US Drought Monitor 10/25/11
Why states do not demand electric grid wires delivering electricity to homes and businesses to be buried underground has always been a quandary to me. The number of climate scientists that line the hallway of understanding are not numbering in the millions, quite the contrary, they are doing the best they can with the capacity available to them in the way of brain trusts throughout the world. Their focus on huge rain events will bring the best use of the talent as these events effect larger numbers of people on a global basis. To realize a snow storm is a huge frozen storm will help put it into context currently being studied. The sincerely cold event which have claimed the lives of at least 13 Americans to date disappeared within 24 hours of its arrival. That is not normal and it is not a winter weather pattern. This was a 'chance' storm due to the mixing of the frigid air displaced over the Artic Ocean to lower latitudes meeting up with a heat transfer system which is the mechanism of the cold air displacement. The storm was not an early arrival of winter, but, a Climate Crisis storm which occurred due to the global physics of Earth.
Within in days of the storm the temperatures across the country are above freezing except for higher elevations. Noted in drought areas, the temperature does not have to be extremely high to suffer drought.
13 dead, millions without power after rare storm (click here)
...Theo Brinkerhoff, 4, who planned to dress as a ghost on Monday but was forced to wear a heavy sweater and snow boots under his costume to keep warm, refused to believe it was the bewitching autumn holiday.
"It's not Halloween, because it's still winter," he said while visiting grandparents in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town still mostly in the dark.
Many roads were still barricaded to steer traffic away from downed trees and power lines. Utility officials said the storm caused more tree damage than most winter storms because leaves had not yet fallen so trees caught far more snow than usual.
"It was like wet cement that just adhered to trees, branches, leaves and power lines," said David Graves, spokesman for utility National Grid.
"That's what really caused the damage, the weight of that snow," he said....
"It's not Halloween, because it's still winter," he said while visiting grandparents in Amherst, Massachusetts, a town still mostly in the dark.
Many roads were still barricaded to steer traffic away from downed trees and power lines. Utility officials said the storm caused more tree damage than most winter storms because leaves had not yet fallen so trees caught far more snow than usual.
"It was like wet cement that just adhered to trees, branches, leaves and power lines," said David Graves, spokesman for utility National Grid.
"That's what really caused the damage, the weight of that snow," he said....
In this Oct. 31, 2011 file photo, Thai residents carry their belongings along floods as they move to higher ground at Bangkok's Don Muang district, Thailand. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila, File)(AP)
WASHINGTON - Freakish weather disasters (click title to entry - thank you) — from the sudden October snowstorm in the Northeast U.S. to the record floods in Thailand — are striking more often. And global warming is likely to spawn more similar weather extremes at a huge cost, says a draft summary of an international climate report obtained by The Associated Press.
The final draft of the report from a panel of the world's top climate scientists paints a wild future for a world already weary of weather catastrophes costing billions of dollars. The report says costs will rise and perhaps some locations will become "increasingly marginal as places to live."
The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be issued in a few weeks, after a meeting in Uganda. It says there is at least a 2-in-3 probability that climate extremes have already worsened because of man-made greenhouse gases.\
This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyze freak events that grab headlines, cause economic damage and kill people. The most recent bizarre weather extreme, the pre-Halloween snowstorm in the U.S., is typical of the damage climate scientists warn will occur — but it's not typical of the events they tie to global warming....
