Weather Where You Are

[Roland Deschain]

Well said, PoN. Those darn pesky liberals need showing who's boss, which is why god has been sending all those storms to Tex...oh.

Rain today, with lower temperatures after the warmest March i've ever known, and I think the warmest on record here. I've often wondered why I love The Day After Tomorrow so much.

[Arkaeon]

Weather in central midwest USA continues to be mild, cool, and does whatever I ask it to whenever I ask it to. It's starting to freak me out a little, actually, because I insist that I don't really believe in weather control magic. Of course there was this american indian shaman in my neighborhood when I was a kid, and whenever he did the rain drums, it rained on us, even if there weren't actually any clouds in the sky -- but we can just ignore that sort of actual event evidence, right? After all, it was impossible so it didn't happen. I've had several examples in my practice in the last year, which is just not right for a modern practitioner to remember. It's all coincidence. Don't believe a word of it!

I did some truly tedious research a couple years ago for completely different reasons, but I had to link other past events to climate models and records. For one thing, I found 3 separate explanations for "world flood" myths that didn't amount to anything like a real world flood in the Old Testament sense. Meanwhile, the Gulf Stream is still working and will continue to do so for as long as the Isthmus of Panama exists, so you Yerpians should say a prayer of thanks to that landform every day you wake up NOT covered in a half a mile of ice. Without it, you probably would. The "El Niño" and other effects, however, will give you some great variations, especially when matched up with stuff like sunspots and so on. Short-term weather cycles override the general warming trend since 25,000 bce with no problem. From 1950-1980something has been called a "micro-ice-age" by climatologists, and you young'uns haven't seen any kinds of winters like we had back then. I once walked to school in wind-chill temperatures of -70°F (-57C), uphill and against the wind both ways!

Blocking the "arctic express" of water and weather interchange flows to toss western Europe back into an abrupt ice age would seem to require one of two things. 1) a meteor/volcano event of grievous magnitude. 2) An arctic freshwater surge equivalent to the catastrophic draining of Lake Agassiz (ca. 12k bce) that froze russian mammoths in place with summer daisies still in their stomach and raised sea levels by 6-12 meters, which cannot be duplicated by any sources available these days. Lake Agassiz covered up to 1/3 of Canada and flooded into the arctic sea when the glacial dam to the north (Hudson Bay) collapsed. It was dozens of times the volume of the combined Great Lakes waters of today, possibly the largest liquid freshwater reservior ever to exist on this planet. Lake of the Woods, Ontario, is the last meaningful remnant of Agassiz, and no real threat to world climate patterns. Great fishing, though.

Bless your lucky stars it only snowed a bit. Let me know if the Thames freezes over in London and lets the wild wargs invade the Shire. Happy Hunting :)

[ET, the Extra Terrestrial]

I dunno, Ark. I attended that seminar (Abrupt Catastrophic Climate Change) last week (missed the last ten minutes or so, dratted physical therapy appointment), and it was fascinating. The presenter, Dr. Alder Stone, drew conclusions very similar to what we were conjecturing back in the late 1970's, only he had better science than we had at the time. We hadn't been able to look at the information in the newer, km+ deep Vostok cores, and we only theorized about how suddenly things could change, but one of the events with the potential for the biggest impact was a shutdown of the mechanism that drives the North Atlantic current, including the Gulf Stream. The current is driven by thermohaline gradients, and it seems likely that the melting of polar ice is having a powerful effect on the haline part of the equation, and probably on the thermal part as well. Doc Stone expects this to happen pretty soon, and pretty quickly once it takes off. He is quite convinced that we are heading almost unstoppably towards a "tipping point" where the global climate will flip to a new steady state. Not a continuation of the recent cycle of oscillation between glacial and warm interglacial, where we are about 7C above the glacial norm, but to a state last seen in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 6C or 7C warmer than we are now. He fully expects a sudden and dramatic shift in the next 50 years, due to what he describes as numerous positive feedback loops that are unaccounted for in most officially-sanctioned climate models. I would love to investigate this further in a more detailed symposium that he plans to offer, but I don't know if I'll be able to make it work with my schedule. Here's his website.

[Roland Deschain]

Thanks for the link, ET. I look forward to reading through it.

[black bart]

Arkaeon wrote:

Bless your lucky stars it only snowed a bit. Let me know if the Thames freezes over in London and lets the wild wargs invade the Shire. Happy Hunting :)

It wouldn't be the Wargs I'd be worried about if that happened it would be the Yardies!

[daftbeaker]

Too hot. I don't do hot weather, make it go away.

Did I mention it's hot? I have my window open after 10pm and still feel like I'm in a bloody sauna.

[Roy Hunter]

Lots of Scottish people started this morning a light blue colour, walked around with very few clothes on today, and finished the day cooked-lobster red. I am not one of them.

[black bart]

Lots of Scottish people started this morning a light blue colour, walked around with very few clothes on today, and finished the day cooked-lobster red. I am not one of them.

Ye has a Jim Lad to accept when ye've stopped hidin from thee sun ye blighter!

[Roland Deschain]

I caught the sun yesterday. It took a while, but i've finally got it to eat something. It doesn't take well to captivity.

[DavidH]

Let it go, yer bugger, we want it too.

[black bart]

We are getting plenty of sun at the moment, phew what a scorcher, scorchio, it aint alf hot mum, god it's hot, you could fry an egg on it...etc etc.

[pieces o'nine]

rain, light rain, dark clouds threatening rain, rain, clouds, light rain, clouds..

[Roland Deschain]

rain, light rain, dark clouds threatening rain, rain, clouds, light rain, clouds..

You should move to England. Much better weather here at the moment.

[Tigger_the_Wing]

Weather in central midwest USA continues to be mild, cool, and does whatever I ask it to whenever I ask it to. It's starting to freak me out a little, actually, because I insist that I don't really believe in weather control magic. Of course there was this american indian shaman in my neighborhood when I was a kid, and whenever he did the rain drums, it rained on us, even if there weren't actually any clouds in the sky -- but we can just ignore that sort of actual event evidence, right? After all, it was impossible so it didn't happen. I've had several examples in my practice in the last year, which is just not right for a modern practitioner to remember. It's all coincidence. Don't believe a word of it!

Sorry, Ark; I just had to correct you on this. That isn't evidence in the scientific sense; it's an anecdote on the internet.

Evidence would be the you or shaman repeating the effect under controlled conditions with instruments recording the results.

For all we know, any of the following would explain what you say happened (and I'm not saying here that I endorse any of them, just that all assertions should be tested):

a) You're telling porkies (because you like to wind up strangers on the web).

b) You're inadvertently telling porkies (because the events didn't happen quite as you describe due to faulty memory/ confirmation bias)

c) The events from your young days happened as described, but the 'rain' was actually a hidden accomplice with a hosepipe.

d) The shaman was very observant after a lifetime of weather-watching and knew all the signs of an impending clear-sky downfall and only played his drums at that time. I've been caught in a clear-sky downfall before. All it requires is a mini-tornado over a body of water which then dumps its load elsewhere. Such downfalls have been known to contain fish.

e, and the least likely) The shaman actually could break the laws of physics but only when he felt like it and only in front of credulous children.

Kids are easily fooled, something that all grandparents (and most parents) take advantage of at every opportunity for the lulz. If a shaman could genuinely control the weather there would be no weather disasters.

You may have a sub-conscious recognition of weather patterns and that is prompting your higher consciousness to anticipate inevitable weather changes and imagine that you have caused them.

[gronank]

It is too warm here to wear socks.