Guess who has his late April allergies more than a month early? I tried to look up the pollen count index but the internet looks all blurry through my swollen eyes.
In other news I hear that this year is the 100th anniversary Cherry Blossom Festival in DC. Better get there fast.
Fox 5 News reported Wednesday the expected peak bloom is happening mid to late March this year, when it normally happens in the first part of April.
As a result, if you would love to take in the beauty of the blossoms this year, you will need to head downtown as early as next week — between Tuesday, March 20, and Friday March 23 — when 70 percent of the blossoms are expected to bloom.
But it snowed somewhere so, you know, Al Gore is fat.
Open thread.
Raven
The fucking pine pollen will be here soon!
capt
We had a little snow here in ABQ just two days ago and might get a little over the weekend. So there.
John Cole
Why do you hate America?
J
Am also a total martyr to hay fever in Pgh. Actually, owing to the mold I think, I didn’t even have my usual winter break from the dread allergies.
Uggh!
beltane
It’s supposed to go up to 75 degrees in northern Vermont on Monday. Our non-winter has come to an end before it ever began. I like the warm weather but there is something scary about temperatures that are consistently 20 degrees or more above normal.
Citizen_X
Unprecedented early-year heat smashes all-time records in Midwest.
Fwiffo
Cities across the Midwest are setting record temperatures 30+ degrees above normal. Traverse City, MI was 42 degrees above normal yesterday.
trollhattan
Y’all like this, right? Plenty more where that came from.
Sorry about Texas, but that’s part of the package.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
My girlfriend said her allergies were acting up last weekend. In Chicago in early March.
We’re set for 2 weeks of 70-80F weather here in Chicago. It’s chilly tonight but will be right back up in the high 70s / low 80s this weekend.
piratedan
if only Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet, then we would never know the myth that is global warming….
MikeJ
@capt: Hell, we had a little snow a few days ago in Seattle.
Arm The Homeless
North Kackalack has friggin’ dogwoods, and the ubiquitous yellow oak scum.
A squirrel jumped on a transformer this afternoon. Since the city was flying the ghetto bird for a half hour before, the boom was a bit disconcerting.
The linemen are going to order a squirrel-bar for the block. I love our municipal utility.
Citizen_X
Ah, I ran out of time to edit my comment above. So here:
Scroll down to “Why the record early-season warmth?” for an explanation. It’s not all global warming, but,
ETA: From the same link.
WyldPirate
@Raven:
Odd. I live probably 150 mi North of you in SE NC and there was a nasty yellow haze of pine pollen hanging in the air here today. It was just brutal trying to breathe today.
Maybe it’s an elevation tree species difference.
Raven
@WyldPirate: Huh, well, maybe it has to do with a couple of pretty heavy rains we had recently. I know one front moved from the ne to se and didn’t go your way.
birthmarker
82 here yesterday. It has been warm all week and is going to be warm for the next week. (Up to mid 80s.)
Usually March in North Alabama is cold and wet, really one of the more unpleasant months because you are so tired of it by then. This year the daffodils and Bradford pears are done and the dogwoods are starting to bloom. I’ve seen blooming azeleas, though mine aren’t blooming yet.
Today it seemed that you could almost see the leaves growing on the hickorys and the oaks. Every time I went out, more green.
We’ve already used the A/C a couple of times in the evenings, just because the house was so stuffy.
AA+ Bonds
TODAY ON A BLOO BLOO BLOO FOXNEWS.COM
Roger Ailes Doubles Down On Fox News Latino
AND
Anti-abortion freakshow Randall Terry wins his very own Democratic delegate!
Raven
@birthmarker: Our bradford is green already.
TheOtherWA
My super special digital cable box died yesterday, so I took it to get a new one. I got the better box, that allows me to get hd channels, and pay an extra ten bucks a month. Now what I want to know is, what the hell took me so long?
Oh, that’s right. I’m cheap.
But those hd channels shure are purty.
Chuck Butcher
Forties and rain, typical March here. It should just miss snowing tonight or it will slush.
Right on through the weekend.
kdaug
We hit 112 last year. Expect ~115 this time.
The best part about SXSW is the yahoos who come down and say “Austin is awesome! I’m moving down!”.
Then, in July, when their flip-flops are melting to the pavement, we all get to enjoy the sudden glut of properties on the market.
Hee.
TheOtherWA
Cold and rainy here in the nw. 40’s to low 50’s during the day, high 30’s at night.
Martin
Could not watch Inhofe on Maddow. Fucktard calls scientific journals ‘liberal publications’.
Police helicopter circling the house. That’s different.
AA+ Bonds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=rVXpRvVUaVM
Chuck Butcher
@Martin:
I also switched channels, watching RM be polite to that jackass might have caused serious mental… issues.
trollhattan
@Martin:
If there’s a more pure, distilled threat to humanity than Jim Inhofe I can’t name him/her.
David Koch
The Obama film premiered a couple hours ago:
http://youtu.be/2POembdArVo
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
Al Gore is a Soros commie. There, I said it. Somebody had to besides Big Journo.
gnomedad
@Citizen_X:
FTA:
@Martin:
C’mon, asteroid!
Comrade Mary
I’m in Toronto. This year, my neighbours were seeing their crocuses in FEBRUARY, and my tulips started coming up at the beginning of this month instead of April. Fuck it, I’m starting my tomatoes Easter Monday instead of Victoria Day.
The menz don’t know, but the little gardeners, they understand.
Anne Laurie
@J:
Same here, north of Boston. Also, for the first time in the twenty years we’ve lived here, the dogs picked up fleas. Our vet says when she moved from California to New England, she figured she’d be trading year-round flea problems for nine months of deer (& dog) ticks, but this winter both vermin varieties never stopped proliferating.
redshirt
algore flies in jets, I hear prithee tell.
capt
@John Cole: Hate allergies – even the kitties get the sneezers here. UGH!
AA+ Bonds
What really happened at Goldman Sachs
WyldPirate
@Martin:
Couldn’t agree more. Pig-ignorant, demagoging fuckwit.
RossInDetroit
Lightning al around for the last few hours but no rain yet. Was almost unpleasantly warm today. Chipmunks raiding the bird feeder and the prickly pear cactus out front is perking up. Before long the orange cones of pavement repair season will appear, announcing the arrival of Spring.
Villago Delenda Est
@Citizen_X:
Further proof that global climate change, due to warming, is a total hoax. A complete and total hoax.
Also, that Flake woman is a $500 a night hooker. Rush told me so!
tofubo
yestiddy here in chicago, record high temp, today maybe also, too, and possibly for the next eight days, what global climate change ??
jwb
Called up Time Warner and cut the cable today. Realized we hadn’t turned on the TV to watch television since the Super Bowl (we do watch lots of DVDs), and even March Madness holds no attraction this year.
General Stuck (Bravo Nope Zero)
@redshirt:
Al Gore’s carbon foot print is so big, he could stomp Limbaugh into pixie dust with his little piggy.
Anne Laurie
@birthmarker:
I miss dogwoods — around here they’ve all succumbed to the bronze anthracnose carried by invading beetles. I was worried it was so unnaturally warm that my daffodils might not bloom, but they’re starting to come up now (just about on schedule, I think they respond to daylight more than temperature). Still nervous about my mini-roses, though; I mulched the raised bed, but with effectively no snow to insulate them, I’m crossing my fingers the roots didn’t thaw-and-freeze once too often.
Villago Delenda Est
@Martin:
Inhofe has been called the stupidest person in the United States Senate.
Given the crop of cretins on the GOP side of the aisle, that’s saying something.
beltane
@Comrade Mary: I don’t know what to do about the garden this year. This is around the time I start my vegetables inside, and every other year but this year we’re still looking at a thick snow pack outside. What if all the fruit trees break bud and we get a spell of hard freezes? I don’t know what to plan for with weather like this, and I hate to think of what people who farm for a living as opposed to gardening for supplemental food are going through right now.
Maybe if more Americans ventured out of their comfy little climate controlled bubbles they’d also be alarmed by this but it would take a major power outage to get them to do this.
RossInDetroit
It’s 70 degrees here in Detroit at 10:30 at night in mid-March. Supposed to hit 80 on Saturday. Yard work here I come.
trollhattan
@Villago Delenda Est:
It needs to be added Santorum’s senate seat loss opened up the competition. He had a stone lock on the title.
TheOtherWA
Inhofe got a bit uptiht when Rachel asked him about his book. He wrote about her and something she said on her show in Dec 2009. It seems he took it out of context, so RM played that portion of her show. It was about the Xian ministers going to Uganda and promoting hatred of the gays and the devastating results those efforts produced. Inhofe was stammering, and claimed he knew nothing about those things, and Doug Coe is a wonderful man and Rachel should have him on her show. She said she’d love to, if only he return her calls.
Inhofe is a clown, but that was worth watching.
Mnemosyne
Contrariwise, it’s been chilly here in So Cal, barely breaking 70. We’re supposed to get major rain this weekend. It’s kinda freaky, actually.
PeakVT
@TheOtherWA: By clown you mean lying sack of shit, right?
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@David Koch:
That was pretty damn good. But I’m an Chicago-style Obot. If I wasn’t so in the tank I’d realize that he’s exactly the same as Bush.
David Koch
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: oNLY rON pAUL aND gLENN tELL dA tROOOTH
moderateindy
Jeebus people, do you not understand the difference between climate change and weather? Lots of warm weather around the country is as meaningless as the inevitable cold snap places will face in June. Climate change, or global warming science is not based on anecdotal evidence. The extra energy in the atmosphere from the additional heat might have an affect on things like isolated storms being stronger, it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden every summer will be a lot hotter, or winter milder. Proffering the great weather as proof of global warming simply makes you sound like a simpleton, wait that’s too kind, it makes you sound like a Republican. Climate science is quite a bit more than just taking temperatures, and global warming is a hell of a lot more intricate than noticing that it’s unseasonably warm
handy
@moderateindy:
You might want to get your snark meter adjusted.
Citizen_X
@moderateindy: Please, read teh fuching link. You’re only partly right.
RS
I live on Saginaw Bay in Michigan’s thumb. It’s a stopover for migrating waterfowl. When we moved here over 20 years ago, we didn’t see the Tundra Swans on their way to the Arctic from the southeastern US until April. Now they’re here the first and second weeks of March.
S. cerevisiae
@RS: One of the huge problems with climate change is that it is happening so rapidly and migratory species that depend on insect hatches are no longer matching up with each other. We broke the fucking planet – well, the planet will eventually find a new equilibrium but from a human perspective the ride will not be fun.
moderateindy
@Citizen_X:
I realize that global warming might be part of why we are having this warm snap, but it may have absolutely squat to do with it as well. Honestly, the evidence is way too sketchy to go around saying the current weather is proof of global warming. If you were to talk to a climate scientist and present him with the theory from the link I’m fairly sure he would say something akin to; well its certainly possible that the extra energy in the atmosphere could add to such an event, but that’s a long way from proving anything.
By the way did you read your own link carefully? After listing the three reasons that are responsible for the weather, the article goes on to say that the idea that were having this event because of climate change comes to us as a theory about the increased odds of having such heat events by a single professor in an unpublished paper. Not exactly something I would throw around in the same sentence with words like fact or evidence, it would fit better with terms like conjecture.
And honestly if this were the result of global warming and was indicative of what we could expect every year then who would care, and how would you convince anyone but ski lodge owners that global warming was bad?
Science isn’t worth crap if you concentrate on the anecdotal instead of cumulative evidence.
I’m a little touchy on this thing because of the times I have heard Conservatives declare that a summer cold snap or a huge winter storm proves there is no global warming. Thus I don’t give a pass to those on the left that use the same stupid argument. All it shows is that they don’t have an even rudimentary understanding of what climate change aka. global warming is.
Nethead Jay
@Martin: I get Maddow as a podcast. I can’t remember the last time I had to use the fast forward button, but for parts of the Inhofe interview it was necessary. The man is vile and disgusting.
alex milstein
I live in Los Angeles, where I try to swim every weekend year-round in the outdoor public pools in my community. But every year there’s usually a several week long period beginning in late December and running through February, when it’s just too darn cold to handle the walk between the locker room and the pool, when you’re wet from the shower or the pool. Not this year. I haven’t missed a weekend. And the refrain heard from most of the swimmers when we meet: “Wow, it feels like it’s summer already!”
Barry
Our blooming is three or four weeks late here in Seattle. This winter was unusual in that we got actual freezing cold weather (not ground-freezing, but temps down to 28-30 at night) a lot more than usual. Crocuses didn’t bloom until the beginning of March and the ornamental plums that normally start on President’s Day, only just bloomed.
Cold places get milder winters, mild places get colder winters, what does it mean?