Posted on 12/28/2010 6:36:17 AM PST by drpix
New Yorkers endured a crippled transit system, completely overwhelmed emergency responders and unpassable roadways yesterday after one of the city's worst blizzards ever dumped a staggering 20 inches of snow.
Abandoned vehicles and buses littered highways and main drags -- and ambulances couldn't make it out to calls that stacked up well past 1,000 at one point. Virtually all modes of transportation -- from air travel to the subways -- left people stranded.
--clip--
Still, he tried to convince the public all was well....
"This city is going on. It's a day like every other day," Bloomberg said, suggesting people go out and shop or take in a Broadway show. "There's no reason [for] everybody to panic."
Anyone who spent time outside would disagree.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
A New York City Department of Parks and Recreation truck plows the sidewalk outside a
school on the east side of Manhattan in New York after a blizzard dropped 18 to 20 inches
of snow in the area
Schools in Manhattan may be closed this entire week, but Bloomberg still has them cleared before streets in the other boroughs.
Government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite
Same thing happened to Lindsay...who also had ideas of going from Mayor to the WH
Sounds like he needs a Janet Napolitano type to come out and reassure everyone that things are working the way they should.
Bloomberg for POTUS??? Now that is really delusional thinking. I say get him right over to Bellevue for observation & evaluation.
....the POS hasn’t handled any crisis well since he was illegally reelected.
Yup, and that blizzard killed ALL his future political ambitions. :)
Its a well worn political trick...claim to be ‘standing up for the little guy’ and complain that City Hall didn’t do the impossible.
Normally I don’t like it...but if it kills Bloomer’s political career, I’ll live with it.
From your article: “..David Seid of Ossining: ..We’ve had snow before. They used to plow. Why aren’t they ready for this?” ...Nina Hustus, 51, ..was supposed to fly to Dallas yesterday. “I’m extremely confused as to why the airlines handled things so poorly. Everyone knew this was coming.”
The transit and snow-cleanup problems led to immediate calls for hearings and inquiries from city officials.”
I suggest the answer to these “crippling problems” will be found when we root out the incompetent politicians who have committed themselves to the warmist orthodoxy, and actually believed Algore and his politicized scientist friends when they said, “the earth has a fever, everything is melting and we probably won’t see any more winters with snow anymore.”
Britain, and other European countries are also suffering the consequences of buying into the warmist delusion. Read on:
The Green Hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain
The Met Office’s commitment to warmist orthodoxy means it drastically underestimates the chances of a big freeze
By Christopher Booker 8:00AM GMT 26 Dec 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8223165/The-green-hijack-of-the-Met-Office-is-crippling-Britain.html
172 Comments
By far the biggest story of recent days, of course, has been the astonishing chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row. We all know the disaster stories – thousands of motorists trapped for hours on paralysed motorways, days of misery at Heathrow, rail passengers marooned in unheated carriages for up to 17 hours. But central to all this – as the cry goes up: “Why wasn’t Britain better prepared?” – has been the bizarre role of the Met Office.
We might start with the strange affair of the Quarmby Review. Shortly after Philip Hammond became Transport Secretary last May, he commissioned David Quarmby, a former head of the Strategic Rail Authority, to look into how we might avoid a repeat of last winter’s disruption. In July and again in October, Mr Quarmby produced two reports on “The Resilience of England’s Transport System in Winter”; and at the start of this month, after our first major snowfall, Mr Quarmby and two colleagues were asked to produce an “audit” of their earlier findings.
The essence of their message was that they had consulted the Met Office, which advised them that, despite two harsh winters in succession, these were “random events”, the chances of which, after our long previous run of mild winters, were only 20 to one. Similarly, they were told in the summer, the odds against a third such winter were still only 20 to one. So it might not be wise to spend billions of pounds preparing for another “random event”, when its likelihood was so small. Following this logic, if the odds against a hard winter two years ago were only 20 to one, it might have been thought that the odds against a third such “random event” were not 20 to one but 20 x 20 x 20, or 8,000 to one.
What seems completely to have passed Mr Quarmby by, however, is the fact that in these past three years the Met Office’s forecasting record has become a national joke.
Ever since it predicted a summer warmer and drier than average in 2007 – followed by some of the worst floods in living memory – its forecasts have been so unerringly wrong that even the chief adviser to our Transport Secretary might have noticed.
The Met Office’s forecasts of warmer-than-average summers and winters have been so consistently at 180 degrees to the truth that, earlier this year, it conceded that it was dropping seasonal forecasting. Hence, last week, the Met Office issued a categorical denial to the Global Warming Policy Foundation that it had made any forecast for this winter.
Immediately, however, several blogs, led by Autonomous Mind, produced evidence from the Met Office website that in October it did indeed publish a forecast for December, January and February. This indicated that they would be significantly warmer than last year, and that there was only “a very much smaller chance of average or below-average temperatures”.
So the Met Office has not only been caught out yet again getting it horribly wrong (always in the same direction), it was even prepared to deny it had said such a thing at all.
The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year – in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?
The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office “for Weather and Climate Change”.)
This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world’s most influential promoters of the warmist gospel.
He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year’s Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.
The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world’s climate in 100 years time.
They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow.
For 17 years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message – as when Dr David Viner of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that “within a few years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event”. (Last week, that article from 10 years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent’s website.)
But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary plunge in global temperatures of 0.7C, more than the net warming of the 20th century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North America “the winter from hell”. Even though temperatures did rise again, in the winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse.
The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 “for 1,000 years or more”. Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage “random event”, for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers’ Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)
The consequences of all this are profound.
Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud-cuckoo-land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system.
Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a “climate activist”, previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.
At one end of this colossal diversion of national resources, permeating every level of government, we have the hapless Mr Quarmby, who feels obliged to follow the Met Office and advise that the present freeze is a “random event” and calls for no special responses – with the results we see on every side. At the other, fixated by the same belief system, we have our Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, hoping we can somehow keep our lights on and our economy running by spending hundreds of billions of pounds on thousands more windmills.
More than once in the past week, as our power stations have been thrashed way beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so small that it has registered as 0 per cent. (See the website for the New Electricity Trading Arrangements: Google “neta electricity summary page”, and find the table of “source by fuel type”.)
At the heart of all this greenie make-believe that has our political class in its thrall has been the hijacking of the Met Office from its proper role.
It’s no longer just a national joke: it is turning into a national catastrophe.
Read the caption under the 1st picture in Comment-1. Sidewalks of closed schools in Manhattan plowed before vital streets in other boroughs?
The criticism is about the "Grey Poupon" Mayor's elitist priorities, and not about demands to do the impossible. Absent your own possibly elitist loyalties, your conscience need not be conflicted.
Fascinating read. We were not in our NYC home yesterday - we were in our suburban home absolutely snowed in. This is nothing new for Bloomberg - although, obviously, this was the worst storm in quite a while. Bloomberg - the nervous, hypochonriacal, drawfish mayor the city - loves to brag at the end of the winter how much money he saved by not spending the snow budget. And we NYers get stuck walking through miles and miles of snow, slush, black and white ice - a real treat watching the elderly handle the horror. My husband is attempting to go into NYC today. I can’t wait for his report.
How stupid is it to call for an ambulance when the snow has the entire city paralyzed???
Do people think those vehicles work like Snow Cats at the ski resorts????
“The criticism is about the “Grey Poupon” Mayor’s elitist priorities, and not about demands to do the impossible. Absent your own possibly elitist loyalties, your conscience need not be conflicted.”
I know exactly what this is - its politicians pandering to their core group of constituents, by complaining about city hall. Its a rabble rousing trick...any time there is a large snow, or power outage, or Katrina, etc., there will always be ankle biters trying to make a political name for themselves by criticizing the gubmint for ‘not doing enough’...which pre-supposes that government has the power to fight nature. Only the feeble minded fall for this trick...and I usually annoys me to no end. I was simply pointing out that I liked seeing it happen to Bloomberg....but I know how intellectually dishonest the complaints are.
Me elitist? Nope. But come on...before you jump on every bandwagon, at least acknowledge what you’re getting into.
I will bet that the rabble rousing complainers cited in the story are democrats, with long standing histories of complaints about invisible racism as their political platform. They probably have a little bit of ‘Manhattan always gets priority over the outer boroughs’ sprinkled in as well.
Just know who you’re getting into bed with, that’s all.
I couldn’t resist. Here is the link to the third generation Democrat politician who has levied his complaint against Bloomberg.
I love to see Bloomberg squirm; but, know whose wagon you are hitching onto, before calling me an elitist.
It was the 0bama weather machine.
Spoken like a true elitist. He's mayor of Manhattan . . well, a few Manhattan neighborhoods at least.
This sounds like Bilandic’s Chicago - 1979. History just repeatiung itself.
from Mayor to the WH
Or Blago from governor to president.
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