Xiaoniu 小妞

I follow the news everyday and I’m still left dumbfounded by the amount of snow that Oswego, NY has gotten this past week. They already passed the 100 inch mark. If you do the math that means they have over 8 feet of snow on the ground and it all came down the past week. The scary part is that it is still coming down!

This amount of snow in such a short period is amazing, but what is even more amazing is that they still haven’t set any records. There is a snow fall record from 1972 that they haven’t beaten yet.

Gregway recalled a lake-effect storm in February 1972 that produced 1.2m over a two-day period. That year, Oswego ended up receiving more than 6.8m of snow, he said

“The irony was we had a conference of meteorologists here from around the country. It snowed so much, they were trapped here and couldn’t get away. It got a lot of national attention – the people who measure the snow were snowbound in Oswego,” he said.

Paul Cardinali, a retired earth science teacher and local weather watcher since high school, also can remember bigger snow events.

During the Great Blizzard of 1966, a three-day Nor’easter blended with lake effect squalls to leave the region buried under nearly five metres of snow.

Cardinali said he has a photograph from that storm of two people carrying groceries on a road.

“It seems nondescript. Then you see a buried car and realize they are walking on top of about 10 feet of snow,” he said.

via Toronto Star

I’m left wondering how much global warming has had to do with this and other weather oddities around the world. Some people blame el nino, which is true to a point, however, el nino doesn’t come so often. For that you can only blame us.

I still have a positive attitude and think that we can fix this. Look at what eliminating lead from paint and gasoline did to fix the environment. The problem comes down to one thing; money. It is cheaper to do thing the non-environmentally way and that prevents lawmakers from making any strong rules that force environmental rules.

It is going to take something a lot more serious and localized than a big snow storm in Oswego, NY to change things. It took a nasty incident where a man died after spending over 30 hours trapped in his car before anybody started thinking that they should add cell towers in northern NY.

He and his wife had an accident and were too injured to make their way out of their car for help. They had no cell reception. This comes shortly after the big to-do about getting the emergency phones on the Adirondack Northway working (spaced out every 2 miles). With injuries those phones were worthless to them.

Now, finally, there are talks about changing the Adirondack Park rules to allow taller cell towers. There are also talks about forcing cell phone companies to put some towers up even though they are not going to make them any money. It is about safety.

As I said though, nothing is going to change without a big disaster. Nothing ever does. Hopefully, things will change before enough glaciers melt and we lose New York City, souther Florida and international cities like Shanghai.