For Twenty and Ten, never again?
Bensblurb # 527
Friday, Feb 26, 2010
Whew, that new Northeast snow storm this week has spared Virginia.
In our so-called global warming era, it’s easy to shrug off the kind of unpopular findings I cited recently---that it took less than a year for a historic “big freeze” long ago to last for some 1,300 years in ancient times.
Let’s hope our blizzards this February wasn‘t the beginning of something again that’s really all too cool. For it was the worst I’ve seen in 32 years of pleasant living here in Aquia Harbour. Even so, my wife and I got off easy. We lost electric power for only an hour or so at most, while some neighbors elsewhere were lights-out for more than three days.
Son Buddy and family, residing back in the section farthest from the community’s entry gate, had that experience. Fortunately they were veteran campers, so made do with logs in their fireplace and propane in their cook stoves. Not that they were happy over their fate.
The power failures and street blockages of auto traffic in Aquia Harbour were one sad result of a maturing community’s abundant trees growing too freely for safety Our tree-lined streets are very attractive when shading the sun during most of the year and providing beautiful fall color. But the trees hindered the best efforts of our own road crews and the power company workers.
Thus, says Bud, our community needs to start a stringent tree-clearing project alongside our streets and power lines. We could see such February storms and outages again; see first paragraph above.
A kindlier recollecton now, if you will, about snow storms and one in particular. On the February day when I got married, in Chicago, a blizzard was well underway. That was 54 years ago. The blizzard ended, but the marriage didn’t, yet. I had always said it would be a cold day in hell when I got married and sure enough...
Almost exactly a year earlier, in 1955, I experienced a Colorado snow drift up close and personal and alone. A snowstorm, followed by a high wind in those Colorado mountains had drifted the access road to my father’s ranch shut. Three separate drifts had formed. They looked like mountains, sprawled across the road. I checked them out.
Each one had mounded up about 5 feet. I had brought a shovel. It should have been a pick axe. The drifts consisted of blown-in snow, grainy and hard as salt and packed just as tight.
Even our medium sized Farmall tractor, I discovered, wouldn’t budge them. Three days later the county’s road-maintainer blade came and busted them up.
Back to the here and now, I had to laugh at the unfortunate timing of two pieces in a newspaper that I had dug out of the snow. One was this announcement: “President Barack Obama's administration is forming a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.” Wow. Whatever happened to the Weather Bureau?
The other was a Washington Post editorial, titled “Still a climate for change.” It argued for a new carbon tax to be imposed on energy providers in the name, not of stopping global warming, but of conservation, don’t you see.
Its chances? About as likely as a snowball in [February’s] hell.
Friday, Feb 26, 2010
Whew, that new Northeast snow storm this week has spared Virginia.
In our so-called global warming era, it’s easy to shrug off the kind of unpopular findings I cited recently---that it took less than a year for a historic “big freeze” long ago to last for some 1,300 years in ancient times.
Let’s hope our blizzards this February wasn‘t the beginning of something again that’s really all too cool. For it was the worst I’ve seen in 32 years of pleasant living here in Aquia Harbour. Even so, my wife and I got off easy. We lost electric power for only an hour or so at most, while some neighbors elsewhere were lights-out for more than three days.
Son Buddy and family, residing back in the section farthest from the community’s entry gate, had that experience. Fortunately they were veteran campers, so made do with logs in their fireplace and propane in their cook stoves. Not that they were happy over their fate.
The power failures and street blockages of auto traffic in Aquia Harbour were one sad result of a maturing community’s abundant trees growing too freely for safety Our tree-lined streets are very attractive when shading the sun during most of the year and providing beautiful fall color. But the trees hindered the best efforts of our own road crews and the power company workers.
Thus, says Bud, our community needs to start a stringent tree-clearing project alongside our streets and power lines. We could see such February storms and outages again; see first paragraph above.
A kindlier recollecton now, if you will, about snow storms and one in particular. On the February day when I got married, in Chicago, a blizzard was well underway. That was 54 years ago. The blizzard ended, but the marriage didn’t, yet. I had always said it would be a cold day in hell when I got married and sure enough...
Almost exactly a year earlier, in 1955, I experienced a Colorado snow drift up close and personal and alone. A snowstorm, followed by a high wind in those Colorado mountains had drifted the access road to my father’s ranch shut. Three separate drifts had formed. They looked like mountains, sprawled across the road. I checked them out.
Each one had mounded up about 5 feet. I had brought a shovel. It should have been a pick axe. The drifts consisted of blown-in snow, grainy and hard as salt and packed just as tight.
Even our medium sized Farmall tractor, I discovered, wouldn’t budge them. Three days later the county’s road-maintainer blade came and busted them up.
Back to the here and now, I had to laugh at the unfortunate timing of two pieces in a newspaper that I had dug out of the snow. One was this announcement: “President Barack Obama's administration is forming a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.” Wow. Whatever happened to the Weather Bureau?
The other was a Washington Post editorial, titled “Still a climate for change.” It argued for a new carbon tax to be imposed on energy providers in the name, not of stopping global warming, but of conservation, don’t you see.
Its chances? About as likely as a snowball in [February’s] hell.
posted by Ben Blankenship at
8:12 AM
