Shovel Off To Buffalo

There has been so much snow over the past several days in Buffalo, New York and its surroundings, that if the late Tim Russert, a Buffalo native, were alive to see this, he'd be on "Meet The Press" treating it as an issue more important than immigration.  The city and its environs have gotten up to seven feet of snow, causing havoc and roof collapses all over the region.  I've seen news reports of people stranded in Wal-Marts and camping out in them, and the state of emergency is ongoing as state and local officials try to clear the snow from the highways.  I think the last time so much of the New York State Thruway was closed was during Woodstock . . . although I may be wrong.

What I'm not wrong about is the cause of all this snow - the earth getting warmer.  What, you say? How can increased warming cause snow?  Well, it means that, in this case, the waters of the Great Lakes have warmed up, and when cold air hits that warm water with enough energy, it causes lots of snow.  Let's call "global warming" what it really is - climate change.  With about four hundred record low temperatures set recently in 43 states, climate change is seen as a laughable idea.  The planet isn't really heating up, right?  Well, that extra warming, in addition to causing lake-effect snowfalls to get souped up, is disrupting cold and warm weather patterns all over the world and delivering high and low temperatures at both extremes in places where extreme weather is unheard of . . . or has been, until now.  As the planet warms, the polar ice melts, it disrupts things like the Gulf Stream, and the result of all that could be Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries freezing over.  And that would be far more extreme than seven-foot snow and nine-foot drifts.

Oh yeah, here's another extreme: Buffalo is expected to warm up well above freezing by Monday (November 24), so all that snow will melt quickly.  That's the good news.  The bad news?  It's going to melt so fast, and there's so damn much of it, it could cause flooding.

Climate changed. :-O