LibertyBell

I remember hearing about ITER- good to know they're still making progress. IMHO "cheap gas" isn't the way to go, especially because of the methane leaks associated with it. Fusion is the ultimate answer.

gas company is going to pay $3 million for faulty gas lines that sparked massive fires near Boston

what frustrates me is that we've been talking about controllable fusion since the 80s....we've had so many technological advances in so many fields since then, why is it taking so long to develop viable fusion reactors?

2050 sounds about right. I think most are getting more worried about the Antarctic because of the implications of a rapid ice melt there. My question is- do we really need an outlier winter like this to get ice growth in the Arctic regions? Very few winters are going to have a + AO like this winter has had.

February is right up there too

thanks Don, and it also makes business sense because it's the fastest growing sector of the job market. Not to mention the savings in health care costs. Whats going on with Wells Fargo? I know they were recently fined $3 billion for that scam they were running from 2002-2016 (opening fake bank accts and charging customers interest) and their former CEO got banned from the financial industry), but in regards to energy, have they also moved away from funding the fossil fuel industry?

maybe there's a different way to read that article- do you have an account there? anyway, I could see where both could be true, where what happened during the 1700s had a different cause from what's going on now. I'd love to read that piece too.

nuclear power can work but they need to do a far better job than Japan did with Fukushima. and why is switching to Fusion taking so long? we've been talking about it for 40 years now. Maybe we need to start genetically modifying humans to make them smarter so they can do this faster.

just look at what's been occurring in the middle of the country, in states like Iowa and Nebraska, farms there have been underwater for two years running. They're losing billions of dollars because they cant grow crops anymore.

well, even if you dont subscribe to anthropogenic climate change, there are many other reasons to stop using fossil fuels, chief among them the health impact they have in urban areas, rising rates of asthma, etc. There has been a civic movement in east coast cities like Providence, RI, to move factories that use fossil fuels out of their cities because of breathing problems people living there have from them. So moving onto a new source of fuel is beneficial for health along with economic reasons.

Access options Subscribe to Journal Get full journal access for 1 year $199.00 only $3.83 per issue We're just talking about super el ninos here, starting with 1982-83.... what occurred during the 1700s wasn't subject to any kind of scientific measurement.

it has to do with the unprecedented type of weather that has been occurring on a large scale. Looks like Russia loves it because they're about to open Siberia for farming and will be feeding the world since America's bread basket will become unviable for farming.

that makes no sense when renewable fuels represent the fastest growing economies and sectors of the job market. At some point you have to move on from the old.

I love how some like to bend backwards to make excuses for the fossil fuel cartel, which is one of the most corrupt cartels on the planet, right up there with big pharma. at least some are seeing the light- Goldman Sachs just pulled all its funding for fossil fuel drilling and put $500 million into renewable fuels, and Delta just put $10 billion over 10 years into achieving carbon neutral by 2030. Amazon just put $10 billion into renewables also. Now we need to go after Chase and Wells Fargo, who have problems of their own.

I was driving on I-80 near the Delaware Water Gap on Monday and I saw a forest fire just ahead of me and above me, first time I've ever seen that- let alone in February! It was named the Rock Face Fire and it was burning 70 acres last I heard, and it was on Mt Tammany on the Jersey side.

but high end ninos do seem to be occurring more often since the 80s.

there is no safe side- I guess people dont care that it's ruining their health too. Darwinism always wins....

PA weather book lists that winter as dropping 120 inches in Stroudsburg!

1965-66 snowfall total for Norfolk, VA was crazy high (over 40"!) compared to NYC! The 80s were similar in that areas south of us got more snow than we did. Our Januarys were dry and cold back then. We've been catching up a lot the last couple of decades lol.

1966-67 had an exceptionally snowy Christmas too! The one winter that doesn't seem to fit anywhere is 2014-15. It really was a great winter (and historic for Boston), even though we didn't get the big hit in January. But we had a historically cold February and lots of snow and that lasted into March. I would compare that to 1933-34 except we didn't go below zero. Maybe 2004-05 is a better comparison for it? Looking at some of our other historic winters.... 2002-03 was similar to 1977-78....although one was a moderate nino and the other was a weak one, 1977-78 was a second year weak nino which made it more like a moderate.

I think 2010-11 was somewhat like 1960-61, while 1995-96 was more like 1966-67. Curiously, both 1995-96 and 2010-11 were la ninas that came after el ninos. 2009-10 was great in its own right and would have been much greater and truly historic had we not missed out on a couple of big storms.

somewhat like 1995-96! 1966-67 was close to a weak la nina too wasn't it? (and a weak la nina after a moderate el nino is supposed to be golden for snowfall!)

Indeed! During our early 90s snow drought I went to the college library and went through the NY Times microfiche collection for that very reason. I picked winter 1966-67 to "relive" (or rather, experience for the first time, since my first weather memory is from the early 80s lol) to see what a prolonged snowy winter was actually like. I loved reading their forecasts, seeing their maps and pictures and seeing their stories of cold and snow, which to that point I had never experienced. All I had were the Blizzard of April 1982 and February 1983 which I also loved to read about during our long snow drought. Then for the first time I remember getting excited for snow in 1993, because the summer and fall temp patterns seemed to mimic 1966, and I thought a big winter might be oncoming, so I started keeping a weather journal for the first time in my life.

yes yet another undermeasured storm at Central Park! the 60s were golden.....

Thanks! I saw some very interesting predictions for temp patterns going forward. Basically, we are warming from the pole "downwards" in that the greatest positive anomalies are occurring the further northward you go. Northern VT is projected to be about 10 degrees F warmer by 2070? At 40 N latitude on the east coast this is projected to be about 5.5 degrees F warmer.