Weather

[fpb]

I just heard that it snowed in Rome, hard enough to stop some twenty flights from Fiumicino airport. This is astonishing. Rome has the mildest climate in the whole country, and a heavy snowfall is more unlikely there than in much of Sicily. This shows what an astonishing weather event we are actually having.

Comments

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

I saw the pics of London covered in snow last night--Michigan on the Thames! lol What really made me go D: though, was when the reporter mentioned that the city of London has no snow-removal equipment. That would suck, and I feel for you.

Although I have to admit over here I can tolerate giant snowdrifts and such more than the -10^o than we've had for most of January. I hope it hasn't gotten that cold over there for you.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I spent a good deal of my childhood on the Alps, and the rest in Milan, which in winter is colder than London. I quite like cold weather. What honks me off is that most of England seems to have been built by someone who was under the delusion that the country was somewhere near Morocco!

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about who has snowplows--obviously they're not needed in Mexico or Florida--but I guess I never thought about England not having them, since y'all are even farther north than we are! If that makes any sense.

I also did not realize that it got that cold in Milan. I used to spend entire days out in the cold when I was grooming horses, I must have been made of tougher stuff then. ;p

[prylliepwns.livejournal.com]

HA what global warming??

Take THAT Al Gore!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think it is more subtle than that - climate change can involve colder winters as well as hotter summers. My problem with Mr.Gore is that I shall believe that it is man-made when I believe in magic. Historically, climate has changed plenty of times. At the height of the Roman Empire, people grew grapes in Northampton, England, where they still cannot be grown today; conversely, in the fifteen hundreds fur was a necessary part of clothing all over Europe - the famous hunger for fur that drove European settlers from Siberia to Canada was due to climate - and in the seventeen-forties, both London and Venice experienced winters so cold that the Thames and the lagoon of Venice froze solid, and people had parties and held fairs on the ice. And climate can change pretty swiftly. From 1000 to about 1300, the coast of Greenland was warm enough for thousands of Viking settlers from Iceland to establish a republic there; by 1350, they had all frozen and starved to death. It is not perhaps a coincidence that this violent collapse in temperature coincided with the famous Black Death which, between 1345 and 1348, destroyed about one-third of the population of Europe. So climate change happens, and happens all the time. What Mr.Gore has to explain to me and to any person of sense is where the man-made ("anthropogenic") factors were in the Roman or medieval periods, or even earlier in the time of the glaciations.

[prylliepwns.livejournal.com]

I couldn't have put it better myself.

I have always believed and still will believe in the future that the climate changes are not directly caused by the greenhouse effect. And if I have to hear one more time about the erosion of the ozone layer, I'm going to shoot somebody. The ozone layer changes from day to day, there is no consistent layer to damage. It's these glaring omissions of facts that Mr. Gore and others use to push their own political agendas.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Also, the last ice age ended 11,000 years ago, which is a long time to us humans but just a blink of an eye in geologic times. There are still fluctuations relating to that.

One also hears about the Great Lakes' water level dropping, but one of the factors in that is that the area is still rebounding from being covered by the ice sheets--something like 1/2 inch a year or so. (But don't quote me on that, I'd have to go look it up again.)

//Takes off geology geek hat.//

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

To quote one of my managers: "Global warming, my ass! Al Gore can come start my car every morning."

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind, I said a "heavy" snowfall. It can snow in Rome, and it can freeze, but a snowfall heavy enough to impede transport is rare.