WNash

These a-holes. UB students from downstate came back up to UB over the last few weeks to party as well, no masks, no distancing. Big parties - 150+.

I think we have really missed out on early season lake effect rain in recent years. Septembers have been warmer than normal, with a cooling trend so gradual we miss out on the delta t’s needed for convection (lake effect rain) in the early fall.

It’s brutal, I’ve gotten pinkeye from dirt and sweat getting in my eyes. People who love extremely hot weather don’t have to work in mid day sun for 40-50 hours a week.

It’s tough, and unfortunately in about 7 to 10 days we’re likely to get enough worse heat and humidity.

Some disturbing pictures going around social media from the last few days near UB south. Apparently a couple hundred students from all over the state flocked back for big frat house parties that have gone on every day. There’s a photo of a house on Main Street showing 100+ kids on the balcony and in the yard, with more visible in the house. No masks, no social distancing. If there’s an outbreak among this group of students, it could undo a lot of progress across the region, seed the whole state with the virus, and risk the ability of SUNY campuses to open this fall.

GFS has us above average all the way through 15 days, but with two dips to lower dews. Some troughiness in the lakes will keep us from the extreme heat. Things look just brutal for the central states, temps getting to well above 105F.

The dewpoint is well into the 60s for much of the summer, and can push towards or past 70 with flow from the S or SW. Stubborn ridging over the southeast can bring that soupy gulf air up this way, not to mention flow off Lake Erie can bring up humidity on the lake plain. When we have highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s, it’s nice to put the windows open, but we haven’t had much of that this summer.

GFS shows a slight cooldown by the latter half of next weekend, lasting 2-3 days before the sauna returns. This is not my favorite kind of summer.

Low dews (mid 50s in Buffalo) felt really good yesterday. Really dreading the subtropical air on its way later this week.

Not terribly uncommon to get a little snow at those altitudes, even in summer months. I think that’s one of the routes that will get you to Grand Teton NP and Jackson Hole if you’re driving west on I-90. It’s pretty high up for a mountain pass.

It’s grim. Not much of a chance of rain for the next 7-10 days, either. 90s and high humidity is not the kind of weather that makes summers in Buffalo so enjoyable. The lake is way above normal temps as well - I expect we will be hitting record lake temps by mid-month, which will really weaken the lake breeze.

Modeling looks hot and dry for the forseeable future, although the GFS is hinting at a trough in the northeast that would bring precip and lower temps in the middle of the month. With the heat and working from home, we're going to have a $300 electric bill easily.

Same when I got mine from Erie County. They took a surprising amount for the antibody test. I wonder if they're reserving vials of blood for future comparison testing or studies.

It's possible he wants to run for president, but Biden is the Dem candidate now. I don't much like him, but it's really hard to imagine him not winning -- I don't think it's controversial to say that Trump hasn't made it a priority to attract votes that he didn't win last time, which is backfiring on him now. Republicans may be facing big losses, but they really have made their successful years count. Maybe Cuomo thinks he can run in 2024 to either succeed Trump or if Biden is in his 80s and steps down? But he has to realize how much he will be held culpable for what was essentially a bloodbath in the state's nursing homes. Even with the capital markets being a little bit down over the last year, total US market cap is 1.5x the entire GDP of the country, so money exists to upgrade climate control systems with HEPA filtration, install UV lights, put in thermal imaging cameras and staff them. We're going to pay one way or another, so it would be a good investment, if we could get a political consensus to make it happen. It would be a good time to work in climate systems and the safety industry, or better yet, to start a business to install such systems. Forcing herd immunity onto the country looks worse and worse as we recognize that this disease has dangerous sequelae even for many young and healthy survivors. Consigning a few percent of the public to death or a severely limited life as a survivor (extremely dependent upon public services or hard-pressed families) will be political suicide.

Another vital point is this: science proceeds based on hypothesis testing, which is a *falsification* process. Scientists subject a theory to repeated attacks in order to disprove it. They test a theory against case facts, or alternative explanations.For us to have scientific knowledge, it is *absolutely necessary* that scientists sometimes be wrong. Claiming that contradictory hypotheses are somehow proof that scientists don't know what they claim to know is a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific knowledge.

Sadly, it's a relative handful of people who refuse to comply with masks and social distancing. All we need to do to get through this is to accommodate some relatively small changes. I have cousins in Houston and in central Louisiana who claim that COVID-19 is a Chinese hoax. One of them depends upon his mother -- my aunt -- for childcare. She is in her early 70s and has survived cancer and has a weakened immune system because of RA meds, and her doctor has told her she is in a very high risk group. What is wrong with people that they'll believe what they hear from sleazy, lying politicians than what they hear from scientists, public health officials, and their own mother? I'm certain that even if my cousin were to give my aunt a fatal case of COVID-19, he would find a way to blame people he doesn't like (BLM protesters, Chinese people, Mexican immigrants) rather than the cynical politicians whose nonsense he follows devotedly and who have made this problem far worse.

I can't make any claim that gyms in Norway has the same climate systems as gyms in the US - in fact, I'm pretty sure they don't -- but there is some evidence that compliance with modest restrictions makes gyms no more dangerous than the average setting. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/health/coronavirus-gyms-fitness.html

I wonder how many cops with enough service are gonna retire. And what that means for everyone else if there’s a long hiring freeze. Stay safe.

They won’t be able to enforce a damn thing. I have to take a trip to Tennessee in early August to help my mother out. I’m driving alone, stopping only for gas, and will be social distancing when I’m there (except for my mother, who is 78 and barely leaves her house). Are they going to stop me from going to Wegmans with a mask on?

Just curious, how is overtime for NYPD patrol officers lately? Are you guys getting extra shifts with all the craziness or are they cutting back already?

I just checked the radar, and plenty of convection is getting through! We’re going to get a storm pretty soon. Those cells that fired up around Clarence look pretty potent as well.

Update: storms approaching Buffalo are getting sheared apart and dried out by the breeze. The clouds look threatening, but the radar is showing convention crapping out in the metro. I don’t want to say we’re getting shafted, because this is the typical outcome from June through August, but I was really hoping to get my water bill a break.

It’s really getting to be sprinkler season in my backyard vegetable garden. I’ve counted only two soaking rainfalls in the past three weeks. It gets pretty dry in Buffalo during the first 2/3rds of the summer, but this is really dry, really fast.

It’s pretty clear that a high degree of compliance of mask use makes a huge difference. The story of the Great Cuts in Missouri, where two COVID-19 positive hair stylists cut 70-80 people’s hair over a few days and had 0 transmissions, apparently because of their mask use, may an anecdote but strongly reinforces our local experience that masks save lives. People who won’t wear masks because of politics are already contributing to infection waves in many states. If mask use could have saved us the shutdown, then we made a huge mistake. But even in a pandemic, many people refuse to wear them when it is optional, so in that sense a shutdown might have been necessary (or even unavoidable). And when we are talking about the toll this disease has taken, it’s not just about deaths of old people. There’s growing evidence that mild cases can cause organ damage. We don’t understand the true cost of a hands-off approach for years.

I was at the Tops on University Plaza on Friday. Healthcare workers were offering free antibody tests. I would guess that the county health department would have more info.