Mezzamorphis

As both an armchair meteorologist and armchair theologian, I would like to make the following observation. Weather is God’s way of telling humanity that we have no idea how things work. We may think we do, but sometimes God simply decides to throw a wrench in the works. My evidence for this follows.

This last weekend was fairly rainy and stormy. We had a pretty good storm roll through about 2AM, with a lot of rain, wind, and lightning. Then it rained pretty consistently from about 4AM until 10AM. The temperature had been dropping all day from a high of 65 at 1AM. About 6:30PM though, things started to change more.

Naturally, the kids were excited as they rarely get to see snow here in Texas. I thought that it would have a few flakes, then not much more after that. Boy, was I wrong.

8PM

9:30PM
 

Tink wasn’t sure what to think of the white stuff invading her back yard.

1AM (yes, I was still awake)

7AM Everything was covered in white.

Naturally, this meant it was time for snow angels.

Four inches of the white stuff, measured several times to make sure it was accurate.

Driving to work everything was beautiful…

… up until this. You can almost hear the people collectively asking, “What is all this white stuff? Where did it come from?!?!?” Since their brains were occupied with these thoughts, they couldn’t be bothered with driving more than 15 MPH on the freeway.
 

Such is snow on a fine March day in Texas, a day after we were under a tornado watch.

I’ve kind of turned this into a photoblog, haven’t I?

I’m actually going to leave my opinion of global warming out of this. Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. I think it’s pathetic and here’s why.

According to Alfred Nobel’s will, which established the five Nobel prizes, the Peace Prize should be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”. The prize committee determined that Al and the IPCC were worthy of this due to “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”

Now unless one is going to make the argument that Gore and the IPCC worked for fraternity between the nations by getting out their version of global warming, this is a complete joke. Talk about climate change has nothing to do with establishing peace. Making a slideshow presentation didn’t abolish or reduce a standing army, nor hold or promote a peace congress. So, why has this prize been awarded to Gore and the IPCC?

The world has gone crazy.

Jay Tea and Kim are talking about this over at Wizbang!.

Glenn thinks he’s fitting.

PJM is talking about it too.

PowerLine says the Peace Prize has been off the rails for 20 years.

My weather station is back up and operational now. The temperature may still be off a little, but if I get time this week I’ll fix that. Just click the Weather Underground image over on the right side of the screen to see it.

I just hope it’s right, though I’m not quite sure how you would quantify “tons”. I’m expecting a deluge. Hopefully I’m not disappointed.

Got this from Drudge this morning. A group called the Heartland Institute wants Al Gore to debate one of their experts on global warming. Al won’t have anything to do with them. A quote from one of Al’s people.

“The debate has shifted to how to solve the climate crisis, not if there is one,” said Kalee Kreider. “It does not make sense for him to engage in a dialogue with them at this time.”

Um, no. The debate hasn’t shifted. The debate should still be going on. Face the music Al.

EthicsDaily.com writer Robert Parham tosses out this little gem of an article about how those of us who don’t feel that global warming is as big of a threat as it is being made out to be are “deniers” and should be called out for it. I’ve got problems with several parts of his article, but I’ll start at the beginning.

“Newsweek” exposed this week the axis of corporations and conservative organizations that oppose the scientific evidence that human actions are causing global warming as the “denial machine.”

So what about the alliance of corporations and liberal organizations that confirm the scientific “evidence” in the face of increasing inaccuracies? Are we to simply believe them out of hand? Just because there is a majority holding a

This slideshow is simply amazing to see. Popular Mechanics does a phenomenal job with this. I’ll be buying their August issue.

It’s wet outside. It’s ridiculously wet outside. We have a pond at our office that is just about to run into the parking lot. This pond was empty three months ago.

All this to say that I finally got my rain gauge working again. It was a terribly difficult fix of putting the gauge on a level spot. It’s a tipping bucket rain gauge, and if it isn’t level, then it doesn’t work. So, if you check out the weather link over on the right side of the page, the rain is finally accurate again.

Instapundit has a good post up this morning about weather radios. A couple excerpts:

SO IN THE WAKE OF THE KANSAS TORNADO TRAGEDY, I finally got around to unboxing and setting up the all hazards weather alert radio
that I ordered a while back.

…

More importantly, it will go off if
there’s a tornado warning in my area. It lets you set the alerts you
want to hear about or ignore (though a few, like “tornado warning” are
non-defeatable — who wouldn’t want to know about that?) and it
lets you set it to register only for your own county or other limited
areas. It was pretty cheap — about 50 bucks — setup was easy, and
there’s a battery backup in case the power goes out. Not a bad little
gadget.

The good thing is that the disaster sparred him to finally get it out and set it up. The bad thing is that he didn’t have it setup before something bad happened. (Bad Glenn!) If the tornado had been around Knoxville he might not have had the chance.

For me it does bring up the sirens vs. radios debate again. It was a good thing that the sirens in Greensburg were sounded well in advance of the storm, but what if they hadn’t? What if power had been knocked out by the storm or by some other freak accident and the sirens could not have been used? Are you willing to put your life and the lives of your family in the hands of the local government? NOAA Weather Radio is an ideal solution in that it is not centralized to one area. You don’t have to rely on sirens to know that something is coming. It’s all about personal responsibility versus abdicated responsibility.

Of course, all this is coming from a weather nut too.