Since winter is already here there is one benefit to the fart mi$t: it's warm.
Look, I want to save the planet as much as the next guy; I just think we need to take it slow because the ecosystem is beyond the climate change obsession and on to the pollution and radiation as the daily forecasts keep getting better and better:
"Alaska storm brings frigid weather to nation" Associated Press November 10, 2014
JUNEAU, Alaska — A massive storm fueled by the remnants of Typhoon Nuri did not do much damage in Alaska’s sparsely populated Aleutian Islands, but forecasters say it is anchoring a system that will push a frigid blast of air into the mainland United States and send temperatures plunging early this week.
Parts of the lower 48 states could see temperatures between 20 and 40 degrees below average, the National Weather Service said Sunday.
Snow was expected to move over the northern high plains and into the upper Great Lakes by Monday evening, with accumulations of close to a foot in parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin and up to 2 feet in the upper peninsula of Michigan, forecasters said....
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"Rockies, Upper Midwest get blast of wintry weather, frigid cold" Associated Press November 11, 2014
PIERRE, S.D. — A blast of wintry weather blew into parts of the Rockies and Upper Midwest on Monday, bringing more than a foot of snow in some areas, along with plunging temperatures. The cold is expected to eventually blanket the central United States from the Rockies to the Great Lakes.
Winter is still 40 days away.
The frigid air was pushed in by a powerful storm that hit Alaska with hurricane-force winds over the weekend, and it threatened to cover several states in snow and send temperatures as much as 40 degrees below average.
Areas of northwest Montana saw 14 inches of snow by late Monday; parts of North Dakota saw as much as 8 inches; a community in central Minnesota got more than 16 inches; and northwest Wisconsin communities saw 11 inches. Parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula had 9 inches, with up to 2 feet expected.
The snow is expected to end Tuesday, but cold air will be around for a while, said Joe Calderone, a forecaster for the National Weather Service.
In Minnesota, a semitrailer carrying a load of turkeys to a processing plant slipped off Interstate 94 and overturned. In eastern Wisconsin, snow-covered roads were blamed for a school bus crash that sent the driver and an aide to a hospital. No students were hurt.
This week’s storm is part of a powerful system being pushed in by the remnants of Typhoon Nuri, which hit Alaska’s Aleutian Islands....
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"Snow buries parts of Rockies, Upper Midwest" by James Nord | Associated Press November 12, 2014
PIERRE, S.D. — Heavy snow blanketed parts of the Upper Midwest with more than a foot of snow on Tuesday, leaving residents there and in the Rockies waking up to frigid temperatures that plunged as much as 50 degrees overnight.
The rest of the Midwest and the East are expecting a dose of the icy weather later this week thanks to a powerful storm that hit Alaska with hurricane-force winds over the weekend.
It feels like it has started to arrive as I type this.
More than 2 feet of snow blanketed parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and more was on the way before the front was expected to exit on Wednesday. Northern Wisconsin also got as much as 18 inches of snow, and parts of central Minnesota more than 16.
The onset of winter wasn’t enough to convince Joe Meath to flee Minnesota — even though he won nearly $12 million in a state lottery game two months ago. Meath was busy with his small snowplow business, taking care of his customers in his worn Chevy truck with nearly 300,000 miles on it.
Except it is NOT WINTER YET!!
‘‘I don’t know what I’d be doing if I wasn’t doing this today,’’ Meath told KMSP-TV.
Schools canceled classes across the region, including at Northern Michigan University.
I just heard a loud cheer in a high-pitched tone.
Multimedia journalism student Mikenzie Frost said she was headed out the door to figure skating practice early Tuesday when she got a text from the school saying it was closed. So, she shifted plans.
‘‘Going to buy a shovel because we don’t have one,’’ Frost said. ‘‘We’re probably the only people in the U.P. (Upper Peninsula) that don’t have one.’’
At least one school found opportunity in the early storm. St. Cloud Cathedral, a seventh- through-12th-grade parochial school in Minnesota, closed when the storm hit Monday but had students log into online classes to complete coursework from home. Cathedral was following other schools nationally who have experimented with online learning to avoid needing make-up days.
‘‘I’ll be honest,’’ Principal Lynn Grewing said with a laugh Tuesday, ‘‘there has been some grumbling.’’
In Billings, Mont., where temperatures in the high 60s fell into single digits, Patsy Kimmel said she had been warned before arriving to visit family and celebrate her 70th birthday. ‘‘Yesterday I was wearing sandals and a short-sleeve shirt, and today I’m wearing a coat and scarf and turtleneck and sweatshirt and gloves,’’ Kimmel said.
The blast of frigid air sent temperatures plunging as far south as the Texas Panhandle, where balmy 70-degree weather fell into the teens overnight. In Oklahoma City, Monday’s high of 80 degrees hit a low of 30 degrees Tuesday morning — a drop of 50 degrees.
And in the Dakotas, single-digit temperatures came with wind chills that made it feel like 20 below in some places. But that was good news for Action Mechanical Inc. of Rapid City, S.D., which was doing a booming heating and ventilation business.
‘‘Bang! We get this arctic blast, and it just opens the floodgates,’’ said John Hammond Jr., a department head. ‘‘We’re behind right now as we’re sitting here talking.’’
In Colorado, temperatures fell to the teens and prompted officials to move a Veteran’s Day ceremony indoors in Denver.
See: VA Day
With only inches of snow, ranchers in the Dakotas were upbeat about the weather, mindful of intense storms in October 2013 that killed at least 43,000 cattle that hadn’t yet developed heavy winter coats.
Yeah, last year's record-setting winter gets lost in the fart mist.
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You know who is responsible for the New Ice Age, right?
"Scientists have found two infants buried under an ancient dwelling, beneath a previously discovered set of toddler remains. At 11,500 years old, this Alaskan grave is not the oldest in North America — but it is the oldest to show such elaborate burial practices, indicating that Native Americans put more care into burying kin than had been thought. But because scientists have so little knowledge of life at that time, the remains present as many questions as they do answers. The burials of the children showed an unprecedented level of care."
That's somehow surprising?
There is still something bugging me:
"New plan to spray pests riles organic farmers in Calif." by Ellen Knickmeyer | Associated Press November 09, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — With organic food growers reporting double-digit growth in US sales each year, producers are challenging a proposed California pest-management program they say enshrines a pesticide-heavy approach for decades to come, including compulsory spraying of organic crops at the state’s discretion.
In leftist, liberal California?
Chief among the complaints of organic growers: The California Department of Food and Agriculture’s pest-management plan says compulsory state pesticide spraying of organic crops would do no economic harm to organic producers, on the grounds that the growers could sell sprayed crops as nonorganic instead.
‘‘I would rather stop farming than have to be a conventional farmer. I think I am not alone in that,’’ said Zea Sonnabend, a Watsonville organic apple-grower with California Certified Organic Farmers.
Certified Organic Farmers is one of more than 30 agriculture groups, environmental organizations, and regional water agencies that have filed concerns about the Agriculture Department’s pesticide provisions by an Oct. 31 deadline.
At issue is a California organic agriculture industry that grew by 54 percent between 2009 and 2012.
California leads the nation in organic sales, according to statistics tracked by University of California Davis agriculture economist Karen Klonsky, who says the state is responsible for roughly one-third of a national organic industry. The Department of Agriculture puts the overall value of the country’s organic sector at $35 billion.
The organic industry has seen a similar growth spurt nationally in the same time frame, and three out of four grocery stores in the country now carry at least some organic goods, according to the USDA.
California’s $43 billion agriculture industry is the largest in the country by revenue, so what happens here matters to consumers and to the agriculture industry nationwide.
The state’s more than 500-page document lays out its planned responses to the next wave of fruit flies, weevils, beetles, fungus, or blight that threatens crops.
Many groups challenging the plan complained that it seems to authorize state agriculture officials to launch pesticide treatments without first carrying out the currently standard separate environmental-impact review.
But Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, said the outline doesn’t give state crop-pest programs any power they don’t already have by law.
The program is designed ‘‘to protect California’s food system through the principles of integrated pest management, while also protecting public health and the environment,’’ Lyle said in an e-mail.
For some conventional growers as well as some organic ones, the fate of the pest-management plan outlined by the state isn’t a theoretical concern. It’s an immediate issue of their economic survival.
Organic farmers are asking the state to give more consideration to nontoxic controls, including long-term methods to strengthen crops and habitats in advance against marauding tropical species, said Kelly Damewood, policy director for Certified Organic Farmers.
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That left me with a bad taste in muh mouth.
EU nations could get power to block GMO crops
Tastes a little better.
Sorry, population control is not an environmental cure-all
That type of talk totally sours me.
If you believe in it so strongly, help us out and step off yourself. Thank you!
Meanwhile, fork over that FEMA aid money even as bankers got to keep all their ill-gotten loot.
I don't know which $torm is wor$e, do you?
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Crazy Weather: Four Feet of Snow in November?
"To the ever-growing list of projected effects from global warming, add a curious entry: a potentially huge jump in lightning strikes in the United States. Researchers reported Thursday that they had discovered a simple physical relationship that seems to predict lightning strikes, and used it to produce a better estimate of the probable change if warming continues unchecked through this century."
It's been cooling for the last 16 years and awe are in a patch of deep freeze that last few winters. WTF?
Curiously, not only have they jumped the shark on this one, they've probably electrocuted it. Pathetic propaganda that is inestimable.
