Joust The Facts

A Waste Of Ink At Reuters

Reuters, apparently completely unfamiliar with both partisan political campaigning and federal responses to natural disasters, thinks the following is "newsworthy:

NJ governor pledges to vote Romney despite praising Obama

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New Jersey Governor Chris Christie defended his praise for President Barack Obama after superstorm Sandy, but said he would stick with his fellow Republicans and vote for Mitt Romney in Tuesday's election.

"I endorsed Mitt Romney 13 months ago because I thought he was the best guy for the job," Christie said on Sunday during a news conference, reaffirming his support for the Republican candidate.

But support for Romney does not mean that he cannot appreciate the "good job" that Obama did while responding to the historical storm that hit the U.S. Northeast last week, Christie said. Sandy knocked out power to some 2.4 million New Jersey residents.

Governor Christie not only endorsed Mitt Romney for president, but has campaigned actively to see Mr. Romney elected.  And some journalists clowns at Reuters thinks that a few words of praise for the man ultimately at the head of the response team in a time of state emergency after a nearly unprecedented natural disaster might change Christie's vote?  I just turned to my wife and said that this may be the dumbest story I've seen this entire election.

I guess they were hoping for change.

'06 Deja View

I've lived and worked in Essex County in the northeast corner of Massachusetts since moving here 14 years ago.  Until last year I hadn't seen anything like this.

But here we are, 1 year later, and it's deja vu all over again.  A view of the same parking lot/strip mall from today:

A little less water, but still impressive.

I wasn't able to get close to the Friendly's last year, but it was under water then also.  The next shot is from the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune showing the same restaurant a little closer up.

Lawrence: A Friendly's employee carries food and supplies out of the restaurant during a rainstorm that caused flooding around the building. A line of employees trudged through the water saving everything from ice cream to napkins and loaded it all into a refrigerated truck. Photo by Angie Beaulieu

I suspect they won't bother rebuilding this time.

Chicken Little II

"The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!"  Or, if you prefer,

So spake the former Vice President this afternoon in testimony he declined to provide in advance to the committee.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Al Gore, who has reversed his political fortunes to become a potential contender in the 2008 presidential race, made an emotional return to Congress Wednesday in an appeal for an even more dramatic rescue—saving the planet.

Gore—who is one of voters' top choices for the Democratic presidential nomination even though he says he's not running—implored lawmakers to adopt a list of policy prescriptions to stop global warming.

Fresh off a triumphant Academy Awards appearance in which his climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won two Oscars, Gore drew overflow crowds as he testified before House and Senate panels about a "true planetary emergency" if Congress fails to act. He said addressing the problem is a moral issue and should not be a partisan or political.

Well, it may not be partisan, but it is certainly political.  Was his performance hysterical, in the crazed rather than humorous sense?  You be the judge.

"The planet has a fever," Gore said. "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, `Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."

I'll play along with this medical metaphor for a moment, "flame retardant baby" notwithstanding.  Nobody is denying that the planet has a (slight, but not unprecedented) fever, Mr. Gore.  What we're discussing is the cause of the fever, and whether the prescription will do more harm than good.  It wouldn't do to give the baby liver damage with adult doses of acetaminophen just to bring down that fever, would it?  It would be improper to prescribe a long and expensive course of antibiotics for a viral fever that will slowly and eventually resolve on it's own, wouldn't it?  The question is, Mr. Gore, are you prescribing the right medicine, or are you prescribing cancer chemotherapy agents to treat shingles?

Gore advised lawmakers to cut carbon dioxide and other warming gases 90 percent by 2050 to avoid a crisis.

Worldwide?  That would require the deaths of a large number of humans and animals.

He said he foresees a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal, likening the development to what the Internet has done for the exchange of information.

The father of the internet would certainly know.  Maybe this is why he didn't want to release his testimony in advance.  Here's my favorite quote.

"Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination."

My moral imagination is being sorely tested, I'll tell you.  A lengthier takedown at Ace of Spades.

Skeptics Debate Alarmists - And Win

A debate was held in New York City featuring scientists from the alarmist and skeptic sides of the anthropogenic global warming argument.  And, lo and behold, an audience which was in favor of that theory before the debate moved noticeably and significantly away from that belief when polled after the debate.

Skeptics Dramatically Convinced Audience

The skeptics achieved the vote victory despite facing an audience that had voted 57% in favor of the belief that mankind has created a climate "crisis" moments before the debate began.

But by the end of the debate, the audience dramatically reversed themselves and became convinced by the arguments presented by the skeptical scientists. At the conclusion, the audience voted for the views of the skeptics by a margin of 46.2% to 42.2%. Skeptical audience members grew from a pre-debate low of 29.9% to a post debate high of 46.2% -- a jump of nearly 17 percentage points. [Link to official audience voting results]

[Link to full debate pdf transcript]

Of course, the alarmist community, while conceding defeat, attributed it more to the entertainment value of the skeptic sides arguments than the substance.

NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, one of the scientists debating for the notion of a man-made global warming "crisis" conceded after the debate that his side was ‘pretty dull’ and was at "a sharp disadvantage." Schmidt made the comments in a March 15 blog posting at RealClimate.org.

"…I'm afraid the actual audience (who by temperament I'd say were split roughly half/half on the question) were apparently more convinced by the entertaining narratives from [Novelist Michael] Crichton and [UK’s Philip] Stott (not so sure about Lindzen) than they were by our drier fare. Entertainment-wise it's hard to blame them. Crichton is extremely polished and Stott has a touch of the revivalist preacher about him. Comparatively, we were pretty dull," Schmidt wrote.

To come to this conclusion they naturally failed to ask the audience what convinced them.  A debate can certainly be won on presentation.  Nonetheless, if the scientific arguments were so strong and defensible in their favor that "wow" factor could easily have been overcome.  Perhaps this is a sign that, should the mainstream media choose to present both sides' scientific work in a more evenhanded manner the global warming alarmist freight train might have to slow a bit to be certain of it's course.

Meanwhile Al Gore, testifying today in Congress on the matter, declined to submit his testimony 48 hours in advance for review by the committee members.  Is he afraid that they might study it and present some rather challenging questions to his assertions?

"Going Green" Often Simply Hot Air

On Saturday I noted the story about ski resorts and their environmental pandering on theoretical human-induced global warming.  I would have written "efforts" in stead of "pandering," but this Business Week story, "Another Incovenient Truth," made me reconsider.

The organizers of the Academy Awards declare all their celebrity presenters to be "carbon-neutral." Vail Resorts Inc. (MTN) in Colorado boasts that its chairlifts and lodges are "100% powered by wind." Seattle's municipal utility claims that its net contribution to global warming is zero.

A  growing number of organizations, corporations, cities, and individuals are seeking to protect the climate—or at least claim bragging rights for protecting the climate. Rather than take the arduous step of significantly cutting their own emissions of carbon dioxide, many in the ranks of the environmentally concerned are paying to have someone else curtail air pollution or develop "renewable" energy sources (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/1/07, "Ethanol: Too Much Hype—and Corn "). Carbon offsets, as the most common variety of these deals is known, have become one of the most widely promoted products marketed to checkbook environmentalists.

Done carefully, offsets can have a positive effect and raise ecological awareness. But a close look at several transactions—including those involving the Oscar presenters, Vail Resorts, and the Seattle power company—reveals that some deals amount to little more than feel-good hype. When traced to their source, these dubious offsets often encourage climate protection that would have happened regardless of the buying and selling of paper certificates. One danger of largely symbolic deals is that they may divert attention and resources from more expensive and effective measures.

Another bit of information concerns methane, produced by rotting garbage and flatulent cows.

The decomposing trash generates methane, a gas 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere, melting glaciers and raising ocean levels.  (ed: they might have left out the latter two references.) 

Waste Management, Inc set up a system at this Arkansas landfill to collect the gas and burn it, converting it to CO2, before carbon offsets even existed.  But, if it'll make you feel any better about your carbon footprint ...

The methane system was launched long before any promise of carbon-offset sales. In other words, it appears that the main effects of the TerraPass offsets in this instance are to salve guilty celebrity consciences and provide Waste Management, a $13 billion company based in Houston, with some extra revenue.

Seattle feels very good about their carbon footprint.  The city assuages their guilt in similar fashion, buying carbon reductions that would occur anyway, and costing their electric customers more for their power.

Seattle, the home of Starbucks, made an astounding announcement in 2005: Its municipal utility, Seattle City Light, had eliminated its contribution to global warming. The power company still annually spewed some 200,000 tons of greenhouse gases. But Seattle said it had negated every last ton by paying other organizations around the country to curtail their emissions. "We can power our city without toasting our planet," Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels declared.

But as in the case of the Oscar presenters, the bulk of the pollution reductions for which Seattle paid would have happened regardless of its offset deal. The city's experience illustrates the difference between more expensive methods of cutting greenhouse gases close to home, vs. more far-flung deals with third parties.

A lot of this inverts the environmentalist's aphorism.  Instead we get "Think locally, and pay someone else to act globally."  It's even more cynical when that someone else is already doing it.  Read the whole thing.

Yeah, I Wrote That, Too

The NY Times piles on to my statement yesterday, delicately peeling away the shroud of certainty surrounding Al Gore's jihad against alleged anthropogenic global warming.  In my words:

Is this the final word?  Was "An Inconvenient Truth" the final word? No, and no.  I can tell you that one side seems not to have proven its case as conclusively as they'd like you to believe.

The NY Times agrees.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Amen.

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings,  and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

If they keep this up the NY Times may yet reclaim some of its lost luster.

Beyond Parody

When I first saw this story I had one question.  Did Iowahawk write it?

OTTAWA (AFP) - A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday.

"I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation ... that could be a way to save our planet," Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.

Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper.

Such alien technologies could offer humanity alternatives to fossil fuels, he said, pointing to the enigmatic 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico -- which has become a shrine for UFO believers -- as an example of alien contact.

"We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough," he said.

Is this the end-stage of a "Man-made global warming" psychosis.  If so, Al "Carbon Bigfoot" Gore is halfway there.

The Emerging Steel Cage Battle

A fight to the finish is brewing over Global Warming.  About a week ago the political arm of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published their conclusions well before the actual research and scientific material are to be published, that global warming is real (ed: sure) and it's due to man burning fossil fuels (ed: not so sure).  Sometimes it's best to tell the people what you want them to think before you give them the means to evaluate your conclusions.

PARIS, Feb. 2 — In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely” causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising seas and shifting weather patterns — unavoidable results of the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

[...]

While the report provided scant new evidence of a climate apocalypse now, and while it expressly avoided recommending courses of action, officials from the United Nations agencies that created the panel in 1988 said it spoke of the urgent need to limit looming and momentous risks.

“In our daily lives we all respond urgently to dangers that are much less likely than climate change to affect the future of our children,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which administers the panel along with the World Meteorological Organization.

“Feb. 2 will be remembered as the date when uncertainty was removed as to whether humans had anything to do with climate change on this planet,” he went on. “The evidence is on the table.”

Scenes From An Ice Storm

Beautiful, if not entirely desirable.

Dissent Perforates The Concensus

The Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, recently concluded in England, laid out a dire scenario that had to have Al Gore performing bizarre self-congratulatory gymnastics.  The report included a brief executive summary (pdf), along with reams of additional analysis and data.  It painted a bleak picture.

Climate change will affect the basic elements of life for people around the world access to water, food production, health, and the environment. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms.

Using the results from formal economic models, the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more.

Ugh.  The concensus on global climate change had been conclusively reached, and it was not a pretty picture.  We simply must act now.

Looking On The Bright Side ...

... at least now we don't have to worry about global warming.  Scientists have determined that were using up the planet - its resources will be gone in a mere 44 years.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets' worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends, the WWF conservation group said on Tuesday.

Populations of many species, from fish to mammals, had fallen by about a third from 1970 to 2003 largely because of human threats such as pollution, clearing of forests and overfishing, the group also said in a two-yearly report.

"For more than 20 years we have exceeded the earth's ability to support a consumptive lifestyle that is unsustainable and we cannot afford to continue down this path," WWF Director-General James Leape said, launching the WWF's 2006 Living Planet Report.

I can't believe it.  No America bashing in a story about the environment.  Oh, wait, sorry, my bad.

"If everyone around the world lived as those in America, we would need five planets to support us," Leape, an American, said in Beijing.

This study was made absolutely vital after a large amount of oil was recently discovered in the Gulf of Mexico.  There is also conflicting data on food supplies from the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

A new technical interim report from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concludes that the long-term food security outlook for developing countries is good. While the world population is expected to reach eight billion by 2030, growth in global agriculture should be more than sufficient to meet world demand.

The WWF is not the World Wrestling Federation (now known as the WWE) but the World Wildlife Fund - might they have an agenda?

Somewhere Paul Ehrlich is smiling.

Why did Ehrlich’s predictions fail to come true? Because the model he used, like almost all those who predict dire problems from population, was basically flawed. In a nutshell what Ehrlich did was take population growth for the 1960s and extrapolate it out through the 1970s, but he insisted production of resources such as food and water were at their limits -- both would likely decline, and certainly not increase.

Food production not only increased, but increased faster than population growth, so 27 years after the publication of The Population Bomb, not only are there many more people alive in the world, but they eat more than they did in the past. Water quality, which Ehrlich believed beyond repair, has also steadily improved.

In a related story, the members of the WWF have contributed to recovery of the planet by moving to Borneo, giving up their automobiles and IPods, and subsisting only on locally grown mangoes and coconuts.

Climate Orthodoxy

Senator James Inhofe produced a speech on the floor of the Senate recently, his second such speech.  The first was in 2005, and covered similar territory.  Apparently he was the topic of an unflattering editorial in the NY TImes, which Debra Saunders discusses in today's San Francisco Chronicle.

Global warming is a religion, not science. That's why acolytes in the media attack global-warming critics not with scientific arguments, but for their apostasy. Then they laud global-warming believers not for reducing greenhouse gases, but simply for believing global warming is a coming catastrophe caused by man. The important thing is to have faith in those who warn: The end is near.

What was Inhofe's mistake?

The Times' focus was on Inhofe's refusal to bow to "the consensus among mainstream scientists and the governments of nearly every industrialized nation concerning manmade climate change." That is, Inhofe has had the effrontery to challenge elite orthodoxy. Or, as the editorial put it, Inhofe "has really buttressed himself with the will to disbelieve."

"Disbeliev[ing]" is the crime, apparently.  Inhofe is an apostate.  There are really two camps in the global-warming debate.  One believes that global warming has had a precipitous acceleration due to man's activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, in the latter half of the 20th century.  The other group, the skeptics, are often mischaracterized as not believing that global warming is occurring.  Largely, though what they believe is that global warming has been neither precipitous nor unprecedented, and it hasn't been due primarily to man, but rather to natural variance from solar activity and other factors.  This latter group got another boost to their hypothesis recently.

Ten years ago, Danish researchers Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen first hypothesized that cosmic rays from space influence the Earth’s climate by effecting cloud formation in the lower atmosphere. Their hypothesis was based on a strong correlation between levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover – that is, the greater the cosmic radiation, the greater the cloud cover. Clouds cool the Earth’s climate by reflecting about 20 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space.

The hypothesis was potentially significant because during the 20th century the influx of cosmic rays was reduced by a doubling of the sun’s magnetic field which shields the Earth from cosmic rays. According to the hypothesis, then, less cosmic radiation would mean less cloud formation and, ultimately, warmer temperatures – precisely what was observed during the 20th century.

If correct, the Svensmark hypothesis poses a serious challenge to the current global warming alarmism that attributes the 20th century’s warmer temperatures to manmade emissions of greenhouse gases.

Just last week, Svensmark and other researchers from the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Centre published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A – the mathematical, physical sciences and engineering journal of the venerable Royal Society of London – announcing that they had experimentally verified the physical mechanism by which cosmic rays affect cloud cover.

This is big news - thus far unreported by big media.

“Many climate scientists have considered the linkages from cosmic rays to clouds as unproven,” said Friis-Christensen who is the director of the Danish National Space Centre. “Some said there was no conceivable way in which cosmic rays could influence cloud cover. [This] experiment now shows they do so, and should help to put the cosmic ray connection firmly onto the agenda of international climate research,” he added.

How significant could this effect be?

That is, cloud cover changes over a 5-year period can have 85 percent of the temperature effect on the Earth that has been claimed to have been caused by nearly 200 years of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. The temperature effects of cloud cover during the 20th century could be as much as 7 times greater than the alleged temperature effect of 200 years worth of additional carbon dioxide and several times greater than that of all additional greenhouse gases combined.

So although it has been taken for granted by global warming alarmists that human activity has caused the climate to warm, Svensmark’s study strongly challenges this assumption.

Ms. Saunders concludes:

I remain agnostic on global warming, as I've seen good arguments on both sides. I know, however, that I never will be convinced that global warming is a scientific threat as long as believers put most of their energy into establishing orthodoxy and denying that reputable global-warming skeptics exist.

She then lists some of the reputable skeptics.  That those skeptics, backed with similarly impressive scientific studies like the one referenced above, are treated like holocaust deniers, speaks poorly not of the skeptics, but of the global-warming true believers, one of whom has even proposed Nuremburg style trials for the crime of denial.

Scared of the debate?

A "Concensus" - Minus One

Global warming alarmists constantly state that there is a "concensus" in the scientific community regarding the anthropogenic nature of any measured warming.  We're driving too many SUV's, darnit!  Judging by Richard Lindzen's article on OpinionJournal.com, you can subtract at least one distinguished climate scientist (he's an Professor of Atmospheric Science  at MIT) from that concensus, one who also blows holes in the "concensus" claim for others in his field.

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.

Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."

Well, hardly.  Mr. Lindzen goes on to point out a number of areas of inconsistency that indicate that scientists really don't know. He then gets to the meat of the claims regarding CO2 levels.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task [assessing the effect of rising CO2 levels] is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.

Similar definitive statements have been attributed to other reports from the IPCC, the National Academy of Science, a study by social scientist Nancy Oreskes, and a presidential advisory panel.  Mr. Lindzen correctly notes that all of them are definitive only in the sense that they are not.  For example:

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.

Mr. Lindzen concludes that there really isn't a scientific concensus as to the human cause of global warming, but that by repetition and intensity the global warming alarmists, such as Mr. Gore, are trying to establish their tale as the truth.  But just because you recruit a thousand Chicken Littles doesn't make the underlying claim, that the sky is falling, any more true.

An Inconvenient Article

From an article in the Canada Free Press: (hat tip Jason Smith)

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

If that doesn't make you want too read the whole thing, nothing will.

"You're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat"

So sayeth Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) to Quint (Robert Shaw) in the the classic horror film Jaws.  Brody, of course, was referring to the size of the shark he'd just seen off the stern.  That need for a bigger boat ... or any boat, really ... popped into my head this morning as I tried to make my way to my office as our own little New England horror film continues.  First I ran into this at the junction of routes 28 and 133 in Andover.

Looking south down 28:

To the west on 133:

I eventually found my way around this pickle, but after an outpatient surgery this morning I decided to take a look at the next closest highway exit, at route 114.  Here we are, about a quarter mile to the highway, looking north:

That's water down the hill, and there's a strip mall on the right. 

Not looking too good for the big sale at Kohl's today:

The Merrimack River is very close to here, and the flooding is extensive.  We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Yeah, It Got Me Too

Via Yahoo News:

Storm Slashes Power Across Northeast

ROCHESTER, N.Y. - More than a quarter-million homes and businesses still lacked power across the Northeast on Saturday as temperatures plummeted following a storm with hurricane-force wind gusts that was blamed for four deaths.

Wind was still blowing at about 30 mph through the region Saturday. On Friday, wind of more than 60 mph buffeted the Rochester area and a 77-mph gust was recorded at the city's airport, the weather service said.

The storm swept out of the Midwest on Friday, carrying a wave of bitterly cold air. Temperatures in some parts of western New York plunged from 60 degrees to below freezing within a few hours. Hayward, Wis., had a morning low of 26 below zero, and afternoon temperatures in the Upper Midwest were in only the single digits Saturday. Parts of Arkansas had 5.5 inches of snow Saturday and freezing temperatures extended across the state.

Utility officials in upstate New York said crews would work through the weekend to restore power to 160,000 customers, down from at least 328,000 customers who were blacked out Friday.

More than 40,000 homes and businesses had no electricity in New Hampshire (ed: that would be us), and more than 35,000 in Maine.

Vermont, where the National Weather Service reported a wind gust of 143 mph on Stratton Mountain (ed: !), had about 7,000 customers still without power, and some 1,800 customers were blacked out in Massachusetts.

So, between being on call, sick children, and being up running the generator to heat the house to keep those kids and my wife warm, it's been a busy 24 hours.

On the other hand, things could be worse.  A close friend's family had a ski trip to Utah cancelled due to flight cancellations and no airline capacity to reschedule them.

Just What We Needed

More rain.   Three inches or so.  Flood watch.  50 mph winds.