and analyze and figure out. It’s not linear, it’s dynamic, it’s full of feedbacks and it’s massively parallel. It’s not something the human species has figured out. And we won’t, not for a long time.
This pretense that we understand climate only hurts the real science. Climate change is a bunch of over-politicized crap whose only redeeming, only CERTAIN, feature is its usefulness to phase out coal and natural gas burning. That is all.