Do Folks Really Notice The Difference Between Four Feet Of Snow And Five Feet Of Snow? -- December 17, 2020

This morning Weather Channel was simply amazed with all the snow winter storm Gail was dumping on New England and the northeast. 

Winter storm Gail.

Historic storm in the northeast: link here. We will see snow reports that will break records like never before. Where are the Kennedys -- you know, the  guys who told us their grandchildren would never see snow again. 

AMHQ: "'We never imagined this once." "We completely missed this in Binghamton." Snowing at a rate of 5 inches/hour. Unprecedented.  "We can keep up with 2 inches/hour, but no way can we keep up with 5 inches of snow per hour." 

The number of commercials on this station exceeds any other network I watch but the optics this morning are worth sitting through the commercials. Keep your remote handy. So much going on across all networks this morning, including North By Northwest on TCM. 

Binghamton record: 18 inches in 24 hours; currently about 34 inches in past 24 hours. Something like that.  Now being reported: 40 inches of snow in Binghamton. Where is Binghamton? Western NY right on the Pennsylvania state line. Normally about 2 hours southeast of Rochester, NY, which sits on Lake Ontario. Three hours southwest of Albany. Record snowfall in Broome County, NY: 31.2 inches, March 14, 2017. That was only three years ago. Say what? Global warming? Never saw this coming.

Note: no one wearing masks in any of the commercials. Finally aerial drone coverage -- but video is from a private source, not from Weather Channel.

But that got me to thinking.

When I was growing up in Williston, ND, the national media thought it was a big deal when winter temps in North Dakota dropped to forty degrees below zero. But honestly, I was never able to tell the difference between thirty degrees below zero and forty degrees below zero.

So, one wonders: do the folks in Pennsylvania and New York really notice a difference between four feet of snow and five feet of snow? 

 Probably. 

By the way, we will hit a new snowfall record in these areas today (2020) and the most recent record prior to that was just three years ago (2020) and I assume they had similar amounts of snow the last couple of years. 

Global warming? Say what? 

Oh, that's right. The global warming folks said they predicted more snow all along.