This story is a fairly nice summary of the icy conditions affecting bits of North America, Asia and Western Europe. Here in London and the Southeast, we are getting snowed on quite a bit; other parts of the UK have been hit even harder.
This time last year, I had cause to snigger at some of the Man-made global warming folk out there and I suppose I was being a bit mischievious, in that AGW alarmists would argue that one or two bad winters hardly undermines their argument, which is true, but then a couple of sizzling summers cannot, by the same logic, be used as confirmation of AGW, either. But much more of this in the next few years, and I would not be at all surprised if public skepticism about the whole AGW issue deepens yet further. One by-product may be changes to transport and the types of cars people use, with more four-wheel drive vehicles coming along (and no, not necessarily SUVs, but smaller ones). And expect sales of these things to rise.
And maybe, this book might get more readers, too. The story, “Fallen Angels”, is about what might happen when governments succeed in massively cutting C02 emissions. Be careful what you wish for.
…a couple of sizzling summers cannot, by the same logic, be used as confirmation of AGW, either.
Indeed!
Of course, “global warming” refers to a global mean air temperature rising over a long period, so one could say that a few cold years don’t affect the fact that this average will be up by the end of the century. Also, what about the bits where it’s not snowing? Are they warmer or colder?
Fallen Angels should be required reading. The more so, since you can find it in their free library.
Snow chains? In the UK? You’re joking, right?
I live in a place where it snows more in a year than it does in the UK in a decade. We get snow feet at a time, some days.
Nobody I know so much as possesses snow chains for their automobiles. The use of snow chains is banned in many places/circumstances becasue they do so much damage to the roads. They are also very hard on the drive train of your car.
Even the folks who plow snow for a living round here, and the city/county/township plow/salt trucks, do not use chains.
The use/carrying of snow chains is mandatory in some parts of the US, but those are places that see truly extraordinary and continuous snowfalls, like the Sierra Nevadas and some parts of the Rockies – not the penny-ante inches of snow that occasionally fall in the UK.
Drving in snow, even heavy snow, is actually easy. Anyone can do it. I did it, on my way to work this morning (about 2″ overnight). Chains are ridiculous excess. Anyone who needs chains to get around in the sort of snowfall that’s typical in the UK shouldn’t be driving at all.
llater,
llamas
llamas –
Quite so. Snow chains are, or at least used to be, banned in Michigan for just the reasons you give.
But people who get regular snowfalls also tend to have a set of snow tires to swap on to the car in November. I’ve yet to hear of anyone in Britain using snow tyres. Heck, I have difficulty even finding a snow shovel for sale.
A large part of the scepticism lies in the absence of inaccuracy in their predictions, as they hedge their bets. My understanding is that if anything is proof of a prediction, then it is unscientific, not to say worthless. But it seems that hot weather, cold weather, wet weather, dry weather, windy weather or whatever, is evidence of global warming. Why didn’t they just say that global warming will lead to weather, full stop? Snowchains were common in the UK in the fifties, to my recollection.
That is absence of accuracy in their predictions.
LINK(Link)
Yeah! Snow chain snobs! Ah, it’s like being in the French Alps!
If you drive a 2-wd car with the kind of tyres common in the UK (i.e. summer tyres with small tread gaps), you pretty much have to have snow chains in any kind of falling or recently fallen snow. Fresh snow also generally falls here at or slightly above freezing, so it fills those gaps instantly. Driving in much colder conditions I agree is easy.
How well you drive has little to do with it llamas. You stop at a roundabout with your tyres full of fresh snow and no amount of macho sneering is going to get you moving. The only way to avoid this is to move at a steady 20mph through junctions, pedestrians etc, which is what they do in the French Alps while sneering at us, but I’d argue it’s them who “shouldn’t be driving at all”.
For people who get precious about their alloys, would recommend “snow socks”, which is a sort of fabric covering. Neat idea, although once you’ve used them once and they then freeze up in your boot, not quite as groovy.
M II P wrote:
‘If you drive a 2-wd car with the kind of tyres common in the UK (i.e. summer tyres with small tread gaps), you pretty much have to have snow chains in any kind of falling or recently fallen snow. Fresh snow also generally falls here at or slightly above freezing, so it fills those gaps instantly. Driving in much colder conditions I agree is easy.
Overnight temperature here was 27°F.
Snowfall – ± 2″
Chevrolet cross-over with all-season radial tires (Bridgestone Dueller A/T, OEM on the vehicle) with 58,000 miles on them.
8 miles of rural roads (half dirt, half blacktop), completely untreated. In many places, I was the first vehicle to pass since the snow stopped falling.
15 miles of freeway.
I wasn’t more than 5 minutes later at work than I would normally be.
So I call nonsense on your ‘gotta have chains!’. What you gotta have is drivers who know what they’re doing. Maybe more-sensible tire choices. When I drove a 5.0 Mustang with vast high-performance tires, I didn’t expect to get around in the snow either.
llater,
llamas
Whilst snow-chains, snow-socks, 4WDs and lessons in snow driving all have their place, I find that VPN is the best way to get to work these days.
In fact, whatever the weather, the journey to work from the bedroom to the study via the kitchen is much less stressful, and while I miss the sense of accomplishment and camaraderie engendered by getting into work two hours late, spending the next four hours swapping horror stories with those other brave souls who risked life and limb making the journey, (and disparaging those wimps who failed to make the effort), then leaving for home two hours early because of the treacherous conditions, I tend to find I get more done.
I agree with Llamas winter tyres are what you want, not snow chains. Of course the most important thing in the winter, as at any other time of year, is awareness of what is happening around you as you drive. Lapses of concentration are potentially lethal. Drive well.
Well, the sun is out in my area of Mexico for the first time in around four days of grim greyness, cold winds and very low temperatures. For the first time since I moved here, I’ve had to wear a long-sleeved t-shirt under a thick turtle-necked pullover to stay warm during the day.
My guess is Al Gore’s fanciful “carbon credits” will go the same way as the hanging chads.
Global Warming – white fluffy material that falls from the sky.
In the wilds of Cumbria in the 80s with snow every winter, we had winter tyres on the car November-March and never had any problems. Ditto now in Italy (Italian winters are the country’s best kept secret).
Sorry to rain on the ‘I’ve yet to hear of anyone in Britain using snow tyres.’ meme but if’n you lived up North(Not beyond Leeds but Sunny Jockland) you use snow tyres as and when the weather dictates.
I think it means we are not stoopid;).
STB.
ScotsToryB and llamas:
Perhaps we should just make fun of those English people who don’t know how to drive in the winter in the same way that here in the US, we northerners like to make fun of the people in places like Nashville or Dallas that shut down the city every time there are flurries. 🙂
Ted Schuerzinger – When the city I lived in Texas had their first tiny snowfall in, oh, around 10 years … the snow was actually melting as it fell … and they closed down the school system in a panic. And people were driving very s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully, except those who’d moved down from the north and couldn’t keep the smirk off their faces.
Sadly, the competency of those Northern Yankees when it comes to driving in inclement weather is horribly overrated.
I see no end of highly snow-capable vehicles buried in the fieldstone walls that line the roads in Connecticut, in the first few weeks of New England Winter. And I can’t blame it all on transplanted Floridians.
for the same reason that governments are highly unlikely to stop the planets warming (if its happening), I highly doubt they could actually make it cooler.
Buckingham Palace will have to replace the horse and carriage with a dog sled.
I was stationed on the US Navy base in Little Creek, Virginia, in early 1971 when we had a little snow (about 1/4″ at most). That area is absolutely flat*, but they shut down the entire military base as a precaution! Perhaps it was because of the disproportionately large number of southerners in the military. Anyway, it seemed to me that if the US military couldn’t handle a dusting of snow we were in real trouble!
* The only hill for miles around is “Mount Trashmore”, a 20-foot-high mound made out of a landfill.
There’s an interesting idea for a book- GoreWorld! What policies would the Us have adopted if Gore had won in 2000 and been President? Maybe the military would now be using bio-sustainable bows and arrows?
“What policies would the Us have adopted if Gore had won in 2000”
That’s an interesting question, Nuke Gray.
My guess is that 9/11 would still have happened, but the US response would have been irresolute & self-blaming. That would have encouraged Saddam Hussein to re-invade Kuwait and proceed on down the east coast of Sadui Arabia, ending up controlling a large chunk of the world’s oil supply. The US response this time would have been to petition the UN to send Saddam a really tough letter, IN FRENCH! The UN would have rejected the US request. Saddam would have used his expanded income to buy weapons from the peaceful EU needed to reinvade Iran — this time with success. The UN would applaud Saddam’s efforts to bring peace & unity to the Middle East.
The one thing we know for sure is that the US Senate would not have approved the Kyoto Protocol that Big Al signed so meaninglessly in 1997. We know that because the Senate had pre-emptively rejected Kyoto in a 97-0 ‘Sense of the Senate’ resolution before Big Al even went to Kyoto.
that’s it, Alice, keep your spirits up! Someone is digging through the snow even now, to send you somewhere warm! And don’t forget to bless global warming- you’d be even more frozen without it!
I find that VPN is the best way to get to work these days.
It has indeed been working very well.
Whether it is a sign of my own poor driving skills or not, I don’t fancy digging through heavy snow and then risking the ungritted roads unless I really have to.
Bring on the snow!!!!!!
Here in Manchester the conditions are so bad that my one-wheel drive vehicle (my pushbike) has had to be pushed 20 yards to the end of the snowy street to the main road.
Once on the main roads everything is just fine, and my 9 mile commute into the city centre has been fairly normal.
Global warming is a scam but we shouldn’t let a bit of snow be an excuse for the 4×4 brigade to expand. They are unnecessary and seem to be driven by vulgar show-offs – in towns at least.
There have been a lot fewer cars on the roads in the past few days, and a lot fewer 4x4s too. Have the owners of these ugly objects been staying at home too because of the snow? And if so, why?
Weather. Is. Not. Climate. I’ve been pointing this out to the ZOMGWTF we’re all gonna FRY crowd for years. Don’t assume that the current North Polar Bounce is going to return annually, either.
Be prepared for the consequences of climate change, mainly more interesting weather. Don’t hedge your bets on the temerature going up or down. Consider the impact on you when – not if – we start seeing mass migrations across the globe and wars over perceived scarcities.
The next decade is going to be interesting. If we keep our eyes open, we’ll probably see the end of it in as good a shape as when we started, if not better.
If.
llamas – you appear to be agreeing with my point entirely. Driving in 27f along empty roads just isn’t a challenge that you need chains for. I agree and that’s what I said.
Driving in the UK (or indeed the French Alps) in a car and tyres not suited for it, along roads where you often have to stop, it’s quite sensible to have a set of chains if you get stuck. Last winter I easily crossed Epsom Downs in my Jag using my chains for a couple of miles in conditions that 4x4s (and, amusingly, recovery vehicles) were struggling in.
I don’t think the skeptics are assuming anything. They are, by definition, skeptics, and not convinced that hot summers, or for that matter, a few nasty winters, proves the point one way or the other.
The trouble with the AGW alarmists is that they invariably use any weather event to back up their case, which is illegitimate. In truth, the long-term trends are what count, and judging by the recent scandal at the University of East Anglia, the trends are not bolstering the AGW alarmist case.
Fallen Angels is a hidden gem that need to be more widely know. I posted on it a week ago. Thanks for the link to baen.com
I’m reposting today using the link
Thanks
Dave
I think I might have caused the snows. Much Sorriness!!! I was sending vibes of peace and love, and I visualised this as beaming white rays at the north. i didn’t realise this would translate as snow. Good thing i’ve stopped thinking in termas of lovebombs!