etudiant

Hi cocoland, Your map shows the heaviest snows in the north of China, past around Harbin. The Harbin ice festival is famous, so it is obviously cold, but where does the moisture come from? The prevailing winds seem to be coming from the Gobi in Mongolia, a pretty dry area afaik. What am I missing?

Tried again this evening, one brief glimpse thanks to a break in the clouds, no time for a scope view, but they are already well apart. Hoping for clearer skies later tonight.

Skunked by a wall of clouds over the south western horizon, looking from the Central Park Reservoir. Guess I have to wait another 800 years.

Business opportunity!! You were smart and early, time to cash in is now.

There was snow in Central Park this morning, although admittedly just individual flakes, so nothing measurable.

Field hospital in NE in January does not sound like fun. What does RI know that we don't?

Am at a loss as to why we remain so ignorant about the virus transmission. Do masks help or are they a delusion. No real answers, just CDC bafflegab, they may help we think.. We know that minks are pretty susceptible, so surely there could be tests on transmission using these test animals. Does anyone know what has been done?.

Think the problem is the larvae chew out the trees from the inside, so they are hard to reach. I don't think the adults do much eating, they focus on reproduction, so killing them requires a species specific virus or a very selective contact poison. Those are hard to come by.

These seating structures dramatically narrow the road, so most drivers slow down a lot. If the virus is ever healed, the congestion will be impressive. Maybe it's all a plot to promote mass transit??

Is there any value to the case numbers other than the obvious, to show that the virus is still here? It does seem that public policy needs to focus on things such as hospitalizations, where there is a possibly reasonable response. I'm baffled as to what the logical response is to a rising infection case number. Shut down the various public venues, restaurants, airports, train stations? Is the remedy not worse than the disease in these cases?

Think that is the secondary but more damaging effect of the virus. Kids lose the sense of personal obligation when there is no personal contact. Once lost, not so sure it is easily recaptured...

This is a very fine piece of work, reasoned and supported by historical evidence. It is work like this that gives hope that longer term weather forecasts can be achieved.

I thought the does were better eating, meat less rangy than that of the bucks.

Careful, we have a candidate vaccine, tested thus far only on healthy people 18-55. How well it is accepted by the older or more infirm who are most at risk remains tbd.

Agree that the hype about the Pfizer offering is silly, the testing was done on healthy adults (most of whom reported pain, chills and fevers, some severe, from the vaccine). who developed substantial antibody titers quite reliably with the vaccine. No tests as yet on the old or the infirm, nor how long the protection lasts. There is a good road ahead before this is ready for general use.

Let him who is without mistakes lead the posting. We learn a whole lot more from the edge forecasts, as long as they are well articulated, not just plopped on the boards. If they fail miserably, we can learn what was mistaken. By contrast, we don't learn much from a sort of OK forecast, even if it seems closer to what actually happened.

Don't they also eat tin cans? Hoping for an organic trash processor.

You raise a valid concern. The Asian testing regimes all have as a common basis the ability of the authorities to track all phone carriers, indefinitely. That is quite unacceptable to many Americans, even as they blithely allow Google and others to monitor their location along with every keystroke they make. Absent the Asian approach, it seems that Sweden has chosen a viable alternative, which is to prevent mass gatherings which would generate huge surges in caseload, but keep business as usual mostly, letting the health services cope with the victims. That minimizes the toll fairly effectively while also limiting the catastrophic economic damage generated by lockdowns. I just wonder how Dr Fauci reconciles his push for extensive lockdowns with his Hippocratic oath: to above all, do no harm. The lockdowns have not really helped, but they have certainly ruined many and made us all much more indebted, with no visible benefit.

What I do not understand is the incoherent nature of the approach in the US and elsewhere in Europe. What is the purpose of testing people other than to allow people who are infected to isolate themselves. Yet it still takes days to get a result, so a good spread to those around the person can be confidently expected and contact tracing is hopeless. Bill Gates, who is no dummy, has called our testing useless, perhaps for that reason, but it continues unchanged. That is very different from the approach followed in Taiwan and South Korea, where the virus has been reasonably contained. Frequent testing and fast tracking appear to work. But neither Europe nor the US appear interested in that course. Perhaps there is an acceptance that the virus is not containable, much as the Swedish health authorities recognized earlier.

I've no idea whether the CDC was prohibited from allowing other countries or industry tests, but they failed to provide a working test themselves because their material was contaminated. That is a failure which the CDC owns, not the White House or others. Likewise, the Fauci flip flops on masks did not serve the country well. I recognize Dr Fauci's long service, but in this case, I think he and his organization failed abysmally. He had lots of access to the microphone, if he felt pressured, he had the power to push back, but he never did.

That seems seriously silly. We should be disappointed by the abject failure of the CDC and of Dr Fauci, as well of Trump if he was dumb enough to believe them. The CDC and Dr Fauci were actively harmful to the efforts to curb this epidemic. Specifically, during the first 3 months of 2020, when there was still a slim chance of controlling the epidemic, they insisted that only their own test be allowed, rejecting any industry or foreign options. Of course their own test was slow and defective, which prevented any prospect of curbing the outbreak. Since then, Dr Fauci has added to his failures by his flip flops on masks. from 'we don't need them' to ' we all need to wear them'. Credibility is precious and imho neither the CDC nor Dr Fauci deserve any in light of their performance this year.

The only societies that have managed to curb this pandemic have been Asian. No Western nation has developed an effective response in the 9 months of grace we were given.. Now with winter coming and the case load again soaring, much as happened during the Spanish Flu, the Western politicians only idea is another lockdown, ruining yet wider swaths of the societies they are leading. Did 75 years of following US leadership make all these countries stupid?

Think the 1821 hurricane had a bigger storm surge than Sandy and is probably the strongest in recorded times. However, Wikipedia notes that there was a stronger storm around 1300+/-, based on evidence from diggings. The weather will always confound our expectations, think of Dorian glued in place for days and then transpose that to our NJ/NY/ Ct corner of the world.

Sadly very much true, for instance some of the best old growth forests in Poland, notably the Białowieża Forest, have been decimated. An outbreak of bark beetles provided the pretext for wholesale logging. The pellets were sold to the UK subsidized 'green power' stations. Similar deals were implemented elsewhere along the Baltic.

Maybe save the lettuce at least with a blanketed cold frame? Although 24 degrees is tough.