We Seem To Have Become Wimps

Sorry if that statement offends anyone, but indications are that it may be true. Dr. Roy Spencer, formerly a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites, posted a story on his website today about the “Historic Blizzard of 2015”–it actually ranked #41, or a weak “Category 2″. The article includes a chart showing the Blizzard of 2015 in comparison to the storm ranked Number 1, which occurred in March of 1993.

The article states:

The ranking is based upon societal impacts, so if the worst storm on Earth in the last 10,000 years hit where no one lived, it would not even rank.

So, the NESIS scale for Northeast snowstorms isn’t well suited for talking about climate change. It’s not clear that more snowstorms in recent decades aren’t just from a slight shift in the storm track bringing Northwest Atlantic winter storms (of which there are many…Greenland routinely gets clobbered) closer to New England.

As someone who lived in New England from 1967 to 2013, I was glad not to be there during snowstorm Juno. I would like to point out that this is the first year I remember naming snow storms. I was in Rhode Island for the Blizzard of ’78, and we never named it. There were 48 inches of snow in about a day and a half, and no one thought about naming the storm. We have become wimps.

My warmest thoughts go out to my friends in Massachusetts as they endure the weather expected over the next week. I think you should name the first sunny day “Fred.”