From the “weather is not climate” department, inconvenient travel:
Here’s a sample of headlines related to difficult if not impossible holiday travel:
Christmas Eve storm in central states creates travel misery (WaPo)
A slow-moving storm spread snow, sleet and rain across the nation’s midsection Thursday, making last-minute holiday travel treacherous but promising a white Christmas for some.
The National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings for parts of Oklahoma, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Texas. It cautioned that travel would be extremely dangerous in those areas through the weekend and that drivers should pack a winter survival kit.
Winter Storm Disrupts Holiday Travel (NYT)
“Snow will be falling at a rate that snow plows are not able to keep up with,” AccuWeather reported on its Web site, “while winds gusting past 40 miles per hour will cause severe blowing and drifting along with whiteout conditions.”
Heavy snowfall causes disruption across Europe (BBC)
Heavy snow and ice are causing disruption across a wide swathe of Europe. Flights have been delayed or cancelled at airports in Britain, Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Power providers in south-east France say they have had to cut supplies to around two million people to avoid a massive regional blackout.
In Poland, nearly 60 people have died this December because of the weather.
Rare blizzard strikes West Texas
DALLAS — In much of the rolling plains of West Texas, a blizzard has never been recorded.
There has been one now.
The region west and northwest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area saw blizzard-like conditions throughout the day Christmas Eve as up to 8 inches of snow fell in the region, according to the National Weather Service. Winds gusting at up to 65 mph drifted the snow as deep as 5 feet in some areas.
No blizzard warning had ever been issued for an area of Texas as far south as Interstate 20, said Jim Wingenroth, senior forecaster at the National Weather Service office in San Angelo.
Heavily traveled Interstate 20 between Cisco and Abilene was closed after six inches of snow fell in the area 130 miles west of Dallas, said Larry Smith, Brownwood area engineer for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Treetops glisten, but storm snarls Midwest holiday (Atlanta Journal Constitution)
The Star-Telegram said the Dallas-Fort Worth area was experiencing its first White Christmas in more than 80 years. While the area had a sprinkling of holiday snow in 2004 and 1997, the lasttime it experienced “a true, New England-style dose of snow on Christmas Day was Dec. 25, 1926,” the newspaper reported.
Some churches canceled Christmas Eve services, while others saw sharply lower attendance.
Oklahoma City had received 14 inches of snow by Thursday night, breaking a record set back in 1914 of 2.5 inches.
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manfredkintop (11:15:49) :
“I wonder how the AGW crowd will spin this weather bomb.”
Pachauri will pronounce it a consequence of the “stolen/hacked” emails which were not “peer reviewed” – and, no doubt, will add that if more people ate less meat* this would never have happened.
*”18. Pachauri said we could all demonstrate our commitment to Saving The Planet by eating less meat.” [Lord Monckton reporting on Pachauri’s Copenhagen address]
Steve Goddard (21:16:38):
Here is one from the horse’s mouth :-O
“Modellers have an inbuilt bias towards forced climate change because the causes and effect are clear.”
“General circulation modelling of Holocene climate variability”,
by Gavin Schmidt, Drew Shindell, Ron Miller, Michael Mann and David Rind,
published in Quaternary Science Review in 2004.)
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Schmidtetal-QSR04.pdf
As someone who was stuck at Milan airport, trying to get back to the UK I can vouchsafe that this global warming sure is cold.
Of course I realise that this is only weather – it’s only an indicator of climate change when it’s oddly warm ;o)
Cheers
Mark
“When one has a preconceived notion of the outcome, he looks for evidence to support his idea rather than paying attention to what is actually happening.”
Initially using the third person pronoun then switching to the second person.
If ONE starts with”one” ONE must stay with ONE and not switch to “he”
Pedantic, I know, but it does jar to encounter such an error upon reading.
Perhaps, in the spirit of this New Winter Reality, Anthony could do a brief posting on the different kinds of ice / snow events. I was watching TWC talk about the Blizzard of 09 and they had “Ice Storm” advisories for some areas and “Freezing Rain” for others with “Freeze warnings” and “Blizzard Warnings” and… They all sound sort of the same to me (cold, miserable, stay by the fire), yet they clearly had some important distinction to the presenter.
So maybe, for those of us afflicted with a perpetual lack of anything worse than “light frost”, you could do a brief run down of “What the heck are these things and what makes one different from another?”. Somehow I suspect we’re going to be using those phrases a lot more than in the prior 30 years… (Maybe even cover “rime ice” vs heavy frost too?)
FWIW, we had ‘heavy frost’ Christmas morning in the Silicon Valley area. Somewhat early for that kind of frost. Wonder what it does to total GHG concentration when all that water vapor freezes out… It would be interesting to see a chart of total IR absorption as a function of water vapor plus CO2 as the temp drops from 110 F 100% humidity to -20 F. Has anyone ever put a sample atmosphere in a box and shone an IR light through it, then plunged the temp to OMG cold? Could be an easy and fun experiment…
Suzanne (09:40:49) : How many years of blizzards will it take before the “warmists” catch on that the correlation between weather trends is with the PDO, AMO and solar activity, not with CO2?
Science advances when ‘the old guard’ dies off. I’d give it about 20 more years… It is a cruel irony that a ‘generation’ is about 30 years, and so it matches (roughly) the length of a cold or warm phase of the PDO … Makes me wonder if we are in a social oscillator of some kind.
Stephen Brown (11:21:31) : Initially using the third person pronoun then switching to the second person. If ONE starts with”one” ONE must stay with ONE and not switch to “he”
Though, oddly, one can switch to the third person non-gender numberless ‘they’. As in:
“When one has a preconceived notion of the outcome, they look for evidence to support their idea rather than paying attention to what is actually happening.”
Pedantic, I know, but it does jar to encounter such an error upon reading.
Even more pedantic, I know, but it also jars the ear to hear too many “ones” in a sentence (being heard us ‘upper crust affectation’ to American ears, so it’s nice if one has an alternative…) BTW, you can also use “they” as the non-gender singular. We don’t need any “te” and “tis” or “s/he” or any of the other horrid creations. “My cousin is in town.” can be answered with “Do they like beer?”
John K. Sutherland (08:40:19) : While I am at it: we need a new word for the English language: WIKI-WISE, to mean woefully misinformed, profoundly ignorant of the facts, believing only what one is told to believe. Shades of Orwell again.
Well…. “wiki” does mean “fast” and English is a Germanic based language, and in German “fast” means “almost” so in a very real sense, Wikipedia means ‘almost’ encylcopedia … or maybe “a little off” … So just remember that when you hear ‘wiki’… it is “almost”, and then things make much more sense. They just do everything a bit too ‘fast’…
December will absolutely be be one of the first ten December’s of the new millennium.
/sarc off
Meanwhile, in Australia, the remnants of Cyclone Laurence brings rain to drought affected farms and washes out Christmas barbecues. Indeed “its worse than we expected”. (need I add … in an El Nino year?)
Lets send all this snow to Hawaii where Obama is vacationing so he can have a ‘White” christmas
We have been using the term ‘global warming’ for cold and snow for a while now!