Spurred by sunshine and warm temperatures, metro Detroit residents are getting a jump on assorted outdoor chores such as raking leaves, pruning shrubs and trees and mowing lawns.The article lists Madison Heights, Southfield, Sterling Heights, and Plymouth Township among the municipalities that have moved their yard pickup dates up. My town is not among them, as my bags of yard waste were not picked up on Friday. I'll have to wait until April for that to happen.
The increased activity has prompted several local municipalities to accelerate yard waste pickups in an effort to accommodate their industrious residents.
The unseasonably warm weather that persisted during the past winter has continued with the arrival of spring as record temperatures were set last week. Detroit Metro Airport recorded just 26 inches of snowfall this season -- well below the normal average of 39.5 inches by Thursday, according to Joseph Clark, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in White Lake Township.The record-breaking streak of warm days for Detroit in March has continued through today, extending the record by a full week. That's impressive. I just have to remind myself that weather isn't climate, but so far southeast Michigan has had a full year of extreme weather, even if some of the extremes have been pleasant.
The reduction in snowfall this past winter translated into a savings of approximately $1.5 million to Oakland County taxpayers, as far as road salt usage and overtime were concerned, according to Road Commission spokesman Craig Bryson.Of course, not everyone is happy, as you can read in Warm weather is headache for Michigan asparagus farms. The same concerns about a potential frost damaging early sprouting crops are also worrying fruit growers in the state.
I know I promised a retrospective post yesterday. Don't worry, I'm working on it and will post it tonight or tomorrow.I've decided to make this a multi-part post spread over the rest of the month. Today's installment features an overview of the statistics and the first part of a series reflecting upon the most popular posts from the past twelve months.
I'm surprised you didn't write about The Rapture as a non-event the news media would rather report on than our real problems. I did, as I thought a blog about the collapse of civilization would be remiss if it didn't have something to say about the supposed beginning of the end of the world. I guess you didn't agree. However, we might agree on the following:That comment was just about as long as the post itself. Speaking of which, this entry was the most successful of several where promising Kunstler's readers a link to an article in the New York Times got their attention--567 pages views worth, the most of any single referring page. There are at three others on this list.
No supernatural causes will be needed to bring about the collapse of civilization; the interaction of human behavior with limited resources can do that all by themselves. That end will be completely natural, not supernatural.As for managing contraction, the New York Times reported on the Detroit suburb of Troy facing that issue. I blogged about it on Crazy Eddie's Motie News, where I have a link to the original article. It's a sign that contraction is hitting even the most well-off areas.
Google marked the vernal equinox, or the first day of Spring, using a doodle based on a design by Marimekko, the the Finnish textile company famous for its bright, bold prints.If there's an event worth celebrating, it will have a Google doodle--eventually. At least the Vernal Equinox has one now.
Across much of the United States, this has been an unusually mild winter, especially for those living east of the Mississippi. Not a few people have noted that spring seems to have come early this year. Of course, in a meteorological sense that could be true, but in 2012 it will also be true in an astronomical sense as well, because this year spring will make its earliest arrival since the late 19th century: 1896, to be exact.The Vernal Equinox arrrived at 1:14 A.M. E.D.T. today, which meant that it arrived during the night of March 19th from Mountain Time Zone west to the International Date Line. That is incredibly early. So, any of the groundhogs that predicted an early spring in the eastern U.S. would have had the odds on their side.
Read the rest of the article on HuffPo (or Space.com if you can find it; I couldn't). Between it and The Science of Today's Spring Equinox, which was originally from LiveScience but is also on Space.com (are the articles playing musical chairs today?), one can get a good understanding of the history and significance of today.
- A year is not an even number of days, and neither are the seasons. To try to achieve a value as close as possible to the exact length of the year, our Gregorian Calendar was constructed to give a close approximation to the tropical year, which is the actual length of time it takes for Earth to complete one orbit around the sun. It eliminates leap days in century years not evenly divisible by 400, such 1700, 1800 and 2100, and millennium years that are divisible by 4000, such as 8000 and 12000.
- Another reason is that Earth's elliptical orbit is changing its orientation relative to the sun (it skews), which causes Earth's axis to constantly point in a different direction, called precession. Since the seasons are defined as beginning at strict 90-degree intervals, these positional changes affect the time Earth reaches each 90-degree location in its orbit around the sun.
- The pull of gravity from the other planets also affects the location of Earth in its orbit.
Metro Detroit is expected to tie a record Monday for the longest stretch of days reaching the 60s this month, and by the end of the week, that record is expected to be shattered.The record for above 60 degree days should be matched today (Monday), broken Tuesday, and be set on Thursday. All of those days are forecast to be above 70. In fact, both Tuesday and Wednesday should set new records for their dates. If I recall what I heard on the Weather Channel on Sunday, the record temperature for the next three days is about 76 degrees F. Tuesday is predicted to be 79 and Wednesday is 78.
Today marks the eighth consecutive day in March that temperatures have reached at least 60 degrees, one short of the record set in 1945, National Weather Service Meteorologist Rachel Kulik said from the office in White Lake Township Today.
Temperatures have reached 75 degrees today at Detroit Metro Airport, she said.
According to the National Weather Service office in White Lake Township, Detroit broke a record for the highest temperature for March 18.
The old record, set in 1903, was 72 degrees, said Phil Kurimski, a meteorologist with the weather service.
The National Weather Service will determine today whether a tornado hit Midland County overnight, as storms move east for sunshine and warm temperatures in metro Detroit.No tornadoes here in Oakland County, but the storm did produce a strong thunderstorm with heavy rain about 10:30 PM. It was enough to interfere with reception of the satellite TV at my house. I can put up with the inconvenience so long as worse weather avoids me and nice weather awaits.
Trees and wires were knocked down and some buildings damaged in Coleman, Michigan, in Midland County overnight, meteorologist Dave Gurney said today from the agency's White Lake Township office.
"There’s a little damage up in Midland county, but not down around these parts," Gurney said. "We’re going to do a storm survey for one portion of the damage to see if it was straight-line wind or a little tornado."
Today, expect warm sunshine with temperatures climbing to an unseasonably warm 60 to 65 degrees, Gurney said.The rest of the week will also be just as unseasonably warm. I'm enjoying it, but not everyone is.
"It's above normally, certainly," Gurney said. "Normal high temperature for this time of year is 40, 45 during the day. So we’re running 15 to 20 degrees above normal."
The mild winter has affected not just the ski resorts and snowmobile dealerships, but also the tertiary businesses that depend on cold and snow to thrive. They include shoeshines, pizzerias, hot chocolate companies, and a whole slew of businesses that rely on a real winter for real dollars.I have to say this has been the mildest winter since I moved here from California in 1989. May the summer not be as hot as the winter was mild.
It's a gorgeous night, so [my wife] and I have the heat off and the windows open, enjoying the warm breeze from the south.As for how warm, I'll let the Detroit Free Press tell you.
It won't be a record-setter, but temperatures today are expected to soar to 65 degrees in metro Detroit, according to the National Weather Service.Yeah, it's nice, but it's not going to last until tomorrow. As for what's in store, here's the latest weather report from WOOD-TV, which looks at space weather in addition to the forecast for the western half of the state.
The record high for March 7 at Metro Airport is 76 degrees, set in 2000, meteorologist Matt Mosteiko said today from the agency's office in White Lake Township. And the record low is a frigid 2 degrees, set in 1913. The normal high is 42 degrees, and low is 26, he added.
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It's expected to be breezy and partly cloudy with peeks of sunshine today, with the temperature peaking at about 2 p.m. Rain is expected to move into the region around midnight, with an overnight low of 52 and an 80% chance of precipitation, Mosteiko said.
Some cooler weather will move in before we get warm again, Bill Steffen says. And a magnificent solar storm.The weather is not returning to the deep freeze again, but will warm up after turning merely cooler. So far, it looks like I was right to believe Staten Island Chuck over Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day.
James Howard Kunstler has no love for flashy, contemporary architecture. "These redundant monumental gestures are the last gasps of the cheap energy fiesta," he writes on his "Eyesore of the Month" page of his website, which regularly skewers images of skyscrapers, poor urban planning and futuristic buildings. "The closer we get to the end, the more soulless they get."I filed the above under "Energy" but I could just as easily have filed it under "Science, Space, Environment, Health, and Energy Policy," "Science Writing and Reporting," or "Non-Science Research." In any event, it's a small world!
Kunstler is author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, and The Long Emergency, among other books, which critique and offer solutions to America's "tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside," symbols of disregard, he says, for an impending energy crisis.
In the keynote address of a spring semester lecture series on "Vermont's Energy Future," co-sponsored by the Center for Research on Vermont and the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, Kunstler will speak on "The End of Cheap Energy," Wednesday, March 14 at 7:30 p.m. in the Davis Center's Silver Maple Ballroom.
In this lecture, Kunstler will lay out a vision of a world dependent on cheap energy and approaching a devastating turning point that will return the nation to a place where community matters, where neighbors gather and people build places they value.
But this is not a column about traffic — per se.Friedman then goes on to explain how the last paragraph I quoted forms the message of two books, “The Sixth Wave: How to Succeed in a Resource Limited World” by James Bradfield Moody and Bianca Nogrady and “Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era” by Avory Lovins. Despite what I think of Friedman on foreign policy and partisan politics, which isn't much, I agree with him here. I highly recommend reading this column.
This is a column about energy and environment and why we must not let the poisonous debate about climate change so tie us in knots that we cannot have any energy policy at all, particularly one focused on developing much more efficient use of resources, through better designs and systems. If you are so reckless as to dismiss all climate science as a hoax, and do not accept the data that our planet is getting hotter and the oceans rising, I can’t help you. That’s between you and your beach house — and your kids, whose future you’re imperiling.
But you better believe this: The planet is getting flatter and more crowded. There will be two billion more people here by 2050, and they will all want to live and drive just like us. And when they do, there is going to be one monster traffic jam and pollution cloud, unless we learn how to get more mobility, lighting, heating and cooling from less energy and with less waste — with so many more people. We can’t let the climate wars continue to derail efforts to have an energy policy that puts in place rising efficiency standards, for buildings, windows, traffic, housing, packaging and appliances, that will drive innovation — which is our strength — in what has to be the next great global industry: energy and resource efficiency.
According to the latest figures from the Secretary of State, Romney won the Republican primary with 41.07% of the 996,126 votes cast in the G.O.P. side of the race, Santorum came in second with 37.86%, Paul placed third with 11.62%, and Gingrich finished out of the money with 6.53%. Despite Romney's clear victory in the statewide popular vote, he and Santorum split the state's delegates to the Republican National Convention evenly, at least according to the preliminary results on the Michigan Republican Party's web page for the primary. Romney and Santorum each won seven congressional districts, earning 14 delegates apiece, and split the two delegates determined by the statewide vote, for a total of 15 delegates for each candidate.It turns out that the Michigan Republican Party decided to allocate both at-large delegates to Romney. Chuck Stokes of WXYZ-TV explains.
The state Republican Party has set the delegates that will be awarded, based on the results of Tuesday's primary.As Stokes explains, Romney now has 16 delegates, while Santorum has 14, so the delegates are no longer evenly split. On the one hand, that's a reasonable result given the outcome of the vote. On the other, it wasn't what the candidates or the media, including me, believed would happen given how their understanding of the rules. I'll let the Detroit Free Press explain.
The vote came despite the party’s rules that the two at-large delegates are supposed to be awarded on a proportional basis based on the statewide popular vote.This decision didn't sit well with two members of the committee, one of whom spoke to the Detroit Free Press about it.
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Saul Anuzis, a member of the credentials committee, said the party’s rules were passed in early February to award the two at-large delegates to the statewide winner, but that a memo sent, in error, to the candidates’ campaigns said the delegates would be distributed proportionately.
“While we regret the error in the memo, it does not change what was voted on by the committee,” Anuzis said. “This is much to do about nothing.”
Former Attorney General Mike Cox is a supporter of Romney and even acted as a surrogate for the candidate on several occasions during the last three weeks.This is the latest episode in a long-running comedy of errors in the Republican primaries and caucuses. I'll let Taegan Goddard of Political Wire sum it up.
But Wednesday night’s 4-2 vote to award the two at-large delegates to Romney didn’t pass the smell test for Cox.
“I have this crazy idea that you follow the rules,” Cox said. “I’d love to give the at-large delegates to Mitt Romney, but our rules provide for strict apportionment.”
The Republican presidential campaign has been one of the sloppiest in memory.The question he asked was "Why so sloppy?" The answers range from simple incompetence to lack of belief in democracy. I'm not going to pick one. Instead, I'll just repeat that I am glad I am no longer a Republican!
Mitt Romney was declared the winner in Iowa until several days later miscounted votes were "found" which put Rick Santorum ahead. Romney was named the victor in Maine without all caucus votes counted because they were "lost" in someone's email. Now, the Michigan delegate count was changed two days after the primary either due to sloppiness, ambiguity in the rules or a backroom power play.
It sure makes you wonder.
So what is the NaBloPoMo theme of the month?This will be easy, as I blog about weather regularly. Even easier, I have multiple sources for it. WXYZ on YouTube has frequent if irregular local weather features, but is very good for any kind of extreme event. WOOD-TV 8 posts their weather reports reliably on their YouTube channel at least once a day, if not more. If all else fails, there are Next Media Animation's Weather Girls. Besides, if the weather is boring, there is always the "whether." Choices and chances about the present and future abound! The big problem will be posting every day, not finding something to post about.
WHETHER
It's actually whether... and it's weather... since both words fit with the season. March is a transitional month, bringing either warmer weather for the northern hemisphere or colder air for those down south. Being transitional means that there are a lot of whethers to your day: whether to wear a coat or not, whether to spend your time outside or in front of the computer, or whether to sign up for these summer/winter plans or that.
Some people love the open possibilities inherent in the word "whether" and others find the lack of concreteness terrifying. Whichever way you swing, this is a great month to explore why you feel the way you do; if you embrace or run screaming from the "whethers" of life.
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NaBloPoMo is what you make of it. At its core, all you need to do is post daily on your blog. The point of NaBloPoMo is not to be restricted by the theme, but instead to either take it or leave it. If you'll do better blogging every day based on what's happening in your world, throw aside the daily prompts.
So start thinking about how you feel about the uncertainty of whether.
