What is 18 years when thinking about time and global climate change? It's a blink of an eye! We're supposed to be experiencing "global warming" but this year has been pretty darn cold!

Well, it could be 30 years or more, but I wasn't here before then, and 30 years is used for most of the long term climatic averages. That pattern is more technically called an extra tropical cyclone for our own version of the "hurricane".

Global warming is when you take global averages. Climatic change and upheaval is when weather anomalies appearing where they're not supposed to and disappearing where they are supposed to.

So you meant you liked this happening to California, especially in your backyard?

Let us assume that earth is 4.5 Billion Earth Years Old, and let us try to proportionate that to an average life span of man, and let us be generous to assume as 100 years old. The idea here is to determine what the blink of an eye means to a geological time scale using the correct ratio and proportion.

There are 3.1536 billion seconds in 100 years, so that approcimately, each human second is proportionally equivalent to 1.43 earth years, if we proportion the life of 100 years to the age of earth of 4.5 Billion uears.

The blink of a human eye lasts one quarter second, so by proportion, it is 0.3567 earth years. The 18 earth years that I have stated is not by any stretch of proportion a blink of an eye in a geological time scale. That would be 12.61 second blink!!! Perhaps Kobe Bryant has scored 36 points when everyone blinked that long.

The above assumptions have been too generous. The last major global warming happened about 17 million years ago, and if we are to use that as our proportionate time scale to an average human life span, the blink of a human eye is only 0.00135 earth years, and the 18 earth years would be 3,339 human seconds by proportion. So the 18 years is far from the blink of an eye.

But I do hope that everyone's home is safe, your fences are secured, that you have tied down your trees, and have prepared long before. The storm will continue up to tomorrow afternoon before it dies down. Hoping the best or everyone.

Hi, Here's a link to accuweather.com. They're describing a severe winter storm, which we do get here in Calif. I was born in California and lived here all my life and we've certainly had every sort of weather known to man. It's been cold for July 4th fireworks shows, and 95 degrees at Christmas. You just never know here. You may be missing a zero or two or three on your long term climatic averages number, and there WAS weather before you lived here. No, we don't like it here and get hysterical here whenever we have to put on a sweater, lol. Just so you know, we also get heavy rains, floods, big waves, storms, earthquakes, smog, landslides, snowstorms, avalanches, lightening, high winds, heavy fog, heatwaves, firestorms, and cold spells, el ninos, la ninas, etc. None of it is anything new. Linda

Here is a link that might be useful: Accuweather info

I have seen numerous storms with similar pattern hit CA in past several years and I have been here less than 18 yrs, so it isn't new. Although it might get a little wild and windy sometimes and each storm seems to be new and different.

If you read what environmental experts say about the changes happening in weather etc to our planet, they have mostly stopped referring to it as global warming and now calling it climate change. The reason being is not all areas are warming. Some are having other results...islands being swallowed up in the pacific.

Hmmm, I'm still waiting for the rain to accumulate. Apparently this storm dumped most of its moisture into the Pacific. We were supposed to get 1.5" and instead the current total is 0.16" - barely more than a sprinkle! I'm trying to get my new plants watered in and Mother Nature is not cooperating, darn it.

Let us see who have lost their marbles. If my marbles are intact, it was the first time this winter that there were several widespread damages due to a "hurricane"-like weather pattern, aka, extra tropical cylcone that is loaded with moisture and sustained winds that hit us hard, that even until now, there are some areas being repaired for electrical connectivity. The only other widespread anomaly that has happened to create such a wide spread disaster aside from the non-cyclonic type winds are the deep freeze of winter 1990-91 when a lot of pipes broke all over the state.

There are many anomalous tornado-like damages here and there through the years but not as wide spread damages as the one we had experienced earlier this winter, if your memories are fresh to remember during the course of this winter, there was none like that for the past 18 years here that I have witnessed. The winds and rains were sustained, and it has the characteristic signature of extra-tropical cyclone to hit us. Many have the same shape, but they usually are toned down or smoothed out before touching inland California.

There were flooding, levee breaks, here and there, usually are not due to combination of sustained winds and rains together. Earthquake capital, shaking here and there and other tra-la-las.

Do you have any evidence or reference of sustained wind and rain in the Sacramento Valley that is comparable to the widespread damages earlier this winter? And how many years ago was it?

I was glad that there was a change in the pattern of the current weather that the sustained winds and rains were a lot lower than previously forecasted so that it did not match the one earlier in the season, otherwise it would have been as disastrous, and that's why the announcement.

But sustained strong winds and heavy rains that causes state of emergency declaration are nothing but ordinary events in the typhoon frequented areas of the Philippines. In here, we Californian typically scramble, have disastrous results, declare state of emergency because we are not accustomed to such events that are too ordinary in some places, proof that it is not common here, and happened only once in the last 18 years that I lived here. Show me proof of the same magnitude from the same type of weather event...

This is not a "hurricane." It is not a "hurricane type." It's raining, so now suddenly people are paying attention to things that happen nearly every winter and have for millennia. Corkscrew-like extra-tropical cyclones are common. Some of the rainy spells we've experienced in SoCal this winter were due to cutoff lows, which don't exhibit this pronounced corkscrew pattern. Global warming is a matter of long-term averages on a global scale. It doesn't mean you can't have a cold snap. An "average" implies variability. Some areas will be above average, some areas below. Not everybody can be above average all the time. This winter, California is "it" for below-average temperatures. But the trend is for gradually warmer, though the effect in California may not be as pronounced as other places. Just scanning climate data for L.A. back to 1905 (data exists back to the 1870s, but I don't have it at hand), it looks to me like L.A. is distinctly warmer now, particularly in the summer, than it was 100 years ago. But this may be partly (or entirely) due to "heat island effect," whereby urban centers tend to remain warmer than surrounding countryside. L.A. has experienced several orders of magnitude of growth in this period, streets paved, tall buildings built, adjacent rural areas developed and paved over, and that may explain the warming. The warming even survived the move of the official "downtown" L.A. weather station from Civic Center to a slightly cooler location (USC campus).

Severe weather happens.

Click on the link, then click on "The Disasters"

The timeline goes from 1950-98.

Here is a link that might be useful: disasters

The Disasters mentions high winds and storms, but not the tornados. A tornado touched down one year briefly here in Altadena, east of where I live. Another year I drove through a tornado going to work in South Central. The news that evening showed a whole side of an apartment building near downtown ripped off. Extreme everything is nothing new here.

We get small tornadoes almost every year during thunder storms. It usually happens out in farming areas up here in N CA. So far, the usual damage is a barn or other out-building. Some day, one will cause some real damage. We get warnings on the local radio stations and on the TV.

Wanda, great link! I remember my mom telling about in the early 50's the dam that was being built by the Army Corps of Engineers on the Kings River at Pine Flat, and that the coffer dam was taken out after strong storms caused the Kings River to flood, causing widespread flooding below the dam.

I remember the weather man talking about the "pineapple connection" and the subtropical storms that it would bring in to hit the California coast. They also talked about storms being lined up all the way to the Bering Sea and we would be hit with storm after storm those winters.

I also remember being told about the winter it snowed on January 23, 1962 in Selma, CA. Significant for me, as I was born on that day!

I think that we've become supersensitive about declaring "disasters" and the instantanious media that is available now enhances the effect tenfold. Used to be that you expected that the power might go out when there were storms, if so, you lit a candle and waited for PG&E to fix it, even if it took a couple hours.

Now, if the power is out 10 minutes, it's a unbelieveable occurance and everyone freaks out like it's the end of the world and calling it a disaster like never before seen!

In my 46 years in California, there has been a cyclical pattern of weather that has gone on since records have been kept. It's just that weather appears to affect us more because there are just more and more of us packed into the same spaces that were once wide open!

Elaine

JoeReal,

As has been pointed out by others. Until a new weather pattern becomes established, a one-off event isn't proof or even evidence of anything. Mid-latitude cyclones with superficial similarity to hurricanes (in satellite images) are common - that's the origin of most of our rain. No area of California north of Point Conception has ever even seen a tropical storm.

altadenamara,

Weak winter tornadoes are very common at lower elevations in cis-montane California.

I've posted this and similar before but here you go.

Ryan