*****UPDATE****
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IS WARNING OF 7 TO 14 INCHES OF SNOW. 4:07 PM 2/8/10
The weather forecast is becoming more ominous for our area. 2 storm systems are converging. One storm is coming in from the north and the other from the south. They are predicted to meet over the Atlantic Ocean, right off the coast as 2 low pressure systems. The end result doesn’t sound good at all.
Between 5-10 inches of new snow is predicted from this storm. While not carrying the moisture that Snowmaggedon contained, this storm is predicted to be more meteorologically intense with much higher winds. According to the Capital Weather Gang at the Washington Post:
FREQUENT QUESTIONS
When will the snow start? Between mid-day and mid-afternoon tomorrow.
When it will end? Probably around late afternoon Wednesday — later north and east.
How much?: Our best bet is 5-10″ in the metro region, but 8-14″ as you head north and east towards Baltimore. South and southwest of the Fairfax County, 3-6″ is most likely.
Could it be more or less? Yes. Double digit totals (10″ or more) remain a possibility throughout the metro region (25% chance). By the same token, if the coastal storm forms too far north, lighter amounts from 1-5″ or so might do it.
How bad will the winds be? By very late Tuesday night and into Wednesday, sustained winds may reach 25-35 mph, with higher gusts. Assuming there is falling snow, this could create blizzard conditions.
This new storm spells trouble and danger, People will be out of work, kids will be out of school. People who work hourly will not get paid. High winds put power lines and trees at further risk. Roofs will be further stressed. Municipalities and VDOT will be further strapped with snow removal costs as crews continue their round the clock pushing, digging and scraping. Power workers will continue to work to get electricity back on. Some folks will be a week without power when all of this is over. It is a dangerous time of year to be without electricity. Even those with gas heat won’t have it because there will be nothing to run the fans.
Let’s hope this prediction is wrong.
On a sad note, Rep. John Murtha has died of complications of gall bladder surgery. He was 77 years old.
And Al Gore is holding what office?
Didn’t think so.
It has been snowing lightly for about an hour. Teeny tiny flakes. Not a good sign of things to come.
Not surprised to find out about the roof issue at Mayfield. Since the building opened it’s been plagued with leaks. Rooms on the first floor get leaks in them when it rains. Saw on Fox news that crews were trying to clean the snow off the roof. The entire school probably needs to be re roofed.
Test for moderation….
Thanks you Moon for taking my comment blocks out of moderation…now I can join this conversation as a blog concept intends…
About global warming and science to those who study neither…and yet claim to be experts based on opinion…
Everyone…yes everyone has an opinion about everything they have an emotional investment in…even if their opinion is based only on their anger, issues they have heard form others, or their own imagination and personal nature toward scepticism and gullibility, and authority…
Franky people of authority, even scientific people represent a form of authority that scares some people…so no matter what they say about global warming there are always going to be a segment of the population that opposes whatever they say, just because it comes from an organization of authority or organization…these people will believe there is no global warming until they actually die from global effects that kill more people than ever before…
So I’m not even going to address this issue to that group of non-believers, who will always have a stubborn opinion and deny its existance…
For the rest of you that may listen to reason, here’s the following to consider…
I study science and a lot of other academic issues, as deeply as I have time for. when I say something it is not usually from an emotional perspective (except for racism, I really hate racial advocacy and racial advantage arguments for minority wealth over majority wealth based on a person;s color, gender, religion or ethncity)…this is one fight I’m going to continue until it stops…
But if you study the history of the earth, there is about 4.67 billion years of history, and the age is known to within 1 million years (how if I told you you would not believe that either, but it has to do with rates of decay of known physics, that is measurable, consistantly measurable, and can be done in a lab over and over…
To prove something true or false, the science community (unlike religious fanatics and mysticists, have to be able to prove a scientific finding to the entire community in a series of repeatable experiments. These experiments have to be consistant, and produce consistant results. About the only branch of science that tends to bend these rules requiring repeatable experiments and results is the social science field, which tends to attract as many mysticists and religious fanatics as real scientists, these people will make any statistic or probability match their beliefs and political opinions. Another class of scientists are those who have more greed than professional integrity, and will twist their results to match the political and commercial goals of thier paying customers (large business and political action committees…
This is why you get conflicting so called “scientific studies” that tell the general population
as Emma put it best:
“Eggs are a nutrient-rich, perfect food. No, wait, eggs will clog your arteries and kill you. No, wait, they’re not all that bad.
Working moms are evil and bad for children. No, wait, children actually benefit from daycare. No, wait, it’s all evil. No, wait, as long as Mom does a good balancing job and projects happiness and contentment. No, wait, Mom really needs to get her priorities straight…..
Red wine is good for you, red wine is now bad for you, especially if you’re a woman, and even in small amounts–no, wait, it’s good for you.
Coffee–bad, bad, bad. Wait, actually it’s a great mood-enhancer. No, it can cause breast cancer. No, wait….
Drink milk for strong bones and teeth! No, don’t drink milk–too many hormones. You have osteoporosis? You should have drunk more milk when you were younger!
Depression drugs can save your life. Depression drugs (per Newsweek a few weeks ago) really don’t work.
The Surgeon General (a federal officer) says smoking is bad for you, but the federal government subsidizes tobacco growers.”
For the most part many of these results are not scientifically credible either, because they are usually not peer reviewed and scrutinized by a professional body of “scientific journals” whose reputation depends on carefully accepting and rejecting papers that don’t meet a long, critical professional acceptance standard…
But in the case of pure science, these scientists are interested in finding the truth regardless of the political or business consequence. Think Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Einstein, etc….
Global warming science is one of those fields called “Earth Sciences” and “weather science” that has a governing body of peers, NOAA and top-end university researchers with very competitive and highly protected credentials that place integrity and honesty above all other values in their work.
When these scientist universally agree that we are creating atmospheric instability by dumping more energy into it than the earth can radiate into space (photons) created by chemical reaction with combustibles (producing carbon and water as a by product of combustion…and provong by repeatable experiment and evidence collection in soild samples, water samples, ice samples and geological records (dated by highly accurate dating techniques) that the earth did indeed have extreme swings in temperature, from very hot to very cold. They can measure when these extreme swings occurred, why (from orbital mechanics of the earth, solar system and the galaxy), and can identify with great presision that starting some 9-10,000 years ago, we should have begun entering another ice age, and did enter the coldest part of that aroud 1100 AD, back when rivers froze, and Europe had COLD, severe winters in the Dark ages, and we should have kept getting colder until somewhere around 5000 AD, we would be as cold as the last Wisconson Ice Age (we have had 6 “recent” ice ages in the last 3 million years, but the deepest ice age of all was 650 million years ago when the entire earth froze over solid)…
But…
That didn’t continue because in the last 250 years we discovered “oil”…and we burned almost all of it up (some 150 million years worth of accumulation) in less that 200 years.
Stored in the ground was the overall total energy of daily solar bombardment of photons, chemically stored as a form of fossil fuel energy (by plants and zooplankton in the oceans, and by fossilized chemical conversion of trees into hydrocarbon fuel in the Pennsylvanian and Mississippian Epochs…
Imagine how much energy (photons, which are never created or destroyed, only converted into different forms) is released into the atmosphere by burning 150 million years of photon energy inless than 200 years?
The end result, the atmosphere must absorb it, the ocean must absorb it, and space must absorb it, but the burn rate is so fast it cannot, thus those photons stay in the atmosphere (stored in electrons of water vapor, carbon and methane). Those photons have high energy levels and leep the atmosphere unstable, warmer than it should be, and the end result is larger tropical and polar weather systems…
These created hotter places on the earth, melting of polar ice caps (just like it did in the Eocene period when massive earthquakes and volcanoes erupted around the earth, lower the oxygen content to less than 10% and abouve 5000 feet there was no oxygen, and temperature at the poles hit 80 and 90 degrees, temperatures at the equator hit 140 degrees and another massive extinction and change in the earth’s life forms changed again (The land around Antartica and Australia 39 million years ago became a tropical paradise….)
So… Yes the earth was hotter and colder than it is now, but it has warmed up faster in 200 years than it ever did over 10 million years before, species cannot keep up with evolutionary changes and are rapidly ying off around the earth (also measurable).
Global warming means, we have burned more carbon than the earth by itself ever did in history, the carbon, water vapor and methane content is approaching that of the Eocene rapidly and will reach Eocene levels in less than 100 years…
So do you really want to live in a world that has 10% oxygen, and no oxygen above 500 feet, a shoreline 60 feet higher than it is today (as it was in the past, Virgina has several fossil beaches just before the fall line…and shorelines in the past 500 feet deeper (submerged) than they are today) or do you really want to have a tropical paradise in Antarctica and hell on earth at the equator?
If you don’t believe what I’m telling you, study it for yourself before you tell the best scientific minds we have today they are all wrong…