Winter: Baby, It's Cold Outside!

This news in from Denver.

Denver Post:

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A historic Siberian cold front blasted Colorado with subzero temperatures and bone-rattling wind chills Thursday, laying waste to holiday travel plans and shutting down major thoroughfares, as city officials scrambled to open enough warming shelters to protect people from the vicious elements.

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Temperatures at Denver International Airport dropped to minus 24 degrees Thursday morning, marking the coldest December day since 1990 and 1 degree away from setting a record low for the month, according to the National Weather Service in Boulder.

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The 75-degree temperature drop from Wednesday’s high to Thursday’s low was the second-largest two-day swing on record in Denver, according to the weather service. And it came with about 4 inches of fresh snow.

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I stayed in all day and just slept. My heater doesn't work right and I need to buy a new one on Amazon.

The bomb cyclone missed me by just a few miles (12/23). It was still down into the teens, but 100-200 miles to the east it was -20.Hoping everyone else in the path of this storm keeps warm and safe. Happy Holidays!!

A few years ago, a guy I know went down to Los Angeles with some buddies of his. The first evening, they were walking around when they noticed that everybody seemed to be looking at them. Was it that obvious that they were Canadian?It was. They finally realized that everybody but them was wearing a jacket. (In Canada, if there's no snow on the ground it's T-shirt weather. The other day, I saw a guy taking his garbage out wearing shorts and sandals.)It's a brisk -24 F here, supposed to shoot up to -18 F later today. But there isn't much wind. The talking heads who do the weather report are about 12 years old, so they're horrified.

We had a fairly warm morning of -12F. It is -1F now.

The storm didn't even get close to Phoenix. Absolutely beautiful weather.Now, Friday 10 am, it is 45° crisp clear sunny gorgeous. Expect to hit highs into the low 70s on bright sunny Sat and Sun. This is what people come here for - absolutely gorgeous. And dry. Comfort levels through the roof.

It's 25° and we're getting freezing rain. The ground and streets are coated with ice but it hasn't started accumulating on the trees and power lines yet, but when it does we'll probably lose power.

Born and raised in Southern California (just south of LA), I served for five years in the cold part of North Dakota -- Grand Forks AFB where arctic air masses would come down from Canada and sit on us (and on International Falls, MN). Needless to say, I got acclimated:

1. At the end of winter when the temperature soared to a searing 33°F, I had to remove my gloves and open up my parka because it was just too damned hot. In Frat Row across the street from the university, the roofs were covered with frat rats in bathing suits soaking up the sun. At 33°F.
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2. When I returned home to start my civilian career, I had to re-acclimate to So.Calif. It was a 20 minute drive in a car without A/C from work in an air conditioned office to home where we had A/C. In the So.Calif. winter that drive would leave me exhausted from the heat.
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3. When my son left for college, he went to the University of North Dakota (UND) where we had attended. When he graduated in December the whole family attended. The temperature when we arrived was about 24°F. My mother-in-law who was always cold here was all bundled up in a quilted jacket with hood and gloves and she was freezing. As we were walking towards a Big Lots, we saw a pickup park and a woman in jeans and a t-shirt got out and walked calmly into the store. My poor mother-in-law just stood there in shock, "How can she do that? How is it even possible?"
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4. My son eventually ended up in Dickinson which is in the warm part of ND. His wife, who was from Florida, talked him into their moving to Florida. When I visited him, he kept the air conditioning so high that I had to wear a jacket indoors. Guess his acclimation to Florida was rough and still in progress.
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5. Earlier when I was stationed at Keesler AFB (on the Gulf Coast in Biloxi) for tech school, we arrived just after midnight on New Year's Day. In the morning, I looked out at our car and it had icicles hanging from it. Part of our problem trying to stay warm was because the apartment was not designed for cold weather.
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   BTW, later in that Gulf Coast winter it snowed. For a full 20 minutes leaving snow drifts nearly an inch high. The locals didn't know how to handle it.

We who have lived through cold weather routinely know how to deal with it and to dress for it, plus being acclimated to it. Acclimation can take months if not a couple of years, so sudden out-of-the-norm cold weather would require dressing for it. Assuming that they even have the clothes, which they likely will not because they've never needed them before.There's also the houses. Most houses in Grand Forks were as close to cubes as they could get. That would minimize surface area to volume, which is important since the outside surface of the house is where you lose most of the heat. A traditional California design, the ranch-style house, which is a long sprawling single-story house, would be nearly impossible to keep heated. Storm windows or double-pane windows (or stapling plastic sheets over the windows) also help to reduce heat loss -- Florida also has storm windows, but they're panels of plywood to protect the windows in a hurricane.Another typical feature in ND buildings was the air lock. The entrances of every store or office building had two sets of doors so that the building interior would never be exposed to the outside. Even the houses had that feature with their enclosed front porches; in many, that would also serve as a mud porch where you could take off your boots and change into your house shoes. In the big cities, revolving doors serve the same purpose. And I seem to recall that Café Sperl in Vienna also had an air lock. Our units in base housing did not have airlocks, which I assume was because multiple bases used the same architectural plans which did not take such local needs into account. And my son's house in Dickenson also did not have airlocks, but then that was in the balmy part of the state.In addition, public utilities and services (eg, snow removal, emergency services, power grids) in cold regions have been designed for such temperature extremes unlike in warmer regions -- just look at how power in the entire state of Texas crumpled in the face of cold weather. 
The point of that is that regions and people being affected are just not ready for these conditions.

Recently, a representative of the School Board remarked that we NEVER have a snow day here. No matter how thoroughly they attempt to contact the parents, SOMEBODY is going to show up at the school, so there has to be somebody there to let them in.Disclaimer: Once, when I was about 13, they did let us go home an hour or so early because a blizzard was on the way.

Yes, it's a dry cold.  
But seriously, humidity makes a difference.We arrived in North Dakota in July -- standard joke: "There actually are four seasons in North Dakota: June, July, August, and Winter" (though we were about to learn that that's not a joke). We were also told that it would only snow in the beginning and end of winter and that during winter it would be too cold to snow (which also turned out to be true).Humidity in a ND winter is low. Cold air cannot hold much water vapor. Then when you take that air inside and heat it, humidity drops even more -- a common attachment to furnaces is a humidifier to add humidity to the indoor air.My mother's mother lived near Peoria, Ill.. My mother told me that whenever she came out to visit for Christmas she would always complain about it being so cold in Southern California, even though it was a lot colder in Peoria. But our cold weather would come with rainy weather, so our cold would be a wet cold which felt worse, whereas Peoria had a drier cold which didn't feel as bad.

same thing in northern Alberta where I grew up. Even in -40C the school would be open, so my siblings and I had to go.

Where I grew up in Central Oregon, there was a myth (that every student knew) that 18 inches of snow would trigger a SNOW DAY. The only time we got a snow day was when the heating system at the high school was flooded.Yesterday the roads were a solid sheet of ice and even emergency vehicles were mostly parked.Today we are melting and are getting liquid rain.

I was born in Beverly, MA(across the harbor from Salem). Grew up in NE PA, just outside of Scranton. So have always experienced winter. In 1980 I came to the Midwest for college. Except for a 6 year stint in NC, I have been in the Duluth, MN/Superior, WI ever since. I now live just east of Superior, five miles from Lake Superior.
Needless to say we get cold and occasionally extensive lake effect snow. Nothing like the UP of MI or Buffalo, but a bit. We have over 2 feet on the ground. The coldest it has been so far is -17F. We will see close to if not -30F before spring.
It is what it is. As I tell people, I would rather a few weeks below 0F than months of 100F+. I can always put on more clothes and create heat. I can only get so naked and cannot easily create cool. Heat is much less expensive to create than cold.

Anytime there is a widespread occurrence of extreme heat or cold, human suffering and lack of preparation for it is common, often because the weather event happens quickly without much warning. That could have been true this time in places like Buffalo NY, I'm not sure, but this time it wasn't true in midwestern U.S. The meteorologists saw this coming about a week in advance, and plenty of weather forecasts both locally and nationally provided warnings about it. News reports over the past weekend and undoubtedly through this week will show countless examples of needless suffering, deaths, and monetary costs, from things like unnecessary travel, flooded buildings from burst water pipes, power outages, etc.Why wasn't the midwest better prepared? Could it be that the drumbeat of global warming / climate change has at least subconsciously caused the public to somewhat discard the possibility of extreme cold?Climate change and global warming are supposedly two completely different things. But that's not how the general public sees it, and there's a reason for it.Here's how the nasa.gov website describes it;

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The Internet is full of references to global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientists website on climate change is titled "Global Warming," just one of many examples. But we don't use global warming much on this website. We use the less appealing "climate change." Why?

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Whats in a Name? Global Warming vs. Climate Change | Precipitation EducationThis web page goes on to explain why, and most would consider it to be a good explanation, but some more cuts from their explanation show some human imperfection, that can easily be linked to politics.

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But global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming. He said: "global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming."4 Hansen's testimony was very widely reported in popular and business media, and after that popular use of the term global warming exploded. Global change never gained traction in either the scientific literature or the popular media.

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(bolded mine) It didn't "explode" only within the scientific community, it exploded throughout the popular media largely because it was a political scare tactic. And of course, it went along with Al Gore's political book, "Earth in the Balance".

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But temperature change itself isn't the most severe effect of changing climate. Changes to precipitation patterns and sea level are likely to have much greater human impact than the higher temperatures alone. For this reason, scientific research on climate change encompasses far more than surface temperature change. So "global climate change" is the more scientifically accurate term. Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we've chosen to emphasize global climate change on this website, and not global warming.

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And Democrats and the mainstream media chose to emphasize global warming a few decades ago for political purposes, and they made a pretty abrupt switch to climate change, now using it for the exact same political purposes.So no matter how different the two terms are, the general public makes little distinction between them. And it's not their fault, it's the way the terms have been politically presented to them. So they are, at least subconsciously, if not consciously in some cases, not as likely to be prepared for, or take heed of, warnings of COLD weather. Both the public, and those in charge of public utilities and emergency services.I saw news footage of abandoned, snowed in cars being moved by forklifts, which seriously damages the undersides of $40,000 / $50,000 cars. Water pouring out of windows and doors of buildings with busted water pipes. What was the cost of this unpreparedness? Milllions? Billions?Democrats aren't to blame? Then call me tons of vulgar names, it'll be fun.

So let me get this straight.You apparently agree on some basic facts:- scientists note that the average temperature of the Earth is rising. This is projected to eventually cause massive ecological disaster, including increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, concentrated areas of drought and floods, superstorms, and other not-good things for life on Earth in general, and human society specifically.- scientists talk about global warming, trying to warn the population while there is still time to change course. A shift away from the fossil fuels and similar measures are needed to stop the increased concentration of greenhouse gasses and keep the climate relatively unchanged. This was noticed many decades before it would be too late.- "global warming" enters the common popular vernacular. However, because the dramatic effects at this point were still in the future, and because of strong economic incentive to downplay it or pretend it didnt exist, people tended to disregard it.- Conservatives, mostly led by the petrochemical companies that stand to lose profit as the world reduces reliance on fossil fuels, engage in full-throated denial which continues today.- As time went on, scientists noted that "global warming" was not the best term, even though it's accurate at a global scale. It implies a uniform warming of the planet, which is not what actually happens. A shift to the term "climate change" begins.- Now in late 2022, we are experiencing more frequent and more extreme weather events, as predicted by climate change.You are now asserting that somehow Democrats are to blame for inaction on climate change, because they said it was going to get warmer and the Midwest is currently facing a very cold extreme weather event, as predicted all along? Because of the "global warming" term?Do I have that right? The Democrats, for all their many flaws, who have been at least talking about climate change and moving away from fossil fuels, the things that would actually help mitigate these extreme weather events, are the ones responsible for a Midwest blizzard? Not the Republicans?The Democrats are at fault for trying to turn off the doomsday device because the public was too stupid to listen past the two-word name they used for it, and the Republicans who were shooing away every attempt to disarm the doomsday device bear no mention?

Yup you are still an idiot