Lots of Weather Going On, Just Not in Atlanta
With the weather in Georgia staying dry, and seemingly no end to the weather pattern that we’re in, there hasn’t been a lot of weather news to talk about. In fact, for most of the country, it’s been dry. But that’s not the case elsewhere.
In Mexico, 1 million people have been displaced, and there has been over $700 million dollars in damage due to flooding in the state of Tabasco. Some are calling the situation as bad as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Meanwhile, in England, massive storms in the North Sea are expected to cause severe flooding and a tidal wave on the east coast of Britain. Officials there have closed a barrier at the mouth of the Thames river to prevent inland flooding.
Closer to home, most of North Georgia got its first freeze of the season last night. Temperatures here in Lawrenceville dropped to 28.5 on my thermometer early this morning. In Summerville it got down to 21 degrees, which appears to be the low for the state so far, followed closely by Peachtree City, which reported 22 degrees. Due to the city heat island, it only reached 32 degrees at Atlanta Hartsfield.
Clouds overnight will keep temperatures above freezing in most places, and then we’re in a warming trend through the first part of next week. It won’t be hot — just a return to normal temperatures, with highs in the mid 60s and lows in the mid 40s. Next week could bring the first rain we’ve seen since October 24th, with a chance of precipitation on Tuesday or Wednesday. Longer range models call for a better chance of rain the weekend of the 17th, but that’s too far out to be sure. Active weather systems are staying to our north, and the mountainous areas in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia could see the first snow of the year over the weekend.
The founder of the Weather channel is calling global warming a hoax. In a blog post, John Coleman, now a forecaster in San Diego, says global warming is “a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam.” Says Coleman,
“Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims.”
In drought related news, this week’s drought report for Georgia showed no change in the drought levels from the previous week, which is to be expected, given the lack of rainfall. Governor Perdue has arranged for a service outside the state capitol on Tuesday to pray for rain. The AJC reports that a group of rabbis are sending a representative to Atlanta to pray for rain on Wednesday. It seems that the last time the rabbi did this, in 1986, four days of rain followed.
And, the libertarian Ayn Rand Institute issued a press release yesterday criticizing the Endangered Species Act, and the requirement that billions of gallons of water be released from Lake Lanier to preserve the infamous mussels in the Apalachicola river basin. Taking on the environmentalists who claim that Atlanta has outgrown its capacity to provide water, the Institute says,
Sphere: Related Content“People find it hard to believe that environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act could really require the sacrifice of human beings to nature. But that is exactly what they have to mean in practice; they mean that in order to sustain some obscure mussel species, the people in Atlanta must go without water.”
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