Let Them Eat (Snow) Cake

Posted on March 3, 2015 | 6 Comments

Alert “06880” reader Sandy Rothenberg took this photo yesterday. For once, I don’t think the deer were to blame.

Snow cake - Sandy Rothenberg

In other weather-related news, spring will definitely arrive — when hell freezes over.

Unless it already has.

This entry was posted in Weather and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

6 responses to “Let Them Eat (Snow) Cake”

  1. Roberta tager | March 3, 2015 at 10:43 am |

    Thanks again for the smile!

  2. Nick Thiemann | March 3, 2015 at 11:57 am |

    Yum. and no calories!

  3. David Bratt | March 3, 2015 at 1:46 pm |

    Snow flan? Snow cheesecake? 🙂

  4. Bart Shuldman | March 3, 2015 at 3:05 pm |

    Do we now call it ‘global cooling’? Someone had to ask

    • Dan Woog | March 3, 2015 at 3:15 pm |

      That’s a softball, Bart. It’s “climate change.” And even though we’re shivering in the Northeast — and Senator Imhofe thinks it’s hilarious to bring a snowball onto the Senate floor — here are some actual, scientific facts (source at bottom):

      The U.S. had the 24th warmest January in the 1895-2015 temperature record, NOAA reported this week. And we saw four times as many daily warm temperature records as daily cold records. Globally it was the second-hottest January on record.

      Yes, those of us on the East Coast were cold, but the West Coast was sizzling, as seen in the chart above. NOAA explains that seven Western states — California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming — “had a top 10 warm January.” But while “parts of the Southern Plains and Northeast were cooler than average… no state had a top 10 cool January.” A new 2015 study links this bifurcated weather pattern to climate change (see below).

      Global warming of 1°F since 1950 doesn’t mean the end of winter or the end of record daily low temperatures. It’s still going to be much, much colder on average in January than July — and one of the most iconic indicators of winter for many Americans, northeastern blizzards, is actually going to get worse for the foreseeable future, as climatologists have long explained.

      As for daily temperature fluctuations, they are so large at the local level that we will be seeing daily cold records — lowest daily minimum temperature and lowest daily maximum temperature — for a long, long time. That’s why climatologists prefer to look at the statistical aggregation across the country over an extended period of time, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one single, local temperature record on global warming.

      NOAA reports “during January, there were 3,499 warm daily temperature records broken or tied (1,906 warm maximum and 1,593 warm minimum), compared to 775 cool daily temperature records broken or tied (441 cool maximum and 334 cool minimum).” That’s a ratio of more than 4-to-1.

      http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/20/3625194/climate-change-records/