The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Friday afternoon link roundup

As we end the work-week, we can start our weekend with these little nuggets of horror and amusement:

Finally, Chicago has only gotten 251 mm of snowfall this season, just 3 mm more than the record-lowest 1920-21 season and only 26% of our normal 975 mm. Granted, we still have three more weeks of winter, but nothing in the forecast suggests we'll get a significant snowfall before March 1st. We may get 10 mm or so Saturday night, depending on when the temperature falls below freezing, but the 10-day forecast doesn't have a lot of precipitation in it. I hope we get some good rainfall this spring, though.

Slippery walk to the train

Chicago got a few millimeters of ice last night, which made my 15-minute walk from my house to Cassie's day camp into a 24-minute walk. The poor girl could not understand my difficulty, but she also can't count all four of her paws, so we work with what we have. Fortunately the temperature has gotten above freezing and promises to stay there at least until late tonight.

Elsewhere in the world:

In other news, I deployed an update to Weather Now last night that corrected a couple of bugs, and I also imported a few thousand places from the US Census Bureau and the US Geological Survey. By the end of February I should have the entire USGS gazetteer imported, plus a vastly expanded search service that will speed up finding places in the world to see their weather. I also hope to (finally!) allow registered users to choose measurement systems and to see where the best and the worst weather in the world is currently reported. Fun!

Cassie did not see her shadow

We got a lot of outdoor time yesterday, and more than an average amount so far this morning.

Yesterday we took a 5.5 km walk from downtown Elmhurst to the Prairie Path, with a sojourn at a big field where Cassie and her friend Kelsey found big sticks:

Then this morning I had to get my butt down to the University of Chicago, so Cassie got to be a Big Dog on Campus for a bit:

The forecast calls for 6°C today and 9°C tomorrow, so I imagine we will get a lot more walkies before the cold front comes in Monday night. With the dreaded "wintry mix" forecast for Wednesday, we need to get all the outside time we can.

Yay meetings!

I had about a half-dozen meetings this morning, including one that dragooned me five minutes before another meeting that I had to preside over. The consolations were (a) I took most of them from home, so (b) I got to walk Cassie in sunny, March-like 6°C weather, and (c) when I finally got to the office my view looked like this:

I've got two more meetings starting in half an hour before I can head back to my dog.

I'll deal with all the OAFPOTUS's chaos tomorrow.

Monarchist anachronisms from the White House

I had a thought about all the executive orders the OAFPOTUS signed Monday and Tuesday. Do they seem to anyone else like a King's Speech at the state opening of Parliament? Remember than an EO only directly affects the Executive Branch, and in many cases, still requires enabling legislation from the other end Pennsylvania Avenue.

I don't like how this reinforces the idea of the President as a monarch—something our founders explicitly said should never happen—but in terms of how an EO actually affects the world, it really could be read out by King Charles and have the same effect in the US.

In any event, it took less than 24 hours for a Federal judge to block the OAFPOTUS's executive order purporting to overturn the 14th Amendment, so our constitutional system hasn't completely collapsed yet.

In other news:

Finally, even though the high temperature today of -3.9°C happened right before sunrise and we're now scraping along at -7.6°C, and even though it hasn't been above freezing since before 8am Saturday, and even though tomorrow will be just as cold...it looks like we might get above freezing by noon this coming Saturday. I can't wait.

Cold snap over for now

The temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ has gone above -6°C for the first time since 10:30pm Saturday. It might even get up to -4°C, at which point we break out the Bermuda shorts. The forecast threatens another brief drop to -14°C tomorrow night before popping above freezing sometime Saturday afternoon.

So we've had a bit of cold, sure, but we've only got a few patches of snow here and there, with no significant precipitation expected. Compare that with, say, New Orleans this morning:

As historic snowfall — in some places more than double-digit totals — fell Tuesday along the Gulf Coast and in the Deep South and Southeast, meteorologists ran out of adjectives to describe what they were seeing.

“Just like hundreds of other meteorologists today, I am speechless,” one wrote, sharing a video clip of whiteout conditions on Pensacola Bay Bridge in Florida. The city of Milton, Florida, reported 8.8 inches — probably the state’s biggest daily snowfall on record.

In Louisiana, deep mounds of snow met the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. In New Orleans, locals skied down Bourbon Street as the airport recorded 8 inches, smashin the daily record of 2.7 inches.

That's right, kids, the Big Easy has 20 cm of snow on the ground for the first time since the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago. OK, well, probably more recently than that; but never since European colonization of the area. Ain't global warming fun?

Only 1,460 days to go

Ah, ha ha. Ha.

Today is the first full day of the Once Again Felonious POTUS, who wound everyone up yesterday with a bunch of statements of intent (i.e., executive orders) guaranteed to get people paying attention to him again. Yawn.

But that isn't everything that happened in the last 24 hours:

Finally, while Chicago has almost no snow on the ground, which probably helped prevent the overnight temperature from going below -20°C at Inner Drive Technology WHQ, the same weather system has already dumped more snow on the Gulf Coast cities of Mobile and Pensacola than they have ever recorded. Right now at Pensacola International, they have snow and -4°C temperatures. Climate change science didn't predict this specific event, but it did predict the weakening of the circumpolar jet stream that made this possible. This is not normal (temperatures in Fahrenheit):

Coldest day ever, 40 years ago

We woke up this morning to frigid -17°C air (with sun though!), with an official overnight low of -19°C at O'Hare. We get cold like this almost every year; in fact, it got down to -23°C just 371 days ago.

No, the record low temperature for this day was also the coldest temperature ever recorded in Chicago, on Sunday 20 January 1985: -32°C. It was so cold that morning that my high school cancelled classes the next day—the only time they did so in my four years there.

Chicago historian John R Schmidt also remembers:

The winters had been getting colder in Chicago. The previous record low temperature had been -31°C, posted only three years ago. A new Ice Age seemed to be on the way. Both Time and Newsweek had predicted it in cover-stories.

Some experts claimed that Chicago temperatures weren’t really setting records. In 1970 the city’s official weather station had been moved from Midway to O’Hare. Everyone knew that the readings were usually a few degrees lower at O’Hare.

The day moved on. By noon the mercury had climbed to -27°C. Now more people were venturing out. A young man on State Street was heading for a movie. “I got tired of staying in,” he said. “What can you do except watch reruns on television?”

Remember, kids: this was five years before Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web and 16 years before the current century. We had to read books, or in my case, study for final exams.

More relevantly, though, is what happened to the predicted ice age. Going by astronomical cycles that have governed Earth's climate for millions of years, we should be moving into a cooler period, and indeed temperatures have declined overall since about 4000 YBP. Yet since around 1800, global average temperatures have instead gone up, increasing even more rapidly in the last 40 years than in any other time than we have detected in the million-year ice record.

There is no guarantee that Chicago will never experience a colder temperature than we did 40 years ago today. But with the OAFPOTUS bringing his kakistocratic, climate-denying clown car back into power in just two hours, we will probably break more heat records than cold records.

I hope we live long enough to see.

Cooling off a bit

Cassie only got an 8-minute walk this morning, and she's not likely to get a longer one today. Officially at O'Hare it's -15°C, and here at IDTWHQ it's -13°C. The forecast promises the temperature will remain right around there until tonight before sliding down to -18°C by 3am, and -21°C Tuesday morning around 5am. Brr.

My Garmin app tells me I'm on day 22 of a 30-day "walk streak" of getting a walking activity of at least 1.6 km every day. We'll see about that. Cassie won't be able to join me, poor dear, because it's not safe for her to be out longer than 10 minutes at this temperature.

The temperature will get back up to -4°C or so when it's time to come home from day camp on Wednesday, though. And I'll make sure to give her extra walkies next weekend.