Saturday, February 10, 2007

Thank goodness for global warming

As we suffer through the coldest spell of weather that we've had in a few years, we can take solace in the fact that it is ONLY cold that we have had to put up with for the last week or so.

The poor folks in upstate New York are covered way up past their collective a**es, ears, eyeballs and top hats with snow.......... over 100 inches in the past week - 100 INCHES - almost 8 1/2 FEET of snow !! HOLY SNOW, Batman !! That's A LOT of f*cking snow! That averages out to over 14 " per day - every day - for a week. Remember the "storm" we had at the beginning of December? - that was a mere 12" or so. Can you imagine dgging out from more than that every day ??

The closest Milwaukee has ever come to anything like this during my lifetime was the winter of 1977-78. We had a storm on Christmas that dumped about a foot of snow; one on New Years that added another 14"; and then, about a week later another 10". People were shoveling snow off their roofs so they wouldn't collapse; snow plows had created such high piles of snow that you couldn't see cross traffic at any intersection - the city ended up hauling these large piles of snow away in dump trucks and dumping into the harbor. These storms had a huge impact on the area - and they were spread out over a 3-week period. Parish, NY has recieved 3 times as much snow in 1/3 the time! I sure am glad that we're living on the "right" side of the Lake.

Upstate NY isn't the only place having fun with snow this year. I have friends in Denver who have 40" - 50" of snow in their front yards. One of those friends told me that 40-50" of snow melts down to about 12" of water. That's about the total annual precipitation for the Denver area and they received all that snow in December - a year's worth of precipitation in just one month.

It even snowed in Malibu, CA and Scottsdale, AZ this season.

Well, all I have to say is "Thank goodness for global warming!"

If it weren't for that, who knows, maybe we'd be building ice sculptures at McKinley next June instead of sand castles and putting walls around our cities to keep the Mammoths out.