Our office shut down early on Monday as the ice and freezing rain started to come down. Our office was closed all day Tuesday (as was most of the city), and opened at noon yesterday for those who felt it was safe to come in from their area of town.
I live out in the hills of West Austin, and I’m not even so sure my Land Rover could have made it out of my own driveway (about a 25 degree rake for about the last 40′ of our driveway, which was a complete block of ice). So I stayed home yesterday too.
We didn’t get any more precipitation yesterday evening, and with temperatures supposed to be around 40 degrees today, I’m back to work as usual.
Sigh. So much for our annual “One Week of Winter” here in Austin. Although, it typically doesn’t occur until February. So maybe this year we’ll get two weeks of winter. Damned global warming…
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Which reminds me…Al Gore is supposed to give a lecture on his “indisputable” global warming theories in Boise on January 22 — where the temperate might warm-up to around freezing during his speech (it’s currently about 14 degrees in Boise).
Maybe Al should hold off on lecturing about the “inconvenient truth” of global warming when it’s freezing cold outside. It kind of makes him look like an idiot. He’d probably get a few more converts preaching his ideas in Houston in late August.
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I hope you’re just being snarky- because your ice storm doesn’t change the fact that 10 of the hottest years on record have occured in the last 12 years.
In fact, Al Gore specifically makes the point that some places will see significantly colder weather in the event of full throttle climate change. For instance, in the last warming period a large amount of ice broke off Greenland disrupting the flow of the gulf stream that directs warm water and weather to the northern Europe. As a result they went into a cold period until the gulf stream again began to bring warm weather from the Gulf of Mexico.
Hope you got paid for your days off, Robbie. If you lived in California Gov. Schwarzenneger would have paid you even if you were an illegal..with the citizen’s tax dollars of course…the creep.
Tell me how that works, Dianne. Why does the state pay people?
Preston — I was being snarky about Gore.
Just as a spell of hot weather doesn’t prove global warming, cold weather doesn’t disprove it.
Have you seen this in the Urban Dictionary?
From the Urban Dictionary — The Gore Effect:
I took some work home on Monday (about 10 hours worth) that I billed, but the remainder of the time will be charged to sick leave (allowed 80 hours per calendar year), which won’t count against my personal vacation days.
So, I’ll still get paid for a full week. I don’t use nearly all of my sick time each year anyhow, and it doesn’t roll over to the next year; it’s use it or lose it.
Preston – The governor has said that due to the recent ruination of the crops in California, x thousand people will be out of work and he intends to cover them with unemployment benefits, even if they’re illegal. I wouldn’t care if the Governor used only the tax paid by the particular businesses that hired the illegals, but that’s not how it works. The money is paid out by the state to the workers from a fund of all businesses who pay into it.
The Govenor should go back to lifting weights and taking steroids…
I’m appreciate snark but giving a favorable link to the dead-enders at Free Republic caused me to wonder. Just a cursory look at Google can reveal that it is unquestioned that the earth is getting hotter and that most scientists believe that this has been caused by human activities.
I’m not sure if the Freepers are just afraid to admit that Al Gore was right (along with the war in Iraq) or if they’re afraid that their coal mining stocks will plummet or if they admit that scientists are right about this they may have to concede the truth on evolution as well.
Oh never mind, it just started snowing: the Ice Age is coming!
Ya know this is crazy. At one time the continents were in different locations than they are now. The earth changes NATURALLY.
Primer: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/continents/
That’s true, Dianne. So scientists have devised ways of looking at temperatures in the past to see if what we are now experiencing is out of the ordinary. To keep it simple: it is.
If you look at that chart, 1450 was almost as cold as the past couple of years are warm. What is the grey?
As I understand it the gray would be the noise from the readings from coral, ice, and tree rings while the blue is the average of those readings.
It’s true that temperatures have had swings in the past but scientists are looking at more than just this chart; if you lay a graph showing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere it matches up eerily well.
I don’t claim to be an expert on climate science, I simply trust those scientists who are. The big question is why so many don’t. People who will fly in a plane, try groundbreaking phramaceuticals, and surf the internet become distrustful of science when it clashes with their politics. Unless the climate change deniers can explain why hundreds of scientists are fixing their results I’m not inclined to believe they are.
I worked in a scientific field for most of my career (drugs) and I understand and appreciate the complexity of reviewing data and making conclusions. The first thing you look at is the study protocol. If it’s biased, intentionally or not, the study results are worthless. In simple terms, the results of a study are only as good as the planning that went into it.
I’m not prepared to make any judgments about global warming because I don’t know the science but I would hope that our lawmakers are smart enough and unbiased enough to really investigate the subject. Scientists all over the world are already split on the issue. This is a complex situation.
Human activity has at least some effect, it always does. But it isn’t necessarily all to do with burning fossil fuels, although that is a large part of it. There is also the fact that there are more people alive than at any time in human history, and at the same time, less and less trees, rain forrests, vegetation, etc.
Because of this, there is carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere, but less oxygen being recycled. Add the ever increased amounts of fossil fuels to the mix, and you have more of a problem.
But there are other aspects as well, such as sunspot activity, natural earth cycles that no one really understands, and finally, the kicker-radiation from distant stars that exploded billions of years ago. Now how are you going to do anything about that?
The only thing you can do is hope that we are just passing through the outer fringes of the radiation belt, because otherwise, this planet could end up as lifeless Mars in a few thousand years.