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The forecasts of this weekend’s storm in the east were very accurate. However,
here’s why Nor’easters are so hard to forecast. From Mental Floss.
… All of the big, historic snows that live in the record books in cities like WashingtonD.C. and New York were produced by a unique kind of East Coast storm known as a “nor’easter,” so called because the storm produces strong northeasterly winds along the coast. Nor’easters form when the dynamics in the upper levels of the atmosphere come together just right to form a low-pressure system at the surface that eventually tracks off the coast of the Mid-Atlantic—think North Carolina and Virginia—and moves parallel to the coast as it heads toward New England and eventually Canada.
Nor’easters can grow into very powerful storms, sometimes the strength and size of a hurricane. The strong winds wrapping around the low-pressure system often drag bitterly cold air from the west and warm, moist air from the south. The varying temperatures through the storm usually lead to the whole spectrum of precipitation, including snow, sleet, freezing rain, and regular rain. The temperature gradient can be so sharp that two neighboring towns can see completely different weather conditions, with one hit by heavy snow while the other gets ice or rain.
When you have such dramatic differences in weather over such short distances, the track of the storm is everything when it comes to determining who will see the worst snow and who will see a cold rain—and this is usually where the greatest uncertainty lies. …
For grins we include a two year old NY Times article on “The End of Snow.”
Officials canceled two Olympic test events last February in Sochi after several days of temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and a lack of snowfall had left ski trails bare and brown in spots. That situation led the climatologist Daniel Scott, a professor of global change and tourism at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, to analyze potential venues for future Winter Games. His thought was that with a rise in the average global temperature of more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit possible by 2100, there might not be that many snowy regions left in which to hold the Games. He concluded that of the 19 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics, as few as 10 might be cold enough by midcentury to host them again. By 2100, that number shrinks to 6.
The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s, and as a result, snow is melting. In the last 47 years, a million square miles of spring snow cover has disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere. Europe has lost half of its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s, and if climate change is not reined in, two-thirds of European ski resorts will be likely to close by 2100.
The same could happen in the United States, where in the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters. …
Adding to the mirth, Don Surber posts on the “curse of RFK, Jr.”
The fourth blizzard in six years is about to hit Washington, D.C., if the bureaucrats at the National Weather Station are correct.
If 15 or more inches of snow pile up in the nation’s capital, the blizzard will rank in the top 10 of blizzards ever recorded in Washington, stretching back to 1850.
Three of the top 10 blizzards occurred in this century!
Indeed, six of the 10 worst have happened since 1979.
Now what is with the sudden big snows in Washington?
Blame Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior, a trust fund liberal who has found fame and fortune as a global warming huckster. On September 24, 2008, he doomed Washington to record snowfalls when he wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times that said there would never be big snows in Washington again because of Exxon! …
IBD editors opine on Al Gore’s global warming racket.
Ten years ago Monday, Al Gore said we had only a decade left to save the planet from global warming. But Earth has been doing just fine. Why do we listen to this man?
While preening at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2006 during the premiere of his “An Inconvenient Truth” fib-umentary, Gore made his grand declaration. The former vice president said, in the words of the AP reporter taking down his story, that “unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” In Gore’s own words, he claimed we were in “a true planetary emergency.”
Ten years later, he’s probably hoping that everyone has forgotten about his categorical statement.
The terrible truth for Gore is that there is no planetary emergency. Not one of the dire predictions he and the rest of the alarmist community made has come to pass. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that they have been running a racket. Here’s how we know: …
You won’t believe the waste when Swedish windmills ice up. Power Line post reports on the idiocy.
… The entire rationale for wind turbines is to stop global warming by reducing the amount of CO2 being returned to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.
In the attached picture, recently taken in Sweden, freezing cold weather has caused the rotor blades of a wind turbine to ice up bringing the blades to a complete stop.
To fix the “problem” a helicopter is employed (burning aviation fuel) to spray hot water (which is heated in the frigid temperatures using a truck equipped with a 260 kW oil burner) on the blades of the turbine to de-ice them.
The aviation fuel, the diesel for the truck, and the oil burned to heat the water, could produce more electricity (at the right time to meet demand) than the unfrozen wind turbine could ever produce. (Before it freezes up again).
The attached picture is a metaphor of the complete insanity of the climate change debate.
In decades to come this one photo alone with sum up an era of stupidity, when rational thought, logic and commonsense was abandoned and immense wealth and resources needlessly sacrificed. …