Valdez socked in
| Dec 17, 2009All the experts say the effects of climate change will be felt most in Alaska, home of the ex-governor who contends climate change is no big deal.
Good thing she wasn't in Valdez this week when the citizenry got buried under a record snowfall. We're not talking about your ordinary little dump here. That was in Copenhagen, where world leaders were meeting to discuss what to do about global warming and the Bloomberg news service was warning that Barack Obama and the rest would "face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.''
Four inches overnight? Valdez got more than four inches per hour at the height of the snowstorm that began there Monday and ran through the week. By the time the citizens of Alaska's only oil port finally caught a break, the snow was piled 5 feet, 8 inches deep.
Yes, you read right.
Five feet, 8 inches; over the head of your average American woman, up the nose of your average American man. The National Weather Service called it record. Fire hydrants were buried so deep under snow not even Tiger Woods could have hit them.
Not that residents are letting it bother them too much. At Valdez City Hall Thursday afternoon, accounting clerk Chris Moulton looked out the window and didn't see any lights on in other buildings -- City Hall has a generator, he said, but it looked like everyone else was in the dark.
Moulton said the National Weather Service estimate was probably already a little low; on Wednesday evening they'd reported 63.5 inches, but, he said, "we easily got (another) foot last night."
The biggest problem? Snow removal from the streets, where berms are piled something like three or four feet deep.
|
HE'S BACK:
 Snowzilla rises againAnchorage's world-famous giant snowman will reemerge this winter. |
Oh, and the harbor.
Moulton has a 25-foot aluminum cabin cruiser moored in the small boat harbor. For the past few days he's been leaving work at lunchtime to shovel the deck. Boat owners who haven't made it down -- well, Moulton said, there've been "a lot of near misses."
And then there was the one that didn't make it. The fishing vessel sank in "under an hour," Moulton said, probably because of the heavy snow load coupled with a failed pump or through fitting. Photographs show a frosty mast protruding from ice- and snow-cobbled water, punching the air like a metallic Michael Phelps.
And yet life goes on in Valdez, where the schools are still open despite the fact that a few buses got stuck in the ever-deeper drifts.
Moulton, still basking in the glow of generator-powered lights, shrugged it off. It's Valdez, he said. People who grew up there don't really take big snowfall seriously.
"No one really freaks out over here."
Wonder what Bloomberg would make of that?
To respond to your statement: "All the experts says the effects of climate change will be felt most in Alaska"... Name one.
The answer is your goofball supreme leader "Al Gore"!!! But then again, he also thinks the earth's core is millions of degrees F. Get this straight BOB, there is NO global warming! This is simply earth's normal weather cycle.
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Nice CHART! It proves the case that those that are brainwashed enough to believe in Man Made Climate Change CAN NOT EVEN READ A CHART!!!
THIS ONE SNOWSTORM PUTS THE AMOUNT OF SNOW FALLEN OF THE CHART IN DECEMBER!!
If you bielive in Man Made Global warming... you are willfully ignorant.
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I predict that silly suppositions on internet news sites will cause the world to implode in 50 years. Now pay me for your destruction.
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Geesh, we used to have snow up to the rooftops when I was little, but it was the Alaska territory then. We expected it to snow in the winter!
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Don't you mean global warming.
your Propaganda is old.
Alaska getting snow, wow what a shock.
"All the experts says the effects of climate change will be felt most in Alaska"
Name one.
bob
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If that's your message you are [wrong]. It shows that the average accumulation for this time of year is between 30 and 40 inches. I also shows a current accumulation of only 10 inches--before this storm!
Let's see, simple math, 10 inches plus 68 inches equals 78 inches. I am thinking that is a bit above normal dude.
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Just of note, the term "Climate Change" is a hyped phrase of natural origins, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the AGW theory. "Climate Change" is a cyclic process of this planet, whereas AGW is the proposed hypothesis dealing with the "Human Forcing" of such. So record cold and snowfall, while they may be a part of a natural "Change in Climate", actually run contrary to AGW. Hence, you have actually just performed a decent job of refuting the very notion which you seem rather adamant upon proving.
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http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/C..._snowf.jpg
wow, just wow
Back in '83 or so I saw 11ft+ in January easy.
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Can you cite a source for that? Seriously, you guys need to stop sowing the seeds of hate and discontent with these erroneous quotes and remarks. Palin says she's not sure that it's caused by man. She did acknowledge it and created a committee to study and make recommendations on it.
Please, stop.
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The Arctic "would have looked very similar to the vegetation we now see in Florida," said Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands who led an international study. Evidence of palms has never been found so far north before.
The scientists, sampling sediments on a ridge on the seabed that was about 500 km (300 miles) from the North Pole 53.5 million years ago, found pollens of ancient palms as well as of conifers, oaks, pecans and other trees.
"The presence of palm pollen implies that coldest month mean temperatures over the Arctic land masses were no less than 8 Celsius" (46.40F), the scientists, based in the Netherlands and Germany, wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.