Snowpack Buries Geese
Today’s (Feb. 8th) Snow-Precipitation Update for Oregon from the Natural Resources Conservation Service [here] indicates that this year’s snowpack and precipitation are far above average. Basins from Owyhee to the Coast Range report snow pack is currently 115 to 490 percent above average, and precipitation statewide is about 120 percent above average, to date for the winter season beginning last October 1st.
Mt. Hood Meadows ski area reports a snow base over 15 feet deep, and Hoodoo reports a base over 10 feet deep. Over 40 feet of snow have fallen at Timberline on Mt. Hood this winter.
Regionally the NRCS reports [here]:
The snowpack across the West is near to well above average in almost all areas. Cold weather and continued stormy weather have created an extensive snowpack in many regions. Heavy snow and dangerous avalanche conditions are delaying many monthly snow surveys for the NRCS and our cooperating agencies. Flood concerns are rising with the continued building of low elevation snowpack. This transient snowpack is vulnerable to rain-on-snow events and have the potential of adding water to any flooding that may occur.
And yet, despite these roof-collapsing facts, numerous dead tree press reports claim the opposite [here]:
Warming blamed for snowpack decline in West
By Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post, February 1, 2008
WASHINGTON - The persistent and dramatic decline in the snowpack of the mountains of the West is caused primarily by human-induced global warming and not the result of natural variability of weather patterns in the region, researchers reported yesterday.
more stories like thisUsing data collected over the past 50 years, scientists confirmed that the mountains are getting more rain and less snow, that the snowpack is breaking up faster, and that more rivers are running dry by summer.
The study, published online by the journal Science, looked at possible causes of the changes, including natural variability in temperatures and precipitation, volcanic activity around the globe, and climate change driven by the release of greenhouse gases. Their computer models showed that the explanation that best fit the data was clearly climate change.
“We’ve known for decades that the hydrology of the West is changing, but for much of that time, people said it was because of Mother Nature and that she would return to the old patterns,” said lead author Tim Barnett of the University of California at San Diego. “But we have found very clearly that global warming has done it, that it is the mechanism that explains the change, and that things will be getting worse.”
Sorry Tim, but you are 100 percent wrong. If this was the Gong Show, you’d have been gonged. Somebody please put the dunce cap on Tim. What a maroon!
Put the dunce cap on a whole lot of people who are/were dead wrong in their snowpack predictions. Just plain wrong-o.
The upshot is that the screaming meemees who have been running around like chickens with their heads cut off and spouting insane nonsense about global warming have been PROVEN to be WRONG about it. Mother Nature gave them the finger and pulled a fast one on them, making the wacky alarmists look like pathetic and utter boneheads.
However, our National Policies are now based on the honking of boneheads. Whichever goose honks the loudest wins, apparently.
Honk, honk, honk.
And the snow keeps falling. How rude! Doesn’t Mother Nature know that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for hysterical predictions of declining snowpacks? She is really making Al look like a goose and a half, along with the IPCC, the UN, the Democrat Party, and all the usual suspect Beltway boneheads who have gone off the deep end on global warming.
Yes, sports fans, I’m a Denier. You can lock me up, shut me up, hang me after a Nuremberg-style inquisition show trial, but still the snow keeps falling!
“E pur se muove” (and yet it moves!) — the famous last words of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for his support of the Copernican theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, and not vice versa.
And it doesn’t help to call it “climate change” instead of global warming. That’s the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.
by Mike
Just yesterday OR Gov Ted Kulongoski’s Natural Resource adviser advised the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission that global warming and declining snowpacks were the Goober’s number one concerns. All present nodded in agreement and not one word of contrariness was uttered. A pall of oblivious, brain-numbing dumbness descended, and the meeting sank into the mire of futility.
by Chauncy
By calling it “climate change” instead of “global warming” sets them up so they can’t lose. No matter what happens, the climate is going to change. It has been since the earth aquired an atmosphere, and won’t stop until the sun blows up and scatters our ashes across the galaxy. They can’t be wrong.
The goosebrains should fly North and not come back. Leave us alone!!!
Hey, burning them at the stake may be better, we can all dance around the fire and get warm!
by bear bait
I remember the snow on my third birthday in Corvallis, 1946. I can’t remember a winter without snow. I remember sliding down the street in Grandpa’s ‘38 Buick, on the way to our house. Nobody wore shoes in class in grade school because they were wet. Our woolen gloves drip dried until recess and the snowball fight.
And there were two floods in the Willamette every year. One in winter and one when it warmed up in spring. This warmer weather pattern first set in around 1966, and the Oxbow burn, and then the Hoodoo burn in ‘67. The 4th Tillamook fire was in 1951. I do remember reading the thermometer on my porch in Monmouth in 1972 going out the door to work before Christmas, and it was -17. I looked at two sections of ground that week and drove every bit of it without one rock road.
A year later we had feet of snow in the Coast Range for 6 weeks, and piles of dead deer in the unit when I started cutters again. The only ones that lived ate all the moss off the felled and bucked logs. The deer were so bogged down the cougars were picking them off like low hanging fruit. If the cutters stopped for 15 minutes, deer were eating moss off the last tree they felled.
My son was born right before Christmas in 1968, with snow on the ground, and in Januar we got three feet on the flat in Springfield. I was without work for another 6 weeks. When we got going again, way down on Smith River, we cold decked until the trucks could get over the Oxbow to Eugene. We hiked a mile into the tail tree and logged another 1200′ feet beyond. A stick in the haywire eye drug us up the hill to get out at night, and we were running when we hit the landing as the line built up on the drum and line speed increased. I will never forget the lung burns I got out of that setting. I hacked up stuff from when I was in Boy Scouts. The swing tree crew came from Siletz, and they were driving in a snow-banked, narrow 101 roadway over Horse Ridge by Sea Lion Caves. In the black of morning they ran into a herd of elk on 101 and were damned near to Baker Beach before they could run them out of the road, what with the snow fence on either side, and a long ways to the bottom on the West.
This is a snowy winter, and not the first one nor the last. All this weather stuff is pure conjecture, and chaos theory will drive it like it has forever. Just expect the unexpected. And enjoy the memories. Hot, cold, wet or dry. Put it all together and it is a lifetime. The charlatans and frauds will be found out.
by Mike
I recall the winter of ‘79. We were living in a trailer on Lost Lake Road. The baby was 4 four months old. It was below zero the entire month of January. One day it was -15. The Columbia River froze across the Bonneville pool.
Somehow we all survived. Today the baby is six and half feet tall and has an MBA, a wife, and a baby of his own.
On February 26, 1979 there was a total eclipse of the sun. We were on the Path of Totality and witnessed the Harmonic Convergence on Macintosh Hill at sunrise. It was no more than 15 degrees above zero and the end of Feb.
The ENSO is partially responsible for our cold, wet winter. The El Niño Southern Oscillation has built up a pool of cold water in the tropical Pacific, known as La Niña. At the end of last month equatorial anomalies were 2 degrees C below average. The current La Niña is expected to last until April and possibly into June, meaning colder, moister conditions across the most of the continent (but dryer and warmer than average in the southeast).
The ENSO is an ancient oceanic oscillation that sloshes in 3 to 7 year cycles and possibly 20 and 40 year cycles (and possibly other periodicities not yet detected).
Be that as it may, it’s colder and wetter this year than any of the last 10 or so, diametrically the opposite of GW alarmist predictions.
And just for the sake of argument, if snowpack was declining, would it make sense to tear down water storage dams? Would it make sense to denude watersheds with catastrophic fire?
Of course not; those would be quite idiotic responses. Need I point out that those idiotic positions are exactly those of our idiot Governor?
by Mike
That’s Harmonic Convergence, not harmonica virgins. Homophones, but two completely different concepts.
by bear bait
I remember that eclipse. What I remember was all the birds quit singing. It became very very quiet out in the yard. And then it was over and the birds sang again. That, and all the tv stuff how to build a box with a hole so you could see the eclipse as a shadow and not burn out your eyes…
6/7th of this deal is agua, and some of it is pretty deep. We sort of become fixated on land deals, but this is a water planet. A whole bunch of that water is now ice, and anytime the clouds leave, a whole bunch of solar energy is beamed along with Scotty into space. If that reflective surface, and the reflective surface of late and long lasting snow fields, all send enough heat elsewhere, we start to cool, and that white deal builds on itself, and then the ice starts to creep south, and Global Al has to increase his carbon footprint to keep his ass warm.
That is why all the worry is in the US and the skeptics are in Europe-it will be their feet that cool first and the most. Only this time they can’t be saved by the Indian potato and Indian corn. If the sky does not fall or the rivers boil away, will it be OK to giggle and point fingers at the Chicken Little Wing of the Fraidycrat Party? The high in Fairbanks was -31 yesterday…the low -49.
There are plenty of skeptics here. As near as I can tell, MOST climatologists in the US are GW skeptics. Skepticism is the hallmark of science. To be non-skeptical is to be unscientific. The “debate is over” yammerers are as far apart from science as they can possibly be.
Europe seems pretty loony, as far as I can tell, except in Great Britain where Science is venerated.
I heard it was -67 near Anchorage last week, but that might have been an ugly rumor. Minus 67 is Antarctical. I think the dark side of the Moon is warmer than that.
by bear bait
An old Alaska trapper told a friend that below minus 20 you hole up in the cabin and don’t go out until it warms up again to minus 20. You would be holed up most of this winter up there. There is ice in places that haven’t had it for decades. I think it has been a winter of crisis in Siberia for Russians. The State no longer has the capability to transport aid across vast areas of snow and ice to needy villages. Kids are going without school. Ships are iced in port. Not a good deal.
On the other hand, polar bears are running and skipping across the ice, and sows will be out with cubs pretty soon, dodging boars looking for some cub meat and chance to father some more lunch.
In one of those deals about introducing exotic critters into the ecosystem, the north Atlantic Russian king crab harvest is well under way. They salted the Barents Sea and south with Pacific crabs a couple of decades ago, and now they are taking over the sea bottom on the North Atlantic in the Barents and down into the Norwegian Sea. Or, that could be their story for poaching all the crab on the Pacific side. Who knows? Either way, it is an ice fight all winter in that area this year. Will Europe have another famine? US ethanol farmers could care less. The subsidy is in. The fix is in. We are subsidizing our grain farmers. They are benefiting from our ethanol and bio-diesel programs. wink wink…
by Forrest Grump
Ah, the eclipse.
I still have some pictures of it. Went out by the fieldhouse at MSU after economics, set up the 300 on the tripod.
Here came the penumbra. Foooom! Sky black with a ring of orange around. “Ooooooo” goes about ten thousand college punks. I racked off a few pictures which weren’t particularly awesome, and then the penumbra zoomed away.
You’d think the Cats had just beat the Griz in triple overtime. Pretty neat.
by Bob Z
I took a drive to eastern Oregon with my wife and oldest son and took some excellent pictures from a Rest Area parking lot, where the clouds parted long enough to view the whole thing. About 30 of us witnessed the event from that location; all startled by unexpected, seemingly pulsating “vibes” that were concurrent with the full eclipse. Meanwhile, I had a planting or thinning crew working near Lincoln City who thought it would be fun to see what the 5-6 Mexican members would do if everyone else continued working, acting as if nothing unusual was taking place. The Mexicans all returned quietly to the crummy as things became dark and remained silent for some time until the light returned and the birds started singing again. Then they got out of the truck and went back to work. No one talked about what had happened until later in the day, when it was considered a Big Joke. Except to the Mexicans, who had been scared.
They want to be thought of as scientists, but they’re really just con artists and snake oil salesmen. And the dead tree press gobbles up the GW BS like candy.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of the Washington Post is? That’s a story they’ll never print.
One thing is for sure: reality will never intrude in their fascistic fantasy world.