Coldest Winter
Oh the snow fell without a break
Buffalo died in the frozen fields you know
Through the coldest winter in almost fourteen years
I couldn't believe you kept a smile
Now I can rest assured knowing that we've seen the worst
And I know I love ya
(Rod Stewart, Mandolin Wind)
Just a bit of perspective. Our media is telling all of us about how sweltering hot it is right now. Every day brings another story of record heat somewhere. The media, almost gleefully, reports on deaths attributed to the heat. Record power usage, terms like 'scorching heat' and 'sweltering July' are tossed around endlessly, it seems.
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Snow. Floods. Icy winds. Maybe even a tornado. South Africans are facing one of their harshest winters in years, with at least four deaths blamed on flooding from heavy rain that has caused travel delays in the south and west of the country.
While north of the equator, much of the United States sweats through a heat wave, Johannesburg saw flurries Wednesday for the first time in at least eight years, the national weather service said. Stunned office workers pressed against windows to savor the spectacle.
Freezing temperatures are not unusual at higher altitudes during the winter, but heavy snow has fallen in some interior towns that rarely experience such weather. More snow and gale force winds were expected Thursday in some areas, Weather SA said.
Torrential rains have caused flooding along the southern coast, including the town of George in the Western Cape province, where a rain-swollen river swept a car from a bridge. Police recovered two men and two children who had been inside the vehicle, but rescuers were looking for a fifth person believed to have been in the car.
Homes were flooded, sending scores of families to seek shelter at a community center and school, local authorities said.
Heavy snow, rain and falling rocks closed mountain roads in parts of the interior, including a border post with Lesotho, according to local news reports.
The George airport was closed Tuesday, disrupting 24 flights before it reopened Wednesday morning, airport officials said. Passenger trains in the Western Cape were running up to 14 hours late, the Spoornet rail company said.
Meteorologists were investigating whether a severe storm that swept through the northern town of Dullstroom on Tuesday night was a tornado. At least six people were injured in the heavy winds and rain, which also ripped roofs off homes, police said.
Well, there's still some good news. The South Africans can keep warm by huddling around the flaming whales!
World news | Gaius Wednesday, 2 August , 2006
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Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » Jingle Bells - South African Style — Thursday, 3 August , 2006 @ 12:36 pm
By crosspatch, Wednesday, 2 August , 2006 @ 5:03 pm
Austrailia had one of the coldest Aprils on record, possibly the coldest ever recorded.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 2 August , 2006 @ 5:10 pm
We had a very cool spring here in the Midwest. One wonders what this winter will be like.
By crosspatch, Wednesday, 2 August , 2006 @ 10:39 pm
What people don’t realize is that global warming mainly acts to increase low temperatures, not so much to increase highs. Also, CO2 acts only very early in the cycle. Once you warm the system up a degree or two, you have a lot more water vapor in the atmosphere and water vapor is a vastly more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2. So water vapor swapms CO2 pretty early. Once you get more water in the atmosphere, even great reductions in CO2 won’t make any difference.
But if people such as Gore were really interested, they should look at the last interglacial … the period before the last ice age. It was much warmer than this one has been. Forests grew much further North than the do today. Actually, there have been at least three periods in this interglacial that were probably warmer than now. The warmest was the Holocene Optimum. We are probably only now nearing the temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, which is still a degree or two cooler than the Holocene Optimum was. Even so, as I stated earlier, this interglacial hasn’t been near as warm as the last interglacial was. And we weren’t burning oil then.