From the Houston Chronicle
Melissa Phillip Chronicle
Excerpts:
Jose Umana builds a snow ball as he plays with his brother and father in the snow fall at Affordable Cars & Trucks on I-45, where his dad, Mario Hernandez, Sr. works.
Falling snowflakes glimmered in streetlights, so wide that they billowed to the ground like parachutes, and so tantalizing that even awestruck adults reached out their hands or stuck out their tongues to catch one.
By Wednesday evening, the flakes were big enough to hold their shape for a moment on the street before melting into the pavement, and a dusting had collected on parked cars in some parts of town.
The flurries tied a record for Houston’s earliest snowfall ever and warmed the hearts of winter weather lovers who have pined for snow since it last made an appearance on Christmas Eve 2004.
“I’ve got a pot roast in the Crock-Pot, and I’m going to go home, change into my warmest pajamas and eat pot roast and enjoy what may be the only real winter day we have all year,” said Tina Arnold, an Illinois native who took advantage of the wintry backdrop to pick up Christmas presents Wednesday at The Woodlands Mall.
Since 1895, records indicate, snow has fallen this early just once — on Dec. 10, 1944.
Late Wednesday, there were no reports of school or business closings Thursday morning in the Houston area.
Patrick Trahan, a spokesman for the city, said the icy weather was expected to taper off overnight and was not expected to disrupt morning traffic. He added that if conditions did not improve, the Public Works Department would clear the roads this morning.
Forecasters at the Houston/Galveston office of the National Weather Service said clouds and precipitation should give way today to sunshine and temperatures in the upper 50s.
Overnight lows for all areas but those north and west of Harris County were expected to stay above freezing tonight, said the weather service’s Paul Lewis.
Snowfall in the metro Houston area Wednesday caught forecasters somewhat by surprise. A significant chance for snowfall didn’t show up in computer models until about 9 p.m. Tuesday.
“The midnight crew adjusted the forecast at that time,” Lewis said.
Read the entire article and watch video here
Alphajuno (14:52:35) :
I talked to a long-time (over 50 years) Galveston (20 miles south of Houston) resident today. Except for our snowfalls in December of 04 and 08, the only other time he recalled it snowing was three times in the 60s.
Houston snowed once in the 84-85 winter, gone by noon. We also had a doozy of an ice storm, but I don’t remember the year. After that, the EPA made the airport dig up the ramp and put in a drainage recovery system for aircraft de-icing fluid. Never used it, and the next time they redid the concrete, they paved right over it.
I can’t take these
weatherclimate extremes. I’m moving back to Illinois and becoming a Senator.It tickles me how record cold is “weather” and record heat is “evidence”.
Well record snow is merely weather to the AGW crowd.
This flowchart clearly explains how Climate Change works, so that there is no longer any confusion 😉
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/understanding-man-made-climate-change
MattN (17:44:33) :
If it gets any warmer…..
I hope not, I’m already freezing my nuts off…
Perhaps OT, but I have been giving very serious consideration to the problems associated with personal comforts, like a roof over our heads, heating, eating, etc. Those general necessities associated with decent human life. It occurs to me that in the dysfunctional UK, none of these fragile facilities will be available to us, at prices we can afford. Suppose we ARE seeing the beginning of another “minimum”, or worse!!
I shall therefore sell up in the UK and move to a country where I can purchase some land with a stand of timber for heating and cooking and a ruined building that we can rebuild, for 10% of the prices in the UK. A country where keeping chickens and a couple of pigs is not looked askance and having a permit to hunt for the pot is considered normal.
Especially, I want a country where the neighbours understand that cold and warm seasons are naturally occurring and good nutrition is a way of life. I would be crazily stupid to tell everyone where this Shangri La exists, but I am willing to leave a clue so that people like me can join us, if they so desire.
The distortion of climate science for the purposes of taxation, is matched by the deliberate misinformation fed to us by socialist governments that wish to weaken their citizens, so that these poor fools can be more easily controlled. If populations are obese, they are unable to fight for their rights. Some might say this is a strange point of view to hold, but I suggest it’s no stranger than the fiction that CO2 is a pollutant. If government advice about good nutrition were correct, there would be very few fatties, but million of fatties there are. What’s going on?? Is the advice wrong??
Read everything published at http://www.westonaprice.org/splash_2.htm and those who can figure it out, will soon be moving to the same superb location. The fishing is also a joy!!
Best of luck,
Perry
PS. By studying mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child, researchers have found that most of the actual European inhabitants seem to have come from re-expansion of hunter-gatherers populations, which have migrated from Iberia, Europe after the end of the last Ice Age reports an article in the January issue of Genome Research.
In the study of human evolution through history and pre-history there are now two indispensable sets of genes to follow: Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genes. Both sets are transmitted uniparentally from one generation to the next – father to son in the case of the Y-chromosome and mother to child in the case of mtDNA – which makes them especially useful to trace lineages.
Mitochondrial DNA is a circular structure composed of 13 genes and exists, as the name indicates, in mitochondria, which are organelles responsible for energy production in the cell. Mitochondrial DNA sequences can be divided in different groups – haplogroups – according to genetic variations (or polymorphisms). Each haplogroup can then be divided into sub-clades (or sub-groups) according to further polymorphisms. Because it is possible to calculate the changes occurring in mtDNA in a certain period of time (the rate of change is constant and known) it is possible to follow in time the different sub-clades and learn when they did get separated, and consequently their individual migrations/geographical separations.
And in fact, the study of mtDNA haplogroups has been used to understand better the migrations of human population throughout evolution. Unfortunately, this has not been possible in Europe, although some progress has been made on a relatively rare haplogroup V. But around half of the European mtDNA sequences belong to a haplogroup (H) and so far it had been impossible to understand its evolutionary pathway in the continent.
But now Luísa Pereira, Martin Richards, Ana Goios, Vincent Macaulay, António Amorim and colleagues from Spain, Israel, Russia, Germany, Dubai, Czech Republic and Ireland, taking advantage of recently available information on haplogroup H polymorphisms, decided to make a new attempt to understand the European migrations throughout evolution. The team of scientists analysed 649 individuals of the H haplogroup from 20 populations throughout Europe, Caucasus and the near East and, by managing to trace the localisation of the different sub-clades, were able to further resolve the evolutionary (and migrational) history of haplogroup H and modern Europeans.
In fact, it is believed that haplogroup H evolved in the Near East around 28.000-30.000 years ago and spread throughout Europe 20.000 years ago. Although it was thought that some, or all, of the European population of this haplogroup have re-expanded throughout the continent from a European glacial refuge 15.000 years ago, this was not possible to be confirmed. Now Pereira, Richards, Goios, Macaulay, Amorim and colleagues’ work not only confirms that in fact the oldest lineage of H (called H*) was found in the near East and entered Europe during the peak of the last Ice Age, but also claims to have identified the glacial refuge in Europe from where humans re-expanded as Iberia.
Pereira, Richards, Goios, Macaulay, Amorim and colleagues’ work is important for the history of human evolution suggesting that most modern Europeans evolved from hunter-gathers that expanded at the end of the last Ice Age (end of the Palaeolithic) from a glacial refuge in Iberia where they had stayed for around 10,000 years after an initial migration from the Near East.
Piece researched and written by: Catarina Amorim ( catarina.amorim@linacre.ox.ac.uk)
There’s an interesting text summing up “global warming” platitudes:
Pre-industrial CO2 levels were about the same as today. How and why we are told otherwise?
But the first question placed by the author in his article has serious global political answer, alas.
I wrote about it in my post Climate Change – Faked, Faked, Faked!. I put there also some additional material from prof. Jaworowski’s article published in Poland at the beginning of this year. (Prof. Jaworowski’s works and theses are the gist of the first article written by Dr. Tim Ball).
Regards
Mike McMillan (23:16:40) :
“I can’t take these weather climate extremes. I’m moving back to Illinois and becoming a Senator.”
Sorry, but I think the Illinois Senator job has been taken off the auction block.
Which poses an interesting question, I wonder how much the Illinois Senate position could go for on E-Bay?
;>P
Gone, snow…
…on a screen near me; just as I was checking the CPU usage (15%), too.
Now if you can exert this control in the great outdoors, Anthony…
I can’t wait to hear what the commentators have to say about the weather during the inauguration. Maybe we could start a pool on snow, wind, temperature, etc. Followed by a second pool on the number of times commentators on the networks refer to it appropriately.
Not another global warming movie
http://www.viewlondon.co.uk/films/the-day-the-earth-stood-still-film-review-26552.html
Has anyone looked at the Pastafarian web sites?
If anyone does not know about them, they are a spoof religion started up by some students to counter claims by ‘intelligent design’ supporters that their version of ‘christian evolution’ should be taught in the US. The Pastafarians use similar arguments to ‘prove’ that God is a ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’. One of the tenets of this spoof religion is that the increase in Global Warming correlates well with the decline of pirates, so that must be what’s causing it. They advocate dressing and talking like a pirate to bring world temperatures down.
Recently there has been a upsurge in pirate activity, particularly around Somalia. And, impressively, global temperatures have been decreasing. The correlation seems to be much better than with the CO2 figures, and the Pastafarians are having a field day, given that they actually predicted this effect.
I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced…….
There appears to be a positive corrlation between the singing of “White Christmas” and the arrival of wintry weather. Therefore stop singing “White Christmas” down South and you won’t have this problem. “We can control the climate just check out the computer models that say so!”
By the way, when JFK was inaugurated in 1961, there was a very big snowstorm with lots of snow on the East Coast. I remember the drifts were taller than me, but I was 9 years old at the time. Hopefully we will have a blizzard to rival the Great Blizzard of “88 for Obama inauguration. Would be nice!Hope Al Gore goes there that day.
” There appears to be a positive corrlation between the singing of “White Christmas” and the arrival of wintry weather. Therefore stop singing “White Christmas” down South and you won’t have this problem…”
Aha, but were you able to make a testable prediction with this hypothesis? The Pastafarians were.
There is now more evidence for pirates being the caise of warming than there is for CO2. Everyone talk like a pirate, quickly!
wow..
You fine Americans are going to freeze big time.
this week and certainly also next week. Big areas in the west with more than 10 degrees K bleow average!!!!
wow…
And here the link…
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp2.html
The link is updated often.
“” E.M.Smith (17:01:49) :
Richard Sharpe (14:52:22) :
It seems more likely to shrink during what looks like the coming coldening. Which does not bode well for many of the extra mouths we added during the good times.
Essentially correct, but simplified. Over a few seasons, farmers adjust the crop they grow (wheat fails at the margin, next year plant more barley). In some regions, the cold also means drought (i.e. California – there goes the salad…) but since we grow lots of cotton in Kern county (for no good reason – water intensive semitropical plant best grown in the south…) we could do some crop substitutions as well. “”
Well not quite correct E. M. , if you are as aware of Kern County as you seem, then you know that it is not bustling with bountiful supplies of surface water. So much of the time, the farmers have to rely on pumped ground water, and I can tell you that central valley well water is between 8 and 9 on the Mohs hardness scale; hardness being the operative word.
So if you check Kern County on “the West side”, from hiway 99 to hiway 5, you will notice that a lot of the ground looks like a giant salt pond, from constant irrigation with ground water.
So there isn’t much besides sage brush and cotton that will actually grow on that land, and the sage brush futures don’t promise much for that crop, unless it becomes a desirable ethanol feedstock.
If you look a little further north, where they have some actual real rivers that bring surface water down from the Sierra (and ship it to socal), they too grow cotton, when the surface salts build up; but every now and then, they get a water bonus, and live water actually flows down those rivers.
Many of the west side farmers then flood the land with Sierra snow melt, and plant rice, which turns the whole place into a wetland for migratory birds.
The surface flooding, flushes the salts back down to the next clay layer, and rejuvenates the surface soils, so once the snow melt bounty ends, they can go back to growing tomatoes and canteloupes, or feed corn.
Eventually, they have to revert to pumped ground water irrigation, and the salts return, till they get back to the cotton or sagebriush stage.
It is actually quite sensible and scientifically sound, and California cotton and rice are both top market products when they have them.
I hasten to point out that the previous snow on Dec 10, 1944 was listed as a “trace” while this one was officially a one inch accumulation. In that sense, this is unprecedented. Not since records began more than a century ago, has there been this much snow this early. That is to say – never in living memory.
I’d call that a long term observation.
I have lived my entire life in either the Baton Rouge area or in Tuscaloosa County, AL. We would get snow in Tuscaloosa and it would stay on the ground for several days and once we got hail storm that piled up in 3″-4″ drifts and lasted for two hot summer days, but the snow we got yesterday in Baton Rouge was different.
I live about twenty miles northeast of the downtown area and while the snow was mostly gone in the city by last night, my pasture is still fifty percent white. I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this south of the MasonDixon line. I warned my friends and family back in the summer that if Solar Cylce 24 didn’t make an appearance soon, this winter was going to be a doozy. I think the fun has only begun. I just hope our Nigerian goats and GulfCoast Sheep will be okay – I may have to put a fireplace in the barn.
wow.
dan howitt.
Per Strandberg (11:52:56) :
Severe storms batter the south and east USA by Dan Corbett
In this report we can learn that the storm was created by “unseasonably warm air pushed north from the Gulf of Mexico”. Emphasis on “unseasonably warm air”.
As someone who lives in NJ where this event occurred I can confirm the report, Wednesday the temperature was mid 60s, that is unseasonable for here!
In the next sentence it says “On Wednesday, this warm and moist air met up with colder air coming down from the arctic”. Without any mention on “unseasonably”, related to the cold air.
Cold Arctic air isn’t ‘unseasonable’ here in December and although we’re supposed to have a high of 36ºF tomorrow it will be up to 60ºF on Monday (unseasonable average for the day is 42ºF)!
E.M.Smith (16:19:29) :
Larkin Lowrey (08:47:26) :
I figured Al Gore would get me sooner or later but I’m a little surprised to have been bit so soon.
He was on national news with Obama when the Messiah endorsed The Gore Agenda. We all ought to have a blizzard by the weekend 😉
I shudda kept my mouth shut …. 8-} Can we ban AlGore from TV?
George E. Smith (15:43:14) :
Well not quite correct E. M. , if you are as aware of Kern County as you seem, then you know that it is not bustling with bountiful supplies of surface water.
Yeah, I’m that aware of it. Drive through it at least a half dozen times a year and have for … for a very long time… I’m very familiar with all the salinity issues you raised along with the flood treatment to flush the salts (and Kesterson and drain tiles and …)
Where I seem to have gone off track is my understanding of cotton. Didn’t realize it was so salt / hardness tolerant. From:
http://www.botanyconference.org/engine/search/index.php?func=detail&aid=404
A solution culture experiment study was conducted in to categorize cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) germplasm against salinity stress. There were 20 cotton genotypes and three salinity levels (viz Control, 100 and 200 mol m–3 NaCl) with five replications.
Seems cotton comes in both non-tolerant and salt tolerant types. Live and learn…
I’ve been trying for 3 years now to grow cotton and only got some to do well this year (“Aggie” strain – nice pinkish flowers and red tint to the dark green leaves. Really pretty!) Maybe I need to dump some salt on it to make it happy 😉 or at least look up the cultural requirements for it rather than treating it like a 1/2 fast hobby… But it’s just a bit too cold where I live to get it to mature well.
I took a cheap shot based on my biases and didn’t look up why cotton might actually make commercial sense. OK. I’ll get over it. Later. A lot later… 😉
I also presumed they were getting water from the Fed system (i.e. aqua duct, Oroville / Shasta dams et.al.) in greater quantities than your post implies. They sure had a lot of signs up when the contract was being renewed… but maybe that’s only the guys near I5.
Still, I think that in a food emergency we would find a way to plant something else. UC has developed some salt tolerant tomatoes, for example, specifically aimed at that part of the state with the salt crusts. IIRC it can grow in 30% or so sea water. See:
http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=5840
and for another source:
http://www.plantstress.com/Files%5Cengineering_salt.htm
Orach & quinoa are from the ‘saltbush’ family (chenopods) and I’d suspect some strains of them would do well in saline / hard conditions. There is an ongoing program searching coastal areas for salt tolerance genes. I *think* they found a bean of some kind that grows near oceans (but it’s been a couple of years since I read the article…)
From:
https://lswiki.byu.edu/index.php?title=Quinoa_Salt_Stress&oldid=4455
High salinity is one of the greatest challenges facing crop production today. […] Chenopodium Quinoa is a crop that has been able to overcome a number of abiotic stresses including high salinity.
So while I may have been bogus in my slam on the commercial growing of cotton, I’m going to stick to the idea that we could do crop substitutions (since otherwise I’d have been wrong, and that just couldn’t be 😉
I found more here if anyone’s interested