WNash

Wait, is this a week away? The anticipation in this discussion made me think this wasn't on the periphery of model accuracy.

Wasn’t there a midwinter storm in 2015 that looked a lot like that one, and dropped a foot+ across the lower Great Lakes?

I’ll never forget that one. We went to my in-laws house in Gardenville after the storm finally ended and public works had sent a high-lift down their street. I was mentally prepared for the walls of snow, but what really shocked me was when I was climbing over snow to rake their roof and managed to get to my feet, which sunk into the snow then found a solid object that I could stand on... it was the top of their six foot fence. The snow was so deep that it topped a 72 inch fence by at least half a foot and probably more, and that was without drifting. It was almost as remarkable that the snow cover was entirely gone within a week and a half.

Not a chance this will come far enough west to help the Niagara Frontier, but I'm cheering for Rochester and points east.

I hear you, but I don't give up on anyone, unless they are actually wealthy and have decided that they will reject all facts to hold onto their money and power. Those people are a lost cause. Tim doesn't seem to recognize that he is repeating the slogans that are used to make sure nothing changes so that the small number of people who actually hold wealth and power (the real elites) are never threatened. Those people know better, but ignorance is curable.

Tim, you can do better than this.

I agree, but now that I have a kid, I think more about exponential increase in the likelihood of extinction or even just social collapse over the next few generations. It's so avoidable, but it requires thinking and acting differently on a large scale (I'm not talking about straws or light bulbs or recycling), and that is understandably very threatening to people. It scares me, and I accept the science and agree that the likelihood of bad scenarios is increasing every decade.

I'm sure there would be an affect on economic output in the US. This is a really simple analogy, but when an auto plant takes a unit offline for retooling, it lowers output in the short term. I'd argue that the feds are already spending the money -- we went from a fiscal surplus and a near zeroing out of the national debt about 20 years ago to around 20 trillion in debt and a huge fiscal deficit, and the main things that changed were that very rich people and corporations got enormous tax cuts, health care costs rose much higher than inflation, and we spent an unbelievable amount of money pursuing two very long wars. Had we not slashed taxes, had we capped health care cost growth, and had we not fought two long wars then maintained the same defense spending even after one of those wars ended, we would have had the money for GND-type research. At a short-term growth cost, sure, but since the benefits of economic growth have accrued mainly to very rich people (and I'm talking VERY rich people, not well-off middle class people), I'm not really sure what we would have sacrificed. Technologies won't cheapen unless we invest significant R&D money -- much more than the market is spending. There is much more incentive to chase short-term profit, even if it offers no productive value. That's why a GND approach makes sense. You can argue against the social spending piece of the GND -- I would say it's essential to make up the short-term economic loss that will come from diminished productive capacity over the next couple of decades -- but the spending on research is essential, and we need to accept that some of that investment will be lost because not every idea works. Your other point is solid, and totally accurate. It's why cooperative foreign policy and an approach to development that is internationalist (I know that word isn't politically correct nowadays) is necessary to fix this mess. The argument that it's hard to solve these problems isn't one that our grandchildren will appreciate.

What confuses me is this: it's highly likely that rising temperatures will affect human existence significantly, and very expensive technology will be needed to mediate between climate pressures and what we consider a high quality of life. Technology exists that would replace most of the current level of energy consumption fairly easily, and significant research investment would close that gap. So who benefits from the status quo? Sadly, the answer is this: people with lots of money and power. Some of them make money off fossil fuel and related technology; others make money off money, through investments, and research whose benefits are 25 years away do not result in the short term yields that they seek. If you work in resource extraction, or are dependent upon it, I get why you would push an anti-AGW line. If you're rich and are seeking more short-term profit, again, I see why you would see pushing an anti-AGW line would be beneficial to your interests. But why would anyone else take such a short-sighted, high-risk position?

Did human life, dependent upon climate-sensitive large scale agriculture, flourish? On the contrary, rapid changes in global temperature, ocean salinity, etc., have resulted in fairly catastrophic die-offs of entire clades of life. It's almost certain that up to the point where the planet becomes too hot or cold to even support extremophilic life that some forms of life will flourish in any climate scenario, but I'm interested in seeing human life thrive.

Sincerely curious, what is the evidence for this? We see pretty clearly that multiple federal agencies are burying studies that explain the effects of climate change and extrapolate results to the future. I have also seen meta analytical studies that identify significant methodological flaws with studies that contradict the AGW hypothesis (this is particularly good one here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-015-1597-5), but please direct me to methodologically sound studies rejecting AGW that have resulted in denial of access to research funding. I know David Evans claims retaliation -- notably, he is an electrical engineer, not a climatologist -- but he is certainly well-compensated by 501(3)(c) organizations funded by the fossil fuel industry, so the fact that someone with no special expertise is able to receive industry funding tends to argue against some sort of conspiracy against climate skeptic research.

My dad, a very conservative engineer and a very smart guy, had a similar mentality in the last six months or so before he died. He had a strong belief in the free market as the most efficient way to allocate resources and was very skeptical that carbon release could have an effect on climate that was greater than natural variation. He also felt that climate scientists produced models that were unreliable and not useful for projecting global temp rise, sea level rise, etc. But he looked at the data and realised that even imperfect modeling has capably predicted unprecedented global temp change. He became very concerned about the long term consequences of imminent climate change — that it would have both direct and indirect effects and would likely significantly lower living standards with little benefit for anyone except people who were already very rich. He told me he was kept up at night worrying about the world his granddaughter would grow up in. He passed away a couple of years ago, and I think he would be even sadder about the fact that we are not only failing to make progress, but things are getting worse in other ways.

There’s far more money coming from fossil fuel extraction and dependent technologies than from the handful of grant-funding agencies who underwrite climate research. Scientists whose motivation is making as much money as possible work for Exxon Mobil or Saudi Aramco or Koch Industries or Schlumberger, not for SUNY Cortland or Michigan State.

From UB North, the visible arrangement of the band clouds was very unusual and cool right before sunset. There was a distant band cloud far to the south (the band off Erie), another distant band that must have been the main Georgian connection far to the NE, and a weak, wispy cloud band from the NW that tapered off, which must have been a band off a very short fetch at the western end of Lake Ontario. We often see single bands to both the N and S, but not with this arrangement.

9.5” in NE Buffalo (with compaction). Definitely the best early season storm in the northern part of the city at least since I moved here in 2012. I haven’t had a chance to look at KBUF’s records, is this the biggest pre-Nov 15th storm since the October Surprise?

We were right at 7” when I went out to snowblow just after 10, and it’s inch-per-hour stuff, so I think we’re gonna hit 10” easily. Good head start, to get over 10% of our mean seasonal snowfall before it’s even November 15!

It’ll sure be cold aloft, but do you think there’s going to be enough moisture to precipitate significantly?

Right, it’s a ... rimejob?

They’re also downplaying the lake effect after this storm passes, saying the most anyone would see off either lake is a couple of inches through Thursday.

Lol WGRZ’s in house model shows the snow quickly clearing out at midnight in Buffalo and shortly after towards Rochester

Yeah I’m a few miles SW of you and it has been light stuff all day. Snowing since before sunrise and there might be an inch on the ground at most. That said, the roads aren’t great.

I’m the idiot who loves snow but lives near the Buffalo-Amherst line, where we get less than half of what they see in the southtowns and only 75% of what the airport records just a few miles due east. But an average season here is still way more than the snowiest winters I saw when I lived downstate.

They start new threads for a 1-3 inch clipper, or even busts. I like the fact that we act like we have seen snow before, and only start a storm thread when a storm is over 2-3 *feet*.

Anecdotally the winds seemed similar to the first of the two big high wind events last winter, but not nearly as bad as event 2 (which I think topped 70 mph in the Buffalo area).