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When a February,
2006 nor'easter coated New York City with a relatively deep blanket of snow, headlines across America screamed: Record Breaking
Blizzard Slams New York!! CNN reported: "In Central Park...a record 26.9 inches of snow piled up Sunday, breaking the mark
of 26.4 inches in December 1947."
And the knee-jerk Bush White House responded
generously to the "crisis" - using your money.
The trouble is, the National Weather Service
was lying up a storm - a Big Government tempest of Biblical proportions. The truth was, the 2006 nor'easter was probably less
severe than the 1947 blizzard. And possibly a lot less.
But this case of inflationary snowfall totals
isn't the first. The same misreporting of storm severity happened here in Boston a few years ago when it was falsely reported
that our great blizzard of 1978 had been eclipsed
by the 2003 President's Day storm, which few Bostonians can
even recall - a mere few years after we "survived" it! Just like New York's 2006 storm, the Boston storm in '03 was nowhere
near as paralyzing as the '78 blizzard had been. But that didn't stop Republican Governor Mitt Romney from going, hat in hand,
to Washington, armed with bogus media reports of "shattered snowfall records," begging for federal taxpayer funding to help
his state "recover" from its "record" blizzard.
Cooking the snowfall books
But how can the
weather history books be lying? Well, the cooking of the books began back in 1996, when the federal government issued new
snow-measuring guidelines. The weathercrats in Washington decided that snow would be more accurately measured if it were done
in short intervals, a few inches at a time rather than in big chunks or when the storm is over. That may be true, but these
new guidelines are dramatically increasing official snow totals, as snowfalls of today don't have the same opportunity to
compress under their own weight or melt with temperature increases over time. Thus a 24-inch snowstorm today is roughly the
equivalent of a 17-inch storm of decades past. And the more snow that falls in a given storm, the greater the discrepancy
- and the more distorted the history books become!
Meteorologists afraid to blow the whistle; fear retribution
I contacted three prominent meteorologists from the Boston area while researching this issue. All three confirmed that the
storms being touted today as record breakers, including the New York and Boston storms, were in fact less severe than the
memorable storms they supposedly beat out. But none of the meteorologists I spoke with was eager to blow the whistle publicly.
Here is what one of them had to say in a private email correspondence:
(Today's snow) measurements are taken
every hour and added up, but they are supposed to be taken every 6 hours, and during those 6 hours, some settling occurs.
So, the every-6-hour measurements will yield smaller totals than the every-hour measurements. In the old days, it was always
done every 6 hours. So, I believe your point is well taken and accurate. However, good luck fighting the beuracracy...I've
tried, but I wind up in the uncomfortable position of putting my National Weather Service colleagues in a tough position if
I try to make this a public issue...you see, they are fine metorologists...the problem is their superiors in Washington.
So there we have it.
How will Big Government take advantage of its fudged snowfall tallies going
forward? My gloomy forecast...
It's time for America's taxpayers and business owners to batten down the hatches.
The new, inflationary snow-measuring guidelines have produced some rather astonishing weather statistics over the past decade.
In the northeastern U.S., for example, three of the top 7 blizzards of all time now appear to have occurred
just since 1996 (according to the new-fangled NESIS
snowstorm impact scale). And these ominous-sounding data, naturally, are being cited by tax-grubbing
opportunists as further evidence that new federal regulations are needed to stave off global warming. Thus I predict a
blizzard of new legislation to form over Congress - which won't be studied by anyone - and which will be filled to the brim
with pork and back-breaking regulations on American business. So get your shovels ready; it'll be getting mighty deep indeed
in the vicinity of Washington - unless we start Downsizing D.C..
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