What’s the Weather Voting For?
Thursday, February 7th, 2008Dear Friends,
Even with my eyes closed the lightning is brilliant. Thunder quickly follows. It’s 12:37 AM and like many of you around here I’m not sleeping. It’s more than the sound of the storm that is keeping me up…It’s the fact of it. Something is wrong. Something is dearly wrong. It’s February in New England. This is the second thunder and lightning storm in less than a week and the third in less than two.
Remember last year we had thunder and lightning combined with snow, and Weather.com introduced a new term, “Thunder Snow”? They even had an icon for it. It was as an amalgamation of the lightning cloud image combined with the snow flake image. It was an icon I’d never seen for a phenomena I’d never experienced. What will be the icons for ice sheet collapse and sea level rise?
I’ve lived in New England since 1969, back when we used to have something called winter. February was cold. Thunder happened in July. The Charles River between Boston and Cambridge would freeze and we would skate on it near the shore of the Esplanade. Dumb yes, but we did it. Temperatures near zero for days and up-to-a-week at a time were common. You would step outside and the mucus in your nose would freeze. The big Arctic Chill would wax in from Canada and sit on us like a Sumo wrestler. We were in Deep Freeze lock down. Yes, it was winter in New England. The two used to be synonymous.
Yesterday was Super Tuesday, and the weather cast her vote. Regarding the tornadoes and “super cell” storms that disrupted the election process in numerous states and left an unprecedented trail of wreckage and death, Stu Ostro, the senior meteorologist at Weather.com, wrote what happened was “a historic February outbreak given the number of tornadoes and amount of casualties. It is one of the most prolific and deadliest outbreaks on record for the month”. Note, we were not even one week into the month.
It seemed that the storms stole the “thunder” from the election coverage. They kept interrupting the Romney versus McCain blather to show the extensive tornado damage…a campus torn apart, a mall collapsed, a gas fire, a house with a family of three pulverized, 51 others killed. And of course, many voting stations were closed,…err…evacuated. All of this was in sharp contrast to the slick New York studios were manicured pundits harrumphed over which Red contender was the righteous conservative.
What’s the weather voting for?
- s
2:26 AM. 2/7/08