Storm Builds Steam And Heads East

More Snow For Colorado And Kansas; Northeast And South Brace For Violent Conditions

(CBS/AP)  A spring storm dropping snow and rain on the central Plains on Friday before speeding toward the East Coast, where it was expected to create a messy weekend.

Up to 8 inches of snow fell over parts of western Kansas by early afternoon, making driving tougher and forcing some schools to close early. Southeastern Colorado was expecting to end up with no more than 7 inches — far less than the 18 inches initially forecast in some places.

The storm will become a huge issue as the weekend progresses as some violent conditions are likely to develop across the South on Saturday, reports CBS News meteorologist George Cullen.

As the storm moved east, tornadoes were possible in east Texas, northern Louisiana and southwest Arkansas on Friday and Saturday, the National Weather Service said.

The storm could then bring rain and 25 mph wind to the Carolinas by late Saturday before hitting the Northeast with heavy snow or rain by Sunday, the weather service said. Forecasters also warned of possible flooding.

The storm's combination of snow, rain and high wind was unusual for this time of year, said Brian Korty, a National Weather Service forecaster in Camp Springs, Md.

It follows an earlier system that grounded hundreds of flights in the Midwest on Wednesday before delivering up to a foot fresh snow to northern New England on Friday.

At least seven traffic deaths were blamed on that storm.

At least one Eastern ski resort that had closed for the season changed course and reopened for the weekend — stretching out a season that began late because of a lack of powder.

"Better late than never," said Chris Lenois, spokesman for Mount Snow in West Dover, Vt., which got just under a foot of new snow. "... There's no bare spots on the mountain."

In the West, the new storm packed less punch than had been forecast. Glum predictions had led Colorado legislators to take Friday off, and United Airlines had canceled 120 flights in Denver, but operations had returned to normal by Friday morning.

[pepperwood2]

Weather climatologists are predicted another brutal cold northeasterly to hit the East Coast. Heavy rain Sunday & blizzard conditions Monday & Tuesday.

More Doomy & Gloomy weather in the extended forecast.

I'm just thankful for Global Warming as I can't imagine what the bitter cold temperatures & conditions we would be having without it.

[nyy027]

It has got to be the big oil producers behind this. They must be loving this cold weather.

[hdmooney]

zipperhead60 global warming doesn't affect temperture it affects weather in general. Do some reserch...

[zipperhead60]

If .... (if that is) , global warming IS happening now??? How does one explain the extended weeks of "below normal temperatures" across the entire USA ??? Huge stretches of land mass BELOW AVERAGE temperature. Weird, isn't it, that with everyone in a panic about global warming - our planet is running considerably below normal temperature - everywhere!! And for extended periods of time.
Sure we have pollutants in the air but how many reported cases of death has anyone heard of yet, from global warming??? "Global warming" doesn't just turn itself off and on with the seasons.IF ... global warming was happening? Wouldn't Spring, Summer and Fall temps be above average too??? Not just summers temps.
Summer brings out more people, more automobiles, more electricity, basically more air warming, buildings adding to the heat, sidewalks, human bodies even. Radiational heating. So let's not all panic, but rather enjoy what good weather we have, when we have it.
:)

[rheola-2009]

Hawksprings

Why do you and others continually use Al gores name, maybe in the past, he was not as green as he is now, but he is only one of so many messengers, the majority much more qualified than is he himself.
I would be surprised if he did not admit that himself, and that because of his position in the public eye, is doing his best to promote what he feels is the best direction for this world of ours to be taken.
A least he is being positive, not negative as are so many of those in denial.

For goodness sake get off your Al Gore mentality, all of you and look around.

Incidentally, that area you mentioned, that you would like to live, has an almost negligible unemployment situation, and there are more jobs than people to fill them.
Further north, big money is being made in the mining industry.

[me4prezz]

Posted by pakaal at 07:42 PM : Apr 13, 2007

You are correct. I also said that I have no doubt that we are playing our part in speeding up the process. I was implying that to place the blame entirely on humans is inaccurate.

It is not HIV or even AIDS that kills. AIDS attacks the immune system which makes the body vulnerable to many infections that a person with a healthy immune system would ordinarily just consider annoying. A simple cold to someone with HIV can kill them---which is the point of this. We are not so much like parasites as we are like a virus. We attack the immune system of the earth and we leave it vulnerable to future attacks of things not of our making. Does that make sense? By destroying the processes in which the earth heals itself, we are making it harder for the earth to repair damage from naturally occuring disasters. You don't die from AIDS. You die from the dieases and complications you contract after the virus has destroyed your immune system.

I like your analogy though. I will have to save that one. I do believe that humans are playing a part. I just do not believe that we are the only reason it is occurring. It would have occurred with or without us. We are just the fuel that makes the engine go faster.

[pakaal]

"the Earth will do whatever it takes to maintain a homeostatic state and it is doing so now."
Posted by me4prezz at 05:05 PM : Apr 13, 2007

Interesting analogy. You missed one point. Take necrotizing fasciitis in the human body. A simple cut becomes fatal within days due to aggressive microbiological infection. For the homeostatic process to maintain normal body functions, it must be free from factors such as parasites, disease, infection, etc. Using your analogy, humans on Earth can be seen as something similar to cancer in that a cancer replicates without any regard to the body's balance or its longevity. Effective symbiotic relationships require some constraint on the part of the invading pathogen not to kill the host.

[aaabee-2009]

I don't want to believe it either.

How do I refute the layer upon layer of evidence presented in An Inconvenient Truth?

Seriously, I made up my mind using the facts in that movie, and some other research steming from it that I looked up myself.

I saw the before and after pictures of the melting glaciers, Mount Kilimanjaro snows, the deserts, the lakes almost gone. How do you get around that?

And the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I saw the CO2 trends for thousands of years at their various levels, then I saw today's CO2 at twice the height of anything previous. How do you get around that?

Al Gore is wealthy and political, sure. But he is still just the messenger. Do I not believe in global warming because the messenger is bad? Is it his fault people don't believe?

Help me out here.

[me4prezz]

(Sorry the last paragraph of my last post was for this post).

We must get on with the real agenda of saving the planet.
Posted by HawkSprings at 04:07 PM : Apr 13, 2007

It is called homeostasis. Our bodies do a miniversion of it everyday of our lives. Your body gets too hot, you sweat. Your blood vessels dilate to release more heat. Your body signals to your brain that you need more fluids to keep the sweat and blood flowing and your body cools itself down. Too cold? Your blood vessels constrict forcing blood to the vital organs that are needed for survival; thus, cold hands and fingers in cold weather. Your heart rate slows down. You shiver to produce heat energy, which is transferred to the body. In turn, you warm up.

I agree that there are times when your body is unable to cope, but again, your body is a much smaller version of the Earth. Can the Earth overcompensate? Yes. Is this the end of the world? No. All of nature has survival mechanisms. This earth will be here long after we are gone and it will get to the business of cleaning up our mess. We can could and most certainly do what we can do help by recycling, walking more and driving less, using less paper, plant trees, pick up trash, reduce our trash waste, etc. Every little bit helps. But again, the Earth will do whatever it takes to maintain a homeostatic state and it is doing so now.

[me4prezz]

It heats up...it cools down...and so on. Where is that fool Al Gore...probably in his big house with all the lights and a.c. on. Or maybe he has the heat on today. What a hypocrite.

Posted by theUSA1st at 03:53 PM : Apr 13, 2007

Did you know that the biggest polluters in the nation are those that are screaming at the top of their lungs for better environmental policies...i.e. celebrities, politicians, etc.

Consider this: They buy and drive a very expensive hybrid, pay someone to recycle all their goods as they climb on an airliner jet to fly back and forth from country to country to shoot movies using up millions, if not more, of jet fuel that is dumped into the earth's atmosphere while I use a little car that I use only for transportation back and forth to work and to daycare for my kids. Al Gore pollutes the air with all of his flying on airliners to preach to the world about global warming than those he preaches to who walked to the door.

There is no more debate, it's a done deal. Anyone who dissagrees with The Consensus is either owned by Big Oil, an idiot, a righ-wing flat earth religious nut, or preferrably, all three, and must be side-lined.

[hawksprings]

You people don't understand how Global Warming Hysterial works.

There is no more debate, it's a done deal. Anyone who dissagrees with The Consensus is either owned by Big Oil, an idiot, a righ-wing flat earth religious nut, or preferrably, all three, and must be side-lined.

We must get on with the real agenda of saving the planet.

Fall down at the feet of the Holy Father of Global Warming, Algore, and confess your sins. And maybe, JUST MAYBE he will let you clean his heated pool.

[theusa1st]

The earth has a way of maintaing a normal balance and it does that by going through hot and cold spells. It will warm up and then it will cool down again.

Posted by me4prezz at 02:35 PM : Apr 13, 2007

Good post. The biggest greenhouse gas is.........
water vapor....about 92 percent followed by carbon dioxide...less than 5 percent. Anybody that thinks we can control the earths temperature by playing with the amount of CO2 is a little off the chart. Do I think we should pollute the earths atmospere...absolutely not...but the earth has a history of cleansing itself time after time.
It heats up...it cools down...and so on. Where is that fool Al Gore...probably in his big house with all the lights and a.c. on. Or maybe he has the heat on today. What a hypocrite.

[me4prezz]

How much would hear of these events if no one lived where they were happening? It only becomes news when it damages the way of life we have become accustomed too. These events will occur whether we are here or not. We just know about them and they affect us so much because we are moving into where they are. Why do think Europe was inhabited so vastly and this continent so rarely, except by those who learned to adapt to the environment and migrate to fit the seasons?

Mother Nature has an awesome power. There is nothing that human kind could ever create to compete the wonderful adaptability and awesome glory of it. We can destroy, blow things up, kill each other, let our blood flow in the streams, and long after we are gone, Mother Nature will be here to clean it up. If we build a sidewalk, the grass still finds a way through. If we drop an atomic bomb as we did at Hiroshima, the grass, trees and animals will grow back. At the site of American Airlines Flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania, it did not take long for nature to reclaim the spot.

We need to respect the powers of Mother Nature. To do otherwise is to stand in the mouth of an active volcano and then blame the volcano for erupting and killing us. It was going to erupt anyway, but we were just stupid enough to gamble that it would leave us alive. It isn't going to happen.

[me4prezz]

If you research back you will find that the earth has gone a rather remarkably steady trend of weather like we are experiencing in an almost predictable pattern. The earth has natural "hot" spells and natural "cold" spells, as evidenced by the ice age, etc. Are humans perhaps pushing the evelope by making it start earlier, end later or perhaps be more intense? There is no doubt in my mind that humans have changed the conditions on this planet, but, to put the blame entirely on humans is just ridiculous. The earth has a way of maintaing a normal balance and it does that by going through hot and cold spells. It will warm up and then it will cool down again.

The reason that this land was uninhabited for so long was because the United States sits in a perfect haven for massive storms. We have the most natural weather phenomena than anywhere else in the world. The coasts are situated perfectly for hurricanes. The plains for tornadoes. California and other states are perfectly situated on fault lines and plates for earthquakes. We have 2 HUGE mountain ranges on each side of the United States that can trap weather systems and make them more intense. These are just natural occurences that only seem to have a larger effect as these areas are becoming more and more populated. It is a rational conclusion that where you have more people, you have more consequences to natural disasters.

[hawksprings]

dlpracer is exactly right.

From now on, all weather on the planet that isn't perfect is the result of Human-caused global warming.

Because we all know that before Human-caused global warming, there were no killer storms, no killer droughts, no killer tornadoes, no killer floods.

The weather on this planet was PERFECT before Human-caused global warming, wasn't it Global Warming Sheep?

[dlpracer]

...it won't be long before any weather which deviates from a cloudless, light wind, 75 degree day will be blamed on global warming.

The level of human arrogance needed to think we are in charge of a system the size of the earth's atmosphere is mind numbing.

Get you head out folks, passing Kyoto as it was written would NOT lower CO2 levels....period. If you think that joining Kyoto years ago would have impacted weather systems today, you are living in the land of OZ.

Good luck.

[extremophil]

The global-warming morons strike again.

[pepperwood2]

I see the bad moon arising.
Looks like were in for nasty weather!

Todays weather forecast -Gloomy & Doomy!

VIEWPOINT By
Oliver Tickell

As the most authoritative report to date on climate change is published, it is time for the world to get serious about curbing greenhouse gas emissions, argues Oliver Tickell. He calls on all nations to embrace a "Kyoto 2" framework, full of "bold measures" to prevent "severe and adverse consequences".


Ice melting in Greenland (Image: AP)
Fail to act at this decisive time and the Earth, its people and its whole panoply of life will face the most severe and adverse consequences
The Earth's average temperature will almost certainly rise by 1.8-4C (3.2-7.2F) during this century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report.

Thanks to "positive feedback" in the Earth's climate system, it could even rise by 6.4C (11.5F). Temperature rises even at the middle of this scale would mean catastrophe.

Hundreds of millions of people would be forced from their homes by sea level rises, storms, floods and drought. And our planet's biodiversity would face the greatest extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago.

The situation is not beyond remedy. In 1997, the world took a significant step to controlling greenhouse gas emissions with the Kyoto Protocol.