adiabatic14

From God's lips to Peanut Butter-99's fingertips will make it so!! Seriously though, you ignore Don's concerns to your peril. Consider it a lesson in model analysis.

I actually have 100% confidence that I will see a snowflake (during this "event"); and as a Manhattanite, 100% confidence that said snowflake will be in the air and NOT on the ground...I give a car or tree about even odds.

Most likely chaotic artifact, it's repetitive in the same way a whirlpool that follows an oar dip is repetitive in nature but chaotic in origin, the human temporal scale is so granular that momentary idiosyncracies are often mistaken for meaningful patterns...which of course begs the question: what events are meaningful in a climate change context? well, I'd personally answer that with "we simply do not have enough knowledge to answer that"...there are obvious candidates: die off blue-green algae, expansion of Gobi to all of central China, death of Gulf Stream and resultant "siberification" of Europe, but for all of the threats we can name, I'm betting the one that writes the history of our species will be one that we aren't able to foresee

And I've been thinking more and more about what you wrote a while back regarding Gaia maybe keeping NOTAM cooler relative to global temps in order to ensure that humans take no action in their last ten hours that could potentially mitigate the worst outcome (not that we have too many options at this point even if every one of us awakens NOW to imminent danger). If IMBY weenies with a hobbyist's literacy in the sciences cannot comprehend how record setting cold Oct-Nov temps over the contiguous 48 could be strongly correlated with a warming planet, then there's no chance that the average Joe in Lubbock can be convinced his frostbite is caused by global warming. Maybe I'm just an old cynic, but that's my take on the eve of 2020.

You're not alone in this sentiment, I used to travel in Japan pretty extensively during the winter and experienced some ludicrous snow-rates and packs, but ALL of the roads (that remain open) are heated so it never looked like winter to me, even when houses had snow to their eves and everyone was topside shoveling like the dickens to keep their roof from collapsing. The "conquest" of nature, in general, hollows me out a little, prys some thing out of my soul.

Yes, seasonal snow forecasts still involve a lot of "dart tossing," as the set of variables that produce a particular snowfall in any single geographic location are simply so many and so spaced out temporally that we're not even sure we know what they all are, never mind whether we're accurately capturing and weighting them in our forecast processes. Weenies don't much like that disclaimer however.