Summer’s Over – Good Riddance
Meteorological summer ended when the clock struck midnight last night. As a winter and snow lover, I say good riddance. Standard operating procedure for weather and climate outlets is to state “record heat” whenever a heat wave hits and this year we had a lot of heat waves. I thought the entire summer, though, that it wasn’t as bad as the summers of 1988 and 1994. That’s not to say it wasn’t hot. It was.
As for doing some detailed direct data comparison for this summer versus some of the summers of the 1980s for Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, I can’t – daily temperature records are now behind a paywall at NOAA even though yours and my tax dollars already paid for them. Such are the hazards of other sane-minded weather and climate folks exposing anthropogenic global warming theory for the fraud it is, then going back through temperature data and discovering where it was adjusted.
Perhaps the best outlet for information on whether or not the Mid-Atlantic had a record breaking summer on some or many levels is the Capital Weather Gang. But given their very pro-AGW stance and seeing what other pro-AGW folks have done the past several years, I simply can’t trust them.
I’m looking forward to the fall and winter, even though last winter’s blizzards are still giving my immediate area problems. Not only have more patches of bare dirt formed in my neighborhood from where the piles of snow sat, a luna hibiscus plant that we had fully died after not doing well at all in the spring as a result of the blizzards, and my air conditioning / heat pump broke twice this summer after starting to make odd noises immediately after the blizzards. I had to get it replaced a couple weeks ago to the tune of several thousand dollars.
Given the amount of snow we had last winter, I think it could be ten years before we see another snowstorm though. 
Yo-yo
Meet Yo-yo. Yo-yo was a cat that lived primarily in the 1970s and this photo is one of only three photos known to exist of him, all of which were taken in April, 1970. Yo-yo was a family pet and was older and larger with a somewhat dumb look on his face by the time I was born, much like Elvis of the same time period, in the mid-70s.
Yo-yo was not known for his intelligence, rather he was known for his lack of intelligence. My mom reported that when he wanted to go outside and it was raining, he would go to the back door, which was a sliding glass door covered by a curtain, and then meow. When my mom would pull back the curtain to show him it was raining, he would get mad and stomp off to the front door and meow loudly to be let out as if rain would not be falling behind the front door.
When I was a toddler at two years old and came stomping into the room, the other two smarter cats in the family got out quickly. But due to Yo-yo’s lack of mental prowess, he stayed and allowed me to pet him, which was probably more like light smacks to his face and body. He didn’t mind so I liked him. Thus, Yo-yo would be considered my first pet even though there were three in the family at the time I was born. I lived on Falmouth Road at the time, which many people in my area pronounced “foul mouth.” That’s why my porn name is Yo-yo Foul Mouth, because the internet says that a person’s porn name is their first pet’s name followed by the street name they grew up on.
Sadly, Yo-yo died when I was still two years old.
It’s Official: Dr. Jeff Masters’ Blog is Now Unreadable
One of my favorite blogs to visit from time to time over the past five years and on a daily basis during hurricane season is Dr. Jeff Masters’ blog on Weather Underground. That is, until this year. Masters is a meteorologist and climate scientist and has focused on hurricanes for quite some time. One of his claims to fame (that he mentions on a regular basis) is nearly getting killed by Hurricane Hugo in a hurricane hunter flight in 1989.
Masters blog used to be quite informative about weather events and hurricanes. Now, it’s all about global warming alarmism and the comments section is full of idiocracy. I fall under what Masters refers to as a “contrarian," that is, I think the global warming talk coming from climate scientists is hysteria and (you guessed it) alarmism.
Last decade I had mixed opinions on the global warming issue and was what Anthony Watts (another meteorologist and blogger that Masters would describe as a “contrarian”) would describe as a “lukewarmer.” But as the decade went on, it became increasingly apparent that climate scientists had become activists, while politicians pushing global warming were using it for their own agendas, and the people that blindly followed the global warming alarmism were people that needed a religion to believe in. Actual scientific information on the subject became harder and harder to come by.
I was just about to declare global warming a complete fraud in my mind when the infamous climategate emails leak occurred last November. My jaw dropped as I read through the emails – everything the “contrarians” were saying for the past decade turned out to be true and they were vindicated. Ever since then, most climate scientists that were global warming alarmists throughout the last decade have doubled their efforts at alarmism I’m guessing as an attempt at damage control.
One of these is Masters. His latest blog entry begins with a roundup of what is going on in the tropics, switches to Arctic sea ice extent, switches to discussing the “contrarian” claim that Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record high (it is and he fails to mention that as a result, global sea ice extent is above average) and ends with a paragraph of activism (subtitled “commentary”). The part that disturbed me in this latest post is Masters’ copy and paste of a skepticalscience.com blog post explaining their thinking as to why Antarctic sea ice is increasing even though ocean temperatures in that region are increasing.
After the copy and paste job, Masters makes this statement:
This counter-intuitive result shows how complicated our climate system is.
To this, I say “Thanks, Captain Obvious.” While Masters gets wholly on the same page as me, there’s one very large problem with that statement from Masters – Alarmists like Masters for years (and some for decades) have claimed they know and understand the complexities of the climate system and that anthropogenic global warming is such a settled theory that they can accurately predict the Earth’s temperature and its effects on climate and weather 100 years from now (and they’ve done this while ignoring the fact that none of their short term predictions have come true.)
In the very next sentence of the post, Masters makes this statement:
Climate change contrarians are masters at obscuring the truth by taking counter-intuitive climate events like this out of context, and twisting them into a warped but believable non-scientific narrative.
Masters has had many statements in his blogs similar to this one since the climategate scandal broke. Each time I read one, I cringe at how badly Masters is embarrassing himself. There’s nothing masterful about what us “contrarians” are doing and is something an elementary school child could do – reporting of the facts. The only obscuring of the truth that I’ve seen since the climategate emails broke has been done by the global warming alarmists.
Masters Commentary section then spreads fire and brimstone doom and gloom about global warming and ends with this statement:
It is time to pay the big bucks and send out the fire engines, before the conflagration gets totally out of control. Consider the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 and the Pakistani floods of 2010 a warning. These sorts of extreme events will grow far more common in the decades to come, because of human-caused climate change.
There are two things to note about these ending sentences: 1) Masters performs the standard global warming alarmist practice of implying recent weather events that, while locally extreme, are within normal parameters for the Earth’s environment, are a result of global warming, and 2) Masters performs the standard global warming alarmist practice of switching to the phrase “climate change” at the end while previously using the term global warming since A) the type of global warming they raised the alarm about isn’t happening, and B) climate change happens all the time, has happened all the time throughout Earth’s history and is thus a catch-all phrase for anything that happens within the climate system.
Anyway, it’s now time to end my readership of Masters’ blog, as it has become a propaganda outlet for the global warming political party, their money grabbers and associated churchgoers and does not appear to be going back to anything based on reality, weather, climate, or science anytime soon.
Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
During an episode of Seinfeld, a Rabbi tells Elaine “Very often we cannot see the forest for the trees.” To this Elaine replies “Yeah, I don’t know what that means.” I have similar confession to make – I don’t know what the “glass half empty or half full” phrase means.
I first heard this phrase in elementary school from a teacher when she brought it up in class. She drew a cup on the blackboard with a line in the middle and said it could be viewed as being half full of water or half empty of water or half full of air. While I understood this part, it’s what she said next that I didn’t understand. She said people that view it as being half full of water are generally optimistic people while people that view it as being half empty of water are generally pessimistic.
After I thought about it for a while, it opened up a whole new world of education and enrichment for me. I lie. Actually, I thought to myself “huh?” and then went back to making noises with my armpits. Ever since then, I’ve heard the phrase used every once a while. The last time I remember hearing it was a colleague at work referring to another colleague saying “he’s a glass half empty type of guy.” Presumably he was saying the other colleague was more of a pessimist than others. I can’t say that for sure, though, because I don’t understand what would make someone a pessimist if they view a glass with half water and half air as being half empty. I’m also extra-confused since I view glasses with 50% water as being half full and am generally regarded as a pessimist as well.
The glass I’m actually writing about is probably of less importance to philosophers. It’s my glass five gallon water jug that I’ve been filing with pocket change. Started in the summer of 2001, it’s now only half full of change. Wait - of air. No wait -it’s half empty. Never mind.
“That’s change we can believe in.” –Barack Obama when he saw it.
“A penny saved is a penny earned.” – Benjamin Franklin, inspiration for “It’s all about the Benjamins” by Puff Daddy.
“A bunch of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters sitting in a five gallon glass water jug for nine years are a bunch of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters that could have been sitting in a bank account earning interest for nine years.” –Colin Beaven
I originally envisioned the jug to fill up much quicker, but as time went on, I started using less and less paper money out and about and thus, had less and less pocket change to put in it. The last couple of years have been exceptionally slow in filling it up.
I also separated quarters from my pocket change so that I could use them for soda machines, parking meters, etc. up until a few years ago, but recently backfilled a lot of my remaining quarter stock back into it.
I also didn’t realize just how heavy it would become. It must weigh about a hundred pounds. It’s this weight of the thing that has made me decide to stop filling it and I know carrying it in general would be a major pain and carrying it up or down the stairs would cause a herniated disc.
For now, I have to decide what I’m going to do with it. Should I cash in the change? Should I not and keep the jar half full of change around? If I do try to cash in the change are there any special coins I should look for to separate because they might be slightly more valuable than their face value?
I also wonder what the total Benjamin amount is of the change in it. Some web pages give an idea and I like the answer on askville of “at least a thousand dollars” to the question of how much change would be in a full five gallon jug, meaning there’s probably at least 500 dollars in mine. It’s definitely difficult to say, though, given my quarter separation and reintroduction of probably only half of them. But I believe there are actually at least ten one dollar coins in there too. A flickr friend gives an idea too as to what the total dollar amount may be and I actually see on the Coinstar web page that they believe 1 gallon equals around $228.34. Assuming my amount is indeed right around 2.5 gallons, that puts mine at $570.
Speaking of Coinstar, a Coinstar machine would be the place I would most likely need to take the change to. I’m not going to roll them and I asked my bank the last time I was at a branch if they had automated machines for it and they don’t.
There was one mystery about the coins that I was going to ask readers about, but I think I resolved it when I took a closer look. The mystery was why the coins ultimately laid vertically against the sides of the glass while often being horizontal everywhere in between:
For many years I sat next to the jar on a daily basis and wondered about this until one day a few months ago I added a bunch of change and saw that when adding the change, it created a very slight ridge or hill of change in the center of the jug. When adding additional coins to it, a few slid down and became wedged against the glass and when more future change was added, they got pushed against the glass to become fully vertical.
Future pocket change is going to go in a piggy bank that was a gift from someone for my daughter that was born earlier this year.
Going Offline for Now
Localnews.colinbeaven.com will be offline for now. It is expected to return within a few months.
Blizzards of 2010’s Effects Still Being Felt
It’s hard to believe that in the middle of a blazing hot July and over five months since the Blizzards of 2010 placed four feet of snow at my house over the course of a few days that the effects of those blizzards would still be felt. But they are and I’ve got photographic proof.
Grass started going dormant a month ago at my place due to a lack of rainfall and virtually all of the grass went dormant a couple of weeks ago when the heat wave hit the east coast. We finally got a little bit of rain over the past week (but not nearly as much as some nearby places reported, we maybe got a half inch or so) and it breathed a little bit of life into the grass. But some of the grass did not come back and in one spot appears to have completely died leaving bare dirt while another spot appears to be in serious trouble.
Those two spots are where the two biggest snow piles from the Blizzards of 2010 were (at least as far as my yard is concerned). The first spot is just off the cement at the base of my deck steps. Let’s take a look at the snow pile as it was on February 11, 2010:
Let’s take a look at the dead zone today:
I can’t say I’m that surprised, I was actually looking for damage to this section of the yard after the snow melted and that’s because the snow was so heavy, it was as if I had piled over four feet of cement on top of the grass. But I didn’t see any damage when it melted and the grass did appear to come back to life in the spring, although it did appear to be heavily laced with weeds. So it is curious as to why it died now. I suppose the heavy snow weakened it enough to not kill it, but cause it to die if any other issues came up, such as a lack of water for an extended period of time.
The other spot is in my front yard next to my walkway steps across from my mailbox. I don’t have any decent pictures of the snow pile as it stood then so I won’t post any pictures of the dying zone now, but I can say that when the second blizzard of 2010 ended, that snow pile was over my head and I couldn’t shovel any of the snow from the sidewalk on it and had to carry it to other spots.
Local Weather Update – What a Difference a Few Months Make
For a visual on the difference between mid-March and the end of June, here are two images of my neighbor’s backyard. The first was taken on March 13, the second was taken on June 29. The angle is slightly wider on the second one in order to show the sprinkler in the frame as proof that the neighbor’s yard looks like this even though he’s been sprinkling it.
March 13, 2010 – It stayed wet until mid-April
June 30, 2010
I don’t think we’re going to see any rain now until September, despite August normally being the wettest month due to thunderstorms. This is because from mid-April (the last time we received a thunderstorm, or any rain at all for that matter) up until now, every line of thunderstorms has broken as it approached my area with cells or line segments going to the north or the south of the area. With that pattern clearly in place, I don’t see it breaking until the autumn season brings weather pattern changes or rains from tropical systems or remnants of tropical systems.
Here’s an image from the National Weather Service’s craptastic online radar loops from June 28. It’s the last time there was a chance for thunderstorms and even though the image quality is bad and pixelated, it clearly shows what I’m talking about.
If you live anywhere from Towson to Carney to the Parkville/Nottingham/Perry Hall/White Marsh suburb quadrangle, no rain for you the past 2.5 months.
I can’t say I understand how this is happening, especially when it’s rained or snowed practically every day since I moved here eight years ago. Another thing I don’t understand is the US Drought Monitor. Two weeks ago the State of Maryland was fine as far as drought was concerned according to the monitor. Now two weeks later, half the state is in a moderate drought while the other half is “abnormally dry.” How does an area go from being fine to being in a moderate drought in just two weeks according to the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center? I don’t know. Shouldn’t the area listed as being in a drought have been listed as abnormally dry at least two weeks ago?
Another item that sticks out to me is that my area isn’t even in a drought according to the HPC, even though it is by far the driest it has been in eight years and has been labeled as being in a drought numerous times during that time period.
With another week of temperatures in the mid to upper 90s or 100s with no rain being forecast, you can bet the house that severe drought will be talked about in weather circles, that alarmism will be performed by Maryland state and local governments, and that inevitably the blame will be placed on anthropogenic global warming. All of this will happen despite the fact that heat waves and dry spells have always happened in the Mid-Atlantic.
This Year’s World Cup is Disappointing (or Today I Type Down Rambling Thoughts on Soccer, er Football)
Soccer, rightfully called football everywhere besides the United States of America, will likely never catch on in the USA as a major sport. The reasons for this have long been known and are accurately summarized in the remarkably detailed infographic below that I first saw on the internet a couple of weeks ago. Whoever made it gets major bonus points for including imagery from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:
He chose poorly.
Soccer and I go way, way back. Not really, but kind of. Here’s a pic of me and my soccer team in 1981. I may not have even turned six years old when this picture was taken:
I’m the ugly one.
Playing soccer wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t overly good either. When I discovered how much fun playing the game of baseball was I dropped soccer and never looked back making 1982 the last time I played soccer.
All I ever did with soccer was that minimal playing time in the early 80s and haven’t known much about the actual sport for the majority of my life. I did make it a point to catch some of the World Cup matches in 1994 and this is when I learned that all football players “flopped,” which is to say they feign injury. The laughable acting on display in that era was cringe-worthy when watching it and spectacularly dumb to see coming from people that otherwise think and act off the field like they’re the biggest, baddest, and toughest men on the planet.
But the quality of play on display otherwise at the World Cup was far better than anything American soccer leagues could ever muster up and I made it a point to try to catch a few matches here and there in future World Cups. As a result, I gradually learned that soccer games shouldn’t really be called games, they should be called matches, one should say “nil” instead of zero and there’s something called “the equalizer” and that it’s spoken best when the person has a British accent. I think the equalizer is when a team ties the game, although I’m not sure because I usually look like the villain from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at that point.
The pinnacle of my watching-soccer-matches-on-television career (which includes perhaps 15 games or so) came when I was in the United Kingdom on business in 2004. At that time, the European Championships were going on and watching a couple of those matches in the pubs after work was actually quite fun and the quality of the games was very high. It was there that I first saw Wayne Rooney and learned that if you are cheering for England you are supposed to add an extra syllable to England and yell “ENG-UH-LAND!”
The English flag (St. George’s Cross) was hung up near many pubs in Nottingham for the European Football Championship when I was there in2004.
This year’s World Cup matches have been pretty disappointing though. The theme of the matches seems to be to play conservative and a whole lot of them apparently have ended in 0-0 ties, making the opening infographic even more relevant. I haven’t had the “pleasure” of watching one of these 0-0 ties, but I did see the USA vs. Algeria match where it definitely looked like it was going to end in a 0-0 tie until a goal by the USA in extra time allowed for a 1-0 win. I also saw the opening USA game where they played England and witnessed the English goalie botch a play so bad that I haven’t seen anything like it since way back in 1981 when I intentionally kicked a goal into my team’s own net.
I didn’t see the second USA match vs. Slovenia, but I did see a lot of the highlights (or lowlights) including the now infamous foul call on a phantom USA player that disallowed the winning goal for the USA. Since I don’t know all of the finer details of international football, I don’t think I’m qualified to say whether or not I thought I saw a foul or not. What I did see on the one million replays of it was something very similar to what happens under the basket about 100 times in every NBA game ever played in America - that is to say the appearance of all of the players both fouling and getting fouled at the same time.
What I learned next, though, threw everything I ever thought I knew about international football on its head. The referees don’t have to identify what foul they called and don’t have to identify who they called it on? Huh? I was unaware of this and I don’t get it at all. I guess it would be OK for a referee to simply call random fouls whenever they want regardless of what’s happening on the field? This completely perplexes me and indicates international football is not as refined a games as it is touted to be.
Then there’s those damn vuvuzelas – the plastic trumpets that make it sound as though the world’s biggest swarm of killer bees has attacked the field and can actually cause hearing loss and other ear drum and throat damage. I had heard them in matches over the past 4 or 6 years, but not to the level that exists in this World Cup. Considerable debate began among some of the US sports shows after the first series of matches as to whether or not the vuvuzelas are detrimental to watching the game (they are) and whether or not they should be banned. Some folks argued that they shouldn’t be banned because it has been a long cultural tradition to use them in South Africa. I immediately call BS on this because I can’t imagine that people have marched around South Africa blowing plastic trumpets for the past several millennia, especially since plastic has really only been around for about 100 years. But then again, what do I know? I’m just a stupid American. I also would have thought that people at the matches would have better things to do with their time than blow the vuvuzelas, like I don’t know, watch the game?
Click here to browse my web site as though it’s part of the 2010 World Cup.
So between the boring games, the poor officiating (there was also what appeared to be a pretty bad offside call against the USA in the Algeria game which disallowed a goal as well as a couple of phantom hand balls in the matches) and the vuvuzelas, this year’s World Cup has been a dud as far as I’m concerned. Maybe I’ll continue watching this year’s World Cup and maybe I’ll watch some of the next World Cup, but maybe I won’t.
It’s the Driest it has been in Eight Years
I haven’t been doing as much blogging lately largely due to an addition to the family two months ago. Two months ago was also the last time we had heavy rain (from a thunderstorm) and it’s hardly rained since then. In fact, it’s the driest it has been in my immediate area since I moved here in February, 2002 and the first time I’ve seen the grass start to go dormant.
So let’s take a look at the US Drought Monitor to see how bad of a drought we’re listed as being in. We’ve been listed anywhere from “abnormally dry” to “drought – severe” countless times in the past five or six years, so I figure we must be in the “drought – extreme” or “drought – exceptional” category then this time around, though funny thing is, I haven’t heard anything about all of the water emergencies and what a dire situation we’re in like the drought that was going on in the summer of 2002 after I moved here.
Hmm…something seems wrong here. I wonder if they’re taking the BWI rain gauge and applying it to the entire area, same thing as what they appeared to be doing for all of the other “droughts”? A quick look at the records at BWI indicates that on the date this graphic was generated, BWI was only down 0.75 inches of precipitation for the month and 0.45 inches of precipitation for the year. I guess that concludes things then.
(Are you going to hear me say “We could really use the rain”?) NO!
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