Word: storming
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...there have been hints that it was coming. The 2009 U.S. Climate Impacts Report found that large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years. While the frequency of storms in the middle latitudes has decreased as the climate has warmed, the intensity of those storms has increased. That's in part because of global warming - hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow. Colder air, by contrast, is drier; if we were in a truly vicious cold snap...
Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm - or even a season's worth of storms - to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries. And while our ability to predict the former has become reasonably reliable, scientists are still a long way from being able to make accurate projections about the future...
...this rate, the flinty toughness that President Obama has tweaked Washington for lacking when it comes to winter weather may soon be forged through sheer necessity. Another epic blizzard hammered Washington on Wednesday morning, paralyzing anew a city that was still struggling to dig out from a storm that dumped some two feet of snow on the nation's capital over the weekend. The frigid blast, which is expected to blanket Washington's beleaguered residents with another 10 inches or more, left travelers stranded, shuttered airports, snarled rail and road traffic and brought the federal government (yet again...
...roads on Wednesday morning, citing "life-threatening blizzard conditions." Swirling winds of up to 60 m.p.h. were recorded, whipping up near whiteout conditions, with visibility at Dulles International Airport outside Washington about one-tenth of a mile. Thousands of people in the region went without power. The storm, which originated in the Midwest, was barreling up the East Coast on Wednesday, battering Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston, forcing preemptive school closings and spurring officials to slash air travel. (See pictures of wacky winter weather...
Even before the latest pummeling, Washington had recorded 45 inches of snow this winter, including two of the heaviest storms ever to batter the city. Wednesday's storm - with some six inches recorded already, and snow falling at a rate of as much as two inches per hour at mid-morning - is poised to shatter a 111-year-old record for total seasonal precipitation. "No one ever has seen this much snow in Washington, D.C.," according to Mayor Adrian Fenty, who said on Wednesday that the city would ask the federal government to foot some of the cleanup costs...