In New England in December the cold does not come in on little cat feet. Instead some mountain god of the great north woods throws open the door to Canada late one night. When you step out the next morning your scrotum promptly goes into hibernation somewhere around your arm pit. The cold gets hammered down tight. And it stays that way. Until, oh, somewhere in the middle of March.
I’d come to New England after many years away and, in Seattle, thought I’d packed well for the trip. I’d made a point to bring my very warm Seattle jacket. I stepped outside into the New England winter this morning and between the door and the car I knew, based on testicle retraction velocity, that my coat had nothing to say to this winter. I might as well have packed and dressed in a Speedo. At least I would have been rapidly arrested and taken to a warm jail cell until my need for medication could be determined.
Gerard Vanderleun, “The Gift of the WalMagi”, American Digest, 2010-12-23
December 23, 2010
QotD: Welcome to New England
December 20, 2010
Boris trims his sails
James Delingpole has a bit of fun at London mayor Boris Johnson’s expense:
. . . what sounds like a fervent declaration of faith in the Warmist creed may on closer examination be a perfectly innocuous statement of the bleeding obvious cunningly calculated to appease all Boris’s rentseeking chums in the City who stand to make a fortune from the Great Carbon Scam and would be most displeased if the Mayor of London were to show signs of wobbling.
Yet wobbling is, of course, exactly what Boris is doing. Or rather — remember, this is the man so ambitious he makes Alexander The Great look like Olive from On The Buses — he is slyly repositioning himself to take advantage of the inevitable collapse of public faith in the Great Anthropogenic Global Warming Ponzi Scheme.
All those thousands of people who’ve had their Christmas ruined as a result of Heathrow airport’s pathetic inability to operate in the snow; all those thousands who have been stranded shivering for eight hours at a stretch on our motorways; all those thousands who can’t use their local municipal sports club because the staff — as is the wont of public sector workers — can’t be bothered to allow themselves to be inconvenienced by the inclement conditions; all those people who are going to look at their electricity and gas bills come the end of next quarter and be appalled beyond measure by how increasingly unaffordable they are; all those businesses big and small whose profits are going to be seriously dented by our political class’s ongoing failure to address our transport infrastructure (and no I don’t mean the irrelevant high-speed rail link to Birmingham; I mean the much bigger problem of our shortage of runways at the airports serving London).
All these thousands of people add up to a lot of disgruntled voters ready to ask hard questions about everything from the size of the state (so patently NOT being shrunk to any significant degree by Cameron’s useless Coalition of the Unwilling) to the three main parties’ position on “Global Warming”.
December 5, 2010
Worst Autumn snowfall in Britain since 1963
Roger Henry sent me this link earlier this year, but it seems even more appropriate now:
I wonder how many budding documentarians will try to replicate the 1963 effort?
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the reminder.
March 5, 2010
The winds of change: UK’s Met Office to abandon seasonal forecasts
You’d almost think someone was paying attention. Britain’s Met Office has given up providing seasonal forecasts:
The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.
It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.
The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.
The Met Office said it decided to change its forecasting approach after carrying out customer research.
Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: “By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.
That last point is why, in years gone by, newspapers used to have much amusement contrasting official weather forecasts with non-scientific publications like the Old Farmer’s Almanac, where just often enough to be newsworthy, the annual’s predictions were more accurate than those provided by “real weathermen”.
February 12, 2010
Eric Raymond finally “gets” the Vikings
I’m just as happy that my area didn’t receive any of the snow that’s been blanketing areas to the south of us. Eric Raymond wasn’t as lucky:
Now I understand the Viking Era
So I’m sitting here, looking out my window at the 3-foot snow and the 5-foot icicles, reverting to ancestral type. Thinking:“Fuck this. Let’s go sack Miklagard.”
And Ken Burnside points out even more opportunity for enriching historical knowledge:
The reason why Minnesota and Wisconsin were settled by Norwege and Swenske isn’t because the other cultures couldn’t hack the winters.
It’s because compared to 19th century Norway and Sweden, Upper Minneosta and Upper Wisconsin are *paradise*.
“Look! Farmland! Lakes for fishing! Timber and lumber to build from! And no morass of petty aristocracy to tell you no. And, hey, it only snows for five whole months here! They won’t believe THAT back in the old country!”
The only reason there weren’t more of them was because a lot of Norski STILL remember the marketing flimflam that was Greenland. They had a completely justified 900 year old mistrust of ANYONE telling them about ‘great farmland, only snows for five months of the year, plenty of timber…’
January 8, 2010
Snow, 1963
What would happen if you took a typical Canadian snowfall and dumped it on Britain? In 1963, this is what happened. As you can see, it must have been the “right kind of snow”.
H/T to Roger Henry for the link.
December 23, 2009
Tornado to the rescue!
With all the winter weather in England this week, the railways are struggling to cope. One of the newest locomotives didn’t have any problems with the snow and ice:
Passengers were rescued by a steam locomotive after modern rail services were brought to a halt by the snowy conditions in south-east England.
Trains between Ashford and Dover were suspended on Monday when cold weather disabled the electric rail.
Some commuters at London Victoria faced lengthy delays until Tornado — Britain’s first mainline steam engine in 50 years — offered them a lift.
They were taken home “in style”, said the Darlington-built engine’s owners.
December 22, 2009
QotD: Say goodbye to “global warming” and “climate change”
This new terminology is more clever, for it neatly avoids the shortcomings of its clumsy forebears. It requires neither warming, nor change. Just television.
When blizzards descend on scientists and world leaders from Copenhagen to East Anglia to Washington, the warmists can now claim ownership.
When hurricane forecasts fall short of the mark, the propagandists can cite their very failure to support their scheme.
Warm winters, cold winters, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, growing ice caps, melting ice caps — directions won’t matter. Every “new” temperature record, every seasonal flood, every California hot spell, every dusting of snow in the south of France — in other words, local weather, reported globally, will return full force as evidence of anthropogenic climate crime, as it did in a simpler time when the ice conditions of a canal in Ottawa led to nationwide panic.
So, get ready to welcome the new talking point on the block: “climate instability“.
Kate McMillan, “Y2Kyoto: Climate Instability Just Around The Corner”, Small Dead Animals 2009-12-20
August 23, 2009
Toronto’s recent brush with tornado weather
I was deep in downtown Toronto when the storm started to move in, and listening to the professional pants-wetters at 680PanicNews was initially disturbing, but eventually hilarious. Not to minimize the genuine damage caused in Vaughan and the town of Durham. This is how I summarized the weather-related experience in an email to Jon:
I barely made it home before the storm hit . . . it chased me all the way, with the ProfessionalPantsWetters at 680Panic Radio getting more and more excited as the time went on.
I got out of the truck, picked up my laptop, walked to the door, and less than a minute later the storm hit. The power went out about five minutes after that (and didn’t come back on until about 3:30 in the morning).
No obvious damage around the house, thank goodness, although the gazebo tried to go walkies around the yard. It wrapped itself around the patio set, which will take several pairs of hands to disentangle and find out if it’s still usable.
From a follow-up email, specifically about the radio coverage:
At first, they didn’t seem too bad. I turned on the radio just as traffic came to a stop on the DVP just south of the Bloor Viaduct. By the time I got as far as Lawrence, the woman reporter who got all verklempt over the TORNADO ON JARVIS!!!!! wasn’t able to draw a breath without sounding like she was panting or gasping. I was starting to laugh at them by that point.
The meteorpanickologist who started to repeat (several times) that everyone should get into the basement — or lower — or into a closet (aren’t most people’s closets on the upper floor if they’re in a house?) or cower in a bathtub (aren’t they usually upstairs too?) . . .
I also found amusement in the repeated definition of the terms “tornado watch” and “tornado warning”, where almost every time, the description of “tornado warning” was to “_watch_ out for imminent tornado formation”. They just don’t listen to themselves, do they?
I thought it quite telling that one of the better reports was from their entertainment editor, who reported from her car on the way up Victoria Park Avenue. She, at least, sounded calm and reported only what she could see for herself.
Chris Taylor brings some actual data to the discussion of tornado frequency and writes “It can be tempting for Torontonians — who generally think of themselves as an island of tranquillity free of severe weather — to overreact a little.”
