Let It Snow

Posted on December 20, 2008 by Gaius

At 7:04 AM EST tomorrow, December 21, 2008, the Winter Solstice occurs. But it has already been a hard winter – and for much of the country, there is no break in sight.

Swaths of the country braced for more snow as cities from Spokane, Washington, to Hartford, Connecticut, cleaned up Saturday from major winter storms earlier this week.

“We have a window of opportunity to make significant progress on snow removal before the next expected snowstorm on Saturday night,” Spokane Mayor Mary Verner said Friday.

The city received about 2 feet of snow this week, with outlying areas reporting up to 3 feet of snow by the time the storm ended Thursday evening, CNN affiliate KHQ reported.

And more is coming, according to weekend forecasts — the National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning for parts of Washington state.

Heck, the Seattle Center has had to cancel it’s “Winter Solstice Fire Festival” due to the harsh weather in that city. Accuweather is reporting that it is going to be brutal through the Midwest and Northeast this week – starting tomorrow.

Another winter storm will cross the Midwest into the Northeast over the balance of the weekend, followed by a blast of arctic air. Meanwhile, a storm that will create blizzard conditions in the Northwest could cause trouble in the Midwest Tuesday and the East on Christmas Eve day.

The Midwest and the East will barely have time to dig out from the snow and ice that blasted the regions on Friday before the next system moves through by Sunday.

Here in the Midwest, it is very, very cold and heading south, so to speak. It will be down to about 4 degrees overnight (that is the official call, but it is already near that as I write this – and the sun is not yet down). Worse yet, there is a major storm hitting the Washington region tonight as well – that one will be moving to the east through this next week.

It is going to be a rough week.

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6 Responses to Let It Snow

  1. feeblemind says:
    December 20, 2008 at 8:31 pm

    I don’t believe it is supposed to get above zero here tomorrow. At least the wind has gone down. I am out in the weather most of the day tending cows and it feels like I have been worked over with a club. Scuttlebutt has it that it is supposed to be near 30 here by Christmas Day.

  2. Sam Wah says:
    December 21, 2008 at 8:27 am

    I HATE this Global Warming!

    Do YOU know where AlGore is?

  3. feeblemind says:
    December 21, 2008 at 9:44 am

    Actually the temp in the northern plains is 105 and rising due to manmade global warming. This cold weather is just an illusion caused by a virus that has infected the skeptics. There was once a Twilight Zone episode where a man thinks the earth is burning up, but in the end we find out he was sick and delirious. The earth was actually freezing over. Rod Serling just had it backwrds.

  4. Quilly Mammoth says:
    December 21, 2008 at 12:26 pm

    Fallen Angels by Pournelle and Niven, Baen Books 1991:

    Gordon didn’t say anything. Alex watched him a moment longer then turned his attention to the gauges. Gordon was nineteen. There had always been an Ice Age, so it did not surprise him that the glaciers had crept farther south. Alex thought he remembered a different world-—green, not white-—before his parents brought him upstairs. He wasn’t sure how much of it was genuine childhood memories and how much was movies or photographs in books. The habitats had a fair number of books on tape, brought up when they still got along with the Downers.

    The green hills of earth, he thought. Now the glaciers-—not rivers of ice, but vast oceans of ice-—were spreading south at tens of miles a year. Hundreds of miles in some places. In the dictionary, “glacial” meant slow; but Ice Ages came on fast. Ten thousand years ago the glaciers had covered England and most of Europe in less than a century. They’d known that since the sixties . . . though no one had ever seen fit to revise his schoolbooks. But what did that matter? To a school kid a century was forever anyway.

    As for Gordon . . . He glanced again at his copilot. Well, what the world is like in our lifetimes is what it should be like forever. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. It was funny to think of groundside environmentalists desperately struggling against Nature, trying to preserve forever the temporary conditions and mayfly species of a brief interglacial. Alex looked again through the cockpit windscreen and sighed.

    “We could have stopped it,” he said abruptly.

    “Eh?” Gordon gave him a puzzled glance.

    “The Ice Age. Big orbiting solar mirrors. More microwave power stations. Sunlight is free. We could have beamed down enough power to stop the ice. Look what one little SUNSAT has done for Winnipeg.”

  5. Bleepless says:
    December 21, 2008 at 5:58 pm

    Not only that, But Dec. 20 is the anniversary of the founding of the Cheka and Dec. 21 is Stalin’s birthday.

  6. sam says:
    December 22, 2008 at 12:18 pm

    Temps here (Utah) are pretty typical for this time of the year, but we have been getting new snowstorms every day or two. I guess I should keep my fingers crossed that we don’t get any of those blasts that have hit further east.