Heavy Snow, followed by Rant

A small town on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario may have set the New York State record for the most snow in seven days: eleven feet.

Now, I grew up near the southern shore of Lake Ontario and we got plenty of lake effect snow, but we almost never got forecasts calling for two to four FEET of snow in a day, and never got repeated forecasts for same through the course of a week. The worst sound imaginable was the clanking of chained wheels and the scrape of the snowplow at 2AM, because you knew school was on the next day no matter what.

Interestingly the recent increase in lake temperatures has resulted in less freezing of the Great Lakes (Ontario, at least) with a corresponding increase in the amount of moisture available for lake effect snow. The latter will immediately be trumpeted by morons as "Global warming, huh? Then how come it's snowing so much?" These people are stupid and the plows should skip their houses until spring, at which point we send in the nutria. (Don't bother; they're here.)

The unfortunate term "global warming" has a multitude of implications. So it gets a bit warmer; how bad is that? If this winter is colder, then how can the globe be warming? Please re-read the last sentence of the previous paragraph, as it is late and I am lazy.

"Global climate change" is a much more accurate term given the effects of rising average temperatures, but "global warming," being roughly 30% shorter, makes for a cheaper nightly news graphic.