Wild weather in both the USA and Australia

As I read the report about U.S. weather below, I had a number of thoughts. Where I live in sub-tropical Australia, just stepping outside my front door feels like diving into a large bowl of warm soup. The air is steamy: very hot and very humid. Such a contrast with the USA at present! But not too different from NYC in midsummer.

Yet such a HUGE variation in climate is COMPLETELY NATURAL and normal. The huge temperature range concerned is one that people have coped with from time immemorial. Yet the Warmists try to tell us that a temperature difference of just a few degrees is going to send us all to perdition. I am sure that both Americans and Australians wish that their temperatures at the moment differed by such a small amount. As it is, the temperatures differ by as much as 100 degrees Fahrenheit and at least 30 degrees Celsius!

Australia also has a big storm raging at the moment, though big is not the word. Cyclone Yasi covers an area nearly as big as the continental United States. And the winds are blowing at around 200 miles an hour. It makes Hurricane Katrina look like a breeze. Fortunately, the place where I live these days is hundreds of miles South of the directly affected area.

Yet, amid such a huge weather event, no-one in the directly affected area has died as a result of it. Luck? In part, but not mainly. Australians are overwhelmingly of British and European descent and Australia has been an advanced Western society since not long after the first white settlement. So Australians prepare for foreseeable disasters. In North Queensland (where I come from and where the cyclones hit) houses have been constructed to cyclone resistant standards for a hundred years or more. So the buildings get damaged but the people survive. They have made their own luck. I am pleased and proud to be one of them

A paralysing, 3200-kilometre-wide storm has dumped snow and ice over most of the US, closing schools, roads and airports in more than 30 states.

Airlines cancelled thousands of flights. Governors called out the National Guard. Schools closed early, if they opened at all. Interstate highways became treacherous ribbons of black ice.

Emergency officials briefed President Barack Obama of their plans to battle the foul weather. By Tuesday evening, the storm had brought Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a virtual halt with more than 30 centimetres of snow. It had layered the roadways of St Louis with an icy sheen and draped Chicago with a swirling snowfall that merged the white-grey sky with the grey-white terrain.

As the storm moved inexorably from the Rockies to the north-east, many people watched the television weather reports of blinding snow and stranded cars and imagined what their Wednesday would bring.

Throughout the day the National Weather Service issuing warnings that read like snippets from a disaster-movie screenplay: "Dangerous multifaceted and life-threatening winter storm, before making decision to travel, consider if getting to your destination is worth putting your life at risk, do not travel! If you absolutely must travel, have a winter survival kit with you."

An interactive map on the service's website showed a pink-and-red band (denoting blizzard and winter-storm warnings) stretched from Dallas, Texas - where plans for Sunday's Super Bowl continued - to northern Maine.

"It's having a gigantic geographical impact," said Bob Oravec, a meteorologist for the service, explaining a cold air mass from Canada had become entrenched over the north-central part of the US while storms in the Mississippi Valley to the south were drawing moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Cold air plus moisture equals snow and ice.

More here

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).