The Los Angeles Times is reporting:
Call it "Icepocalypse" or "Icemageddon" — a bout of wintry
precipitation and bitter cold air has brought unusually icy weather to a
large swath of the country.
Subfreezing temperatures
made Saturday the coldest Dec. 7 on record in much of the Great Plains
and Tennessee Valley, said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. In two locations in Montana, temperatures plummeted to minus 42 degrees.
The Eastern Seaboard, which had been mostly spared by the storm thus
far, will see snow starting Sunday, with ice storms in the mid-Atlantic
region. Moderate snow will start in West Virginia on Sunday before moving across portions of the mid-Atlantic into New York by Monday morning.
Major Eastern cities such as
Washington and Baltimore are not expected to see too much ice accumulate
on roads, but interior parts of the mid-Atlantic could see a dangerous
quarter-inch of ice or more, Hurley said. Freezing rain, which he called
the "main weather story" for Sunday, is expected to continue through
Monday.
This is unquestionably the worst, the very worst, ice storm I have seen since moving to the Dallas-Ft Worth are last July, 2013. I should have stayed in San Antonio.
This is what the paper had to say about our area:
Though some parts of the country are used to frigid weather, it has
proved to be particularly problematic for the Dallas-Fort Worth area,
where the temperature Saturday afternoon was 25 degrees.
Over the last few days, the region saw sleet and freezing rain that
covered much of the cities in ice, inspiring the name "Ice Friday."
Residents took to social media, posting photos of frozen fountains, cars
covered in ice and trees brought down by heavy coatings of ice.
"The residential streets are almost like ice skating rinks," said
Dennis Cain, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Fort Worth.
The roads are so slick that Satori Ananda, who lives in Arlington,
skipped the Kanye West concert that she had tickets for Friday night in
Dallas.
"I can't leave my house because of all the ice in the street," Ananda, 37, said in a phone interview Friday night.
Because of the dangerous conditions, the Dallas-Fort Worth
International Airport canceled at least 400 departures Saturday, which
is about half of its usual schedule.
The MetroPCS Dallas Marathon scheduled for Sunday was also canceled.
The streets and parking lots really were ice-skating rinks. I remember this only once in all the years I grew up in Williston, North Dakota. We could have ice-skated to Wilkinson Elementary. I remember it vividly. It's funny what one remembers. I also remember how cute my 10th grade biology partner was; I would mention her name, but I don't want to embarrass anyone. But I digress.
From
The Dallas Morning News:
- Dallas marathon canceled for first in 44 years
- ice halts 90% of DFW flights
- glazes roads, disrupts DART
- nearly 270,000 customers lose power; repairs may be slow
The US Postal Service did not make deliveries. The morning newspapers were not delivered. One 29-year-old died, rear-ending a truck on one of the area freeways. Starbucks at Tom Thumb opened late. Tom Thumb closed early.
************************************
The warmists now say this extreme cold weather was predictable; that all this snow was predicted.
They even noted that the Arctic ice mass was receding in 2012, "forgetting" to mention the Arctic ice mass hit new records in 2013.
Reuters is reporting:
Sea ice in the Arctic shrank to a record low in 2012 and the U.N.'s
panel of climate scientists says it could almost vanish in summers by
2050 with rising greenhouse gas emissions.
But some scientists
said other factors, including the usual vagaries of weather or changing
sea temperatures, may explain some recent extremes rather than changes
in the Arctic.
The comments are all right on target. This is my favorite of all:
From 2000: "According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at
the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia
,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and
exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he
said. David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and
Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only
virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at
polar scenes - or eventually "feel" virtual cold."
And this one:
So, let me get this straight: No hurricanes striking the U.S. for four
straight years and record cold winters across Europe are meaningless
because they are only regional and not "global" events, yet, when the
U.S. has a hot summer or Europe has a rainy summer, suddenly, it means
something? Oh, btw, Antarctica is doing just fine and has the largest
ice mass since 1979, and that's where 90 percent of the world's ice is
located, not Greenland or the Arctic. Not to mention, Greenland and the
Arctic are relatively small regions and not "global." The rhetoric from
the AGW crowd is sickening.
I will leave it there. Except to say their rhetoric is not so much "sickening" as it is "tedious."
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For the archives, from N:ewsMax, February 14, 2010.
Back in September 2008, environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote an
article raising the alarm about global warming and the resultant lack of
winter weather in Washington, D.C.
On Monday, Feb. 8, as the nation’s capital dug out from under a
ferocious snowstorm, The Washington Examiner reran an article from last
Dec. 21, published as Washington was struggling to dig out from under an
earlier snowstorm.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flies around on private planes so as to
tell larger numbers of people how they must live their lives in order to
save the planet, wrote a column last year on the lack of winter weather
in Washington, D.C.,” wrote The Examiner’s Online Opinion Editor David
Freddoso.
He quoted from the article written by Kennedy, a lawyer specializing
in environmental law, which ran in the Los Angeles Times: “Recently
arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic
winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski
runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean [Va.], with a rope tow and local ski
club.
“Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled.”
He reminisced about ice skating on a Washington canal, “which these days rarely freezes enough to safely skate."
