First, a word about that stupid Groundhog. His predictions have been accurate, according to the official weather statistic keepers as reported on Wikipedia, about 39% of the time over the last hundred years or so. On a seemingly 50/50 proposition, that’s not even good guessing.
Anyway, today I’m glad I live in Europe and it doesn’t have anything to do with a more cultural lifestyle, socialized medicine and good
Somewhere near Chicago: Seriously Illinoising Weather
public transport, the lack of teabaggers or any of that stuff. It’s just that I’ve been seeing photos and listening to horror stories of bitingly cold air, impassible drifts and dangerously icy sidewalks all day. Worst blizzard in decades, they are saying. Snow in Texas and Louisiana, of all places. My native state of Iowa, in the satellite photo, looks like a big marshmallow.
Of course, the worst storm in decades is naturally going to come along every few decades, so this by itself is not proof of global warming. Even this plus the horrible floods in Australia is circumstantial evidence at best. There’s one more thing, though, which I believe is directly connected to the storm in the U.S. right now and pretty much proves that global warming is something we’d damned well better start taking seriously.
An amazing thing happened in Greenland this year. Now, you get that far north and the sun actually does entirely disappear through a portion of the winter. The date of its reappearance, however, is generally consistent. It’s printed on the calendars, it’s a predictable thing, it has been the same date for as long as anyone can remember. And this year it came back two days early. Obvs, the earth has not altered it’s speed or angle of rotation, or else we’d be seeing environmental disasters a whole lot worse than a bad snowstorm. So, the leading theory is that the melting of the icecap has actually lowered the peaks enough that the sun peeked over them earlier than usual. Make’s sense.
Anyway, with the Greenland icecap melting, there’s a whole lot of spare water in the air, which has to come down somewhere. It has apparently settled on North America.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
I agree, interesting times…..but some will never believe in global warming as that would require humility and change.
Karns tells me in DM it’s below zero with 40mph winds and 6-8 inches of snow on the ground. I remember days like that back in my paper-boy days, crawling through the drifts to deliver the register, with icicles on my eyelashes and frost all around the mouth hole of my ski mask. I hadn’t heard about the Greenland thing, but for the sun to come two days earlier the peaks must have lowered substantially, if that is indeed the cause.
Iowa is actually having a mild winter – for Iowa. It’s February and we just now get the first true blizzard of the winter. Sensationalist weather pundits said it would be a “historical” snow event. They were wrong as usual. It was an average blizzard in central Iowa. Nothing remotely historical about 8 inches in these parts. Only thing historical was how wide a swath the storm covered, but this occured because of standard weather events converging. It’s normal for Texas to get snow and ice every so often, but they tend toward more ice than snow. It’s just a big event for them because they don’t keep snow/ice equipment on hand, knowing it will all melt rather quickly anyway.