Absolutely violent windstorms here last night (with very little rain) that knocked out the power from about midnight until just a little bit ago. No damage in my little neck of the woods, but trees are down on the outskirts. I know we shouldn’t deal with anecdotal evidence, but I’ve been observing much more violent weather here for several years, and that things are changing. While spring rain storms and wind storms aren’t unusual, there is an intensity to them that was not there before. The weirdest for me is the violent windstorms in the winter we’ve had the last few years- I’ve lived in this region for 40 years, and we just didn’t have storms like that in my youth. We’re also experiencing record rainfall, and it will be raining once again today. I’m never going to get this garden in.
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cathyx
And if you’re having problems getting a garden in, think about the farmers having the same problem. Prices will skyrocket.
Ghanima Atreides
may i suggest ABL’s/jinxtigr’s post?
Chaos Theory 101
mr. whipple
Same never-ending rain here. Brutal. Hoping to have the garden in by Memorial Day.
geg6
Well, your weather is my weather and your climate is my climate (most of the time), and I’ve noticed the same thing. Bigger and more serious storms in the winter. Vast amounts of rain in the spring (more this year than I ever remember) with tons more storms that produce hail, microbursts, and tornadoes. All happening over years with increasing intensity. It’s like a new normal.
I’m blaming it all on the goddam stink bugs.
And don’t even get me started on the whole garden thing.
RobertB
Here in Ohio, the fields around my house haven’t been plowed. I think it’s too late for corn, but they have a couple of weeks left until it’s too late for soybeans.
Jonathan
I’ve been noticing the same thing in my neck of the woods. It just seems like it weather is more “aggressive”. Rain amounts might be the same, but rain events seems to be more severe. Same with snow events. It also seems to be more humid in the summers than I remember it.
Superking
According to the announcement:
I want to know who the first gay columnist was. Can the Times out someone from the 1850s?
Comrade Javamanphil
We are so screwed.
Ash Can
Re the title: OK, I don’t mind an earworm like that.
Halteclere
When I was a kid in southern Missouri (150 miles east of Joplin – so I don’t know anyone affected by that tornado) the large winter storms would drop snow on us, while farther south in Arkansas they would get a ton of ice instead that decimated their trees and knocked out power. This was back in the ’70’s and ’80’s.
Now southern Missouri is also getting the ice, and the damaged trees and knocked out power that comes with it, while the boundary for the snow has moved farther north. Central and southern Arkansas that used to get the bottom edge of the ice is now getting heavy winter rains.
So yea, the weather is changing.
jrg
Weather in NC has been worse, as well. The tornadoes a couple of weeks ago were brutal.
We’re going to have to answer to our kids and grand kids about inaction on global warming one day. I really hope they are smart enough to learn about propaganda and money in politics… God knows, most “adults” today are far too fucking stupid to see this for what it is.
Stefan
Winter is coming.
Foxhunter
Georgia checking in. No rain in my suburuban paradise for 3 1/2 weeks and none on the horizon.
What happened to the days of the two day, steady drizzle? Seem to be gone. All we get now are rushed Tstorms that (when they show) produce ample rainfall, but in such a quick dump that it runs off rather than penetrate the soil.
Bob
Things change.
When I was a kid, the 50’s, here in northeast Kansas my parents cut peonies and iris to decorate graves on Memorial Day. Today peonies and iris are finished blooming long before Memorial Day rolls around. But who cares? Walmart and Kmart sell lovely plastic thingies for graves.
WaterGirl
@geg6: Just want to say that I have been thinking about you and wondering how you and John and your dog are doing.
maya
I’ve noticed these severe weather changes too, starting November 4, 2008 and reaching peak sustained intensity since January 20, 2009. I wonder what the root cause could be?
DanF
The weather models based on global climate change are much better at prediction than Dick Morris.
Murc
Upstate New York here, in my early thirties, and we’ve been getting the same thing. It’s been getting much, much wetter than it was in my youth, with more long, dreary summers and more uncertain springs, although total aggregate snowfall is down due to warming winters.
It’s so weird. My grandparents and to a lesser extent parents (all Rochester natives) can without hyperbole break out the old saws about how much worse the winters were when they were kids (uphill! In the snow! both ways!) but for me and my peers, the weather has actually been getting WORSE.
Montysano
I’m currently reading Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 And How It Changed America, which I highly recommend. It’s history written as a page-turner novel. Of the many things I’ve learned, two stand out: they had crazy weather back then as well, and their mainstream media was way more fucked up than ours is. In both cases, it’s cold comfort.
I’m not denying that our current climate seems to be changing. But it’s difficult to separate what is caused by human activity and what is not.
Rosalita
@Foxhunter:
I was in Atlanta last week. We were looking forward to a sunny reprieve from the Connecticut chill. All my shorts stayed in the suitcase, fleece out at night, 48 degrees the morning we left. Very little sun, just cloudy. Weird.
Montysano
@Bob:
Same with dogwoods here in the Deep South, which are now over with in early April.
Nemesis
+1 for The Guess Who reference.
geg6
@WaterGirl:
Thanks! We are okay, for now. Henry is still having accidents, despite all of our attempts at avoiding them. And is ashamed every time. He goes to the vet tomorrow, so we will see what he has to say at that point.
Hopefully, it’s something fixable. But, if not, it will be very, very, very tough, especially on John.
Foxhunter
@Rosalita:
This week, mid 90’s. Albeit, it’s been a dry heat with zero humidity. /chuckles/
artem1s
My childhood memories of thunderstorms are pretty bleak. I haven’t really seen anything as severe as the weather the night that Xenia got wiped off the map (1974). And well, as bad as storms are in Cleveland, I haven’t seen anything yet like the winter of 77/78. A couple of individual storms that have come close but not whole winters.
But then again my perception is markedly different as an adult. As a child I lived out in a very rural area and witnessed the storms rolling over the landscape. Even a mild storm could look pretty threatening when you have a big horizon as a palette.
As an adult living in the city, I see weather very differently. Cleveland just handles snow, the city is well versed and no recent storm has shut things down for more than a day or two. Their might be individual neighborhoods that have extended power outages but that has more to do with how First Energy services poor neighborhoods than the actual severity of the event. And the rest of the state has just gotten better at snow removal.
My real beef is with the local TV coverage of weather. Fox definitely has a tendency towards apocalyptic weather reporting and now the other local stations are following their model. We have heat indexes and chill factors as if I need some hairdo to tell me that 100 is hot (no really it FEELS like 115!)? The Yahoo weather widget on my desktop doesn’t even have the actual temperature. Yahoo thinks I need to be told what the temperature FEELS like, too.
I don’t know if data and statistics support the ‘more severe’ weather theory that everyone espouses. I do know for sure that even people who don’t watch local TV news will tune in for 15 minutes to see the weather. It’s a ratings maker. So last night, as is almost always the case after an event like Joplin, every local channel was interrupting regular broadcasting so the hairdo’s could play with the Dopplar Radar displays.
We had some heavy storms south of the city. They MAY have been severe enough to warrant breaking into regular programming. The hairdo’s were reporting sightings of funnel clouds and even a wall falling down in the food court at a mall. And they even encouraged local people to get in on the hysteria and phone in and upload videos. It was pretty obvious they were trolling for free footage to go viral, NOT really particularly concerned with getting people out of the weather.
Turns out, no funnel cloud confirmation and the wall was an outside construction project that got knocked down in the wind and the mall was open for business as usual. Some downed trees and power lines, that’s pretty much it.
My point with all of this is that in a couple of weeks, after their attention span has strayed (OK, 15 seconds), the local hairdos will be obsessing over some sports or birther nonsense. And if or when there really is a dangerous storm system, no one is going to pay much attention to alerts on the TV because you can’t tell when these guys are crying ‘wolf’ and trying to bump their ratings. Oh yea, pretty much the best storms in Ohio come during May sweeps. Gold baby, gold.
Linnaeus
Here in the Puget Sound area, our weather’s been affected – so I’m told – by this years very strong La Niña event, which means our winter was a bit rainier and chiller than normal and that’s extended into our spring. We’re having the coldest spring we’ve had in 60 years; it’s late May now and we’ve had maybe one day around 70 or above. Today might reach mid-60s, then we’re back to rain and high-50s//low 60s for the rest of the week. Summers here are normally quite nice, but I don’t know about this year.
I’ve been here about 10 years, and the last few winters have featured a few crazy snowstorms that shut the city down or at least make travel very, very difficult. It doesn’t take much, comparatively speaking, to do that because of the hilly terrain and because appreciable snowfall is typically quite rare here. Of course, you can’t read too much into that and make generalizations about the local climate but it does make one wonder.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
It’s not just global warming. If I’m understanding the global weather conditions correctly, a La Nina coinciding with a Negative North Atlantic Oscillation is also contributing to the violence of weather patterns over the past year or two. Then add the increased humidity from the warmer Gulf of Mexico waters.
.
AnnaN
On a very simplistic level, climate change is due to overall rising temps of the Earth. Heat is energy. More heat in weather patterns should produce more energetic results. HAWT = FLASHBOOMWHOOSHFLOOD
eemom
here is a totally awesome op-ed by Bill McKibben from today’s WaPo that was just MADE for this post.
Yes, you read that right — awesome op-ed in the WaPo. It happens once every gazillion years. This time, it happily coincided with eedad’s latest lamentations about why don’t I cancel the damn thing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-link-between-climate-change-and-joplin-tornadoes-never/2011/05/23/AFrVC49G_story.html
Violet
An article in Slate, “The Century of Disasters” talks about this issue a little, along with Fukushima, etc.
AnnaN
@Montysano: “I’m not denying that our current climate seems to be changing. But it’s difficult to separate what is caused by human activity and what is not.”
Actually, that’s not true. We know that the carbon cycle affects climate change. More atmospheric carbon correlates to higher temps on earth. Land ecosystem carbon can be easily differentiated from fossil fuel burning carbon by measuring 14CO2 in atmospheric samples. “14CO2 content of coal, oil and natural gas is zero” while ecosystem 14CO2 is “very close to equilibrium with the atmosphere”. This can be measured easily, the process needs to be streamlined (e.g., more data samples -in the thousands – per year) to determine just how much man is contributing to the mess. However, Congress has just crippled funding for the project and will continue to do so. Since there is no money to be made in the private sector for this type of research, the Republicans have effectively said, “Shhh, shhhh, close your eyes. What you can’t see and what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
RoonieRoo
I grew up in Lubbock, Texas and have been through my share of tornadoes, including the May 21st, 1970 one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Lubbock_tornado
I remember that a lot of the neighborhood was in our basement with all the pets and I also remember going downtown the next day with my father to find that there was no downtown anymore.
The weather has definitely changed for me since I was a kid but I don’t know that it’s necessarily for the worse down here. Granted, we are having significant and ongoing drought issues but that’s always been a problem in Texas and water issues relate more to population increase than just weather changes.
I can definitely point to a man made change for the panhandle. Growing up, we had dust storms that were Oklahoma Dust Bowl scary. The farmers changed how they plow and farm and, voila, dust storms became much rarer and rarely deadly. Lubbock still has muddings though. That is something I don’t miss from living up there. Muddings are when the dust storm is followed and overtaken by a rainstorm. It literally rains mud.
jnfr
@Foxhunter:
Your days of steady drizzle seem to have moved to Denver. We had steady rain every day for nearly two weeks. That’s unheard of here. I’ve lived in Colorado since 1990 and I’ve never seen anything like it. And yes, I’m having trouble getting my garden in.
ETA: However, the neighborhood lilacs have been spectacular this year.
joeyess
Some folks in the scientific community have taken to calling this increase of violent storms “global weirding”. I’m slightly troubled that the link I’ve provided quotes the Mustache of Understanding at length, but I’ll take sentience where and whenever I can find it.
Linda Featheringill
Interesting.
It looks like having to plant a container vegetable garden because of no available ground space may work in my favor. I live about 10 miles south of Lake Erie but my garden has been in for a week. It’s doing fine.
And to geg6:
I hate those things. Ugh!
joeyess
@Montysano: Roses, here in Kansas.
Rihilism
Not saying it means anything, but a storm that passed through here on Sunday had continuous sustained thunder. Given the tornado warning for this storm, it was scaaaaaary ominous…
Odie Hugh Manatee
We normally have a wet fall, winter and early spring, with our good weather coming in the mid to late spring and lasting through early fall. But not for the last few years now. We’ve had drier than normal winters with a wet fall and wet mid spring to early summer. We had three weeks of sun and 70’s in January and we figure that was our summer. It’s been pretty much nothing but clouds and rain since then with a few nice days interspersed throughout. Where we usually have beautiful weather by now it’s been nothing but cooler temps, clouds and rain, more of which is heading our way for the next week according to NOAA. Nothing nasty, just cool, cloudy, rainy weather with no break in sight. I used to ride my motorcycle to Spokane in April but this year would have seen me riding in the 30’s and 40’s if I tried that.
Whenever it gets hot inland from us, we usually see fog. Nope, just clouds, rain and not much more. We can’t complain, compared to what people are going through in inland (we’re south Oregon coast) but it still sucks. The wife and I have a motorcycle trip planned for early June but I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll need to bring our winter gear for the ride.
I guess all that ice melting up north is fucking everything up down here. It sure isn’t like it used to be, that’s for sure.
Damned at Random
I’ve moved around all of my adult life, so I really don’t know normal, but my Mom (born in 1910) lived in the same county her whole life and claimed it all changed with the moon landing. so that’s one hypothesis.
Global warming- people assume it means everything gets uniformly warmer. I keep telling them heat is energy. add energy to the system and things get – shall we say- interesting.
Stooleo
For those of you with limited space and have to plant in containers, These EarthTainers things seem to work well. I built a couple a few weeks ago and my tomatoes are totally busting out.
gex
Ditto here. I’ve lived in Minnesota all 40 years of my life. It has only been in the past few years that we’ve gotten thunder and lighting in the *winter*. It’s freaky. I expect toads next winter.
S. cerevisiae
I linked this paper in another thread but it very relevant to this thread. Heavy precipitation events have increased in frequency. Groisman et.al. 2004.
ornery curmudgeon
Hundreds of millions of years of sunlight stored in plants eaten by dinosaurs along the food chain have been pumped from the earth’s crust into the atmosphere.
And humanity watches with tsking denial this could be the cause of changing our environment. It may be a form of insanity; our ancient forebears noted that those whom the gods will destroy for their hubris are first made insane. That’s how it seems to roll.
One thing seems certain (or has already happened): humans will wait before taking action until it is either almost completely too late, or until it actually is.
cckids
I just started McKibben’s book, “eaarth“; I highly recommend it if you don’t mind being scared shitless & infuriated while you’re informed. A major premise seems to be that while we can & should still try to work on climate change, it is too late in one respect; we already no longer live on the earth we grew up on. Warming has progressed too far for that.
Jewish Steel
Before this thread gets derailed it’s important that everyone know that the dollar value meal is back!* I am not a sock puppet! But if I was, I would be Smartwool™
When Katrina hit my students from the giant insurance company in my town would, unprovoked, offer, “You know, we’re not responsible for floods. That’s the federal gvt’s dept.” Just as if they were being coached or encouraged from above to disseminate exculpatory rhetoric. Big money has ten thousand little megaphones in this world. What a fucking racket.
*A call back to a climate change denialist clown from yesterday, in case you missed it.
terraformer
Yup, we’ve noted weather that is more and more severe here in the upper midwest.
As my Fox News-watching grandfather noted the other day when discussing this and I said “that global warming is really changing the weather”, he responded, “well, it’s something, that’s for sure.” Sigh.
donnah
I’m another from Ohio, but from the SW region in Dayton. We have a long history of tornado activity, that F5 that hit in 1974 was fifteen minutes from where I lived at the time. We’re at the end of Tornado Alley, but we still get some freaky storms and I agree that our usual pattern of spring, summer fall, winter now consists of longer winters, short springs, long summers and short falls. We go from freezing rainy weather to hot summer with barely a nod to moderate, mild weather.
The storm that hit John Cole was probably the same front that blew through here yesterday. It didn’t form tornado funnels, but I have to think we had some microbursts here in my area, as trees were corkscrewed up and the streets were littered with debris. The winds seem much stronger than they used to be.
Arclite
@ John,
I’m also going to assume that you there was a lot more snowfall when you were younger, and frosts came earlier and ended later in the year.
Tehanu
I’m in L.A. We hardly even had a summer last year — which was nice, believe me, as the previous summer was hotter than blazes — and this year, we had a substantial rainstorm, enough to wash all the dirt off my car, only last week, a month after the end of rainy season. Admittedly we don’t (usually) have the kind of extremes of weather you do in the Midwest, but we’ve noticed changes here too.