OT What a Winter!

[GM]

Yeah, it's under the very '70s orange n' yellow hallway rug, so wouldn't have been visually obvious as a furnace when you were here.

Yeah, installing a 'replacement' valve requires I replace the pilot system, so this repair's parts cost is more than I paid for the whole furnace when it failed the first night of Snow Jam '82 (~$306 Vs ~$350), though of course there's inflation to consider. If I wanted to gamble on a used valve, they can be had for as little as $75 plus shipping with the caveat that there's no return policy. The upside is that the new pilot system doesn't require any manual lighting or stopping, it's done automatically via the thermostat setting, so less hassle and slightly less expensive to run.

Yeah, with the flex hoses available now I wouldn't bother with a new hard line adapter if I didn't already have some tubing/fittings left over from '82 and the flaring tool required.

AFA doing the conversion, it's easier to just lift it out of the floor and work on it in the hallway once all the plumbing is disconnected, but doing the shop roof fired up my sciatica to near complete immobilization of my left leg, so pretty much stuck in one room most of the time anyway.

GM

[Panomaniac]

I'll never forget how bad it can be, and will always have pity for those still in it. The poor and elderly in drafty old homes, ..

My mother was literally born in a log cabin. Not a fancy new "log home", either. No electricity, no phone, no indoor plumbing. Just the farm.
She and her brothers always talk about how bitterly cold winters were when they were kids.

We have it so much easier.

[MikeInNH]

Growing up in Upstate NY where they get a LOT of snow...I understand that getting 8" of snow in the south is a LOT..I lived in Tennessee and North Carolina when I was in the Army for a while..When those area's get 6" of snow it's a complete mess. Cities like Syracuse and Rochester get 6" of snow every week...

My WORSE storm I was ever in...was when I was visiting my GF who lived in the Tug Hill Plateau area north of Syracuse. I visited her one thursday afternoon and needed to be back in Syracuse to work on saturday morning......Started snowing late thrusday...didn't stop until sunday morning...after a total of 90" fell. My F150 was parked in her driveway...and looking out Sunday afternoon...all I saw was snow...and a little bump where my truck was. Her town had over 600" of snow that year. Great place to visit in the summer...

[bowtie427ss]

My WORSE storm I was ever in...was when I was visiting my GF who lived in the Tug Hill Plateau area north of Syracuse. I visited her one thursday afternoon and needed to be back in Syracuse to work on saturday morning......Started snowing late thrusday...didn't stop until sunday morning...after a total of 90" fell. My F150 was parked in her driveway...and looking out Sunday afternoon...all I saw was snow...and a little bump where my truck was. Her town had over 600" of snow that year. Great place to visit in the summer...

This was my winter playground from the early 80's until the very late 1990's, it's about an hour and a half drive from here in "ideal" conditions. Now the trail system up there is very reminiscent of southern CA's 405 or PCH at rush hour, especially on the weekends. It's no longer fun or affordable to ride up there. Where we used to see maybe a dozen or so other sleds on a 4 hour ride, it's now not unusual to see 80 or 100 of them go by during a 10-15 minute trailside break.

FWIW, Mike isn't exaggerating in the least about Tug Hill snowfall. Just a breeze of frigid Canadian air out of the west/northwest blowing over Lake Ontario can bring lake effect snowfall at rates of up to 4 inches or more an hour for as long as the breeze lasts.

If you like the fluffy white powder deeper than you are tall, you might think Tug Hill was a little slice of heaven.

[Russnohio]

Sick of the white stuff here in Ohio as well.

Russ

[Old Guy]

"Global warming" is a bad misnomer. But believe it or not, it's causing this. Heat pumped into the air causes it to expand and move...it moved north to the pole, it is melting.

People are running around in T-shorts at the Olympics...the cold air has to move when it's displaced by warm air...guess where it went?

"climate change" is a way better term. What is happening is the world's weather patterns are being disturbed. Not to mention it's inhabitants.

[Panomaniac]

And I moved back from Maui for this? Phooey!

[gortnipper]

Man - I miss the snow! I grew up in Minnesota, and used to "winter" in Montana before moving to Seattle and now in Auckland. Nothing like a -44 cold snap to wake you up!

Down here it has been a long, hot and very dry summer. We have had a couple years of very dry almost drought conditions which has led to serious feed shortages - bad for a country that depends on dairy and lamb as key exports. Hay has gone from $2-3/bale a few years ago to averaging about $6-10/bale now. At one point last year, I saw it for sale at $20/bale!

Almost all of the population outside of the core urban areas depend on roof collected rainwater for their household water. Since the island is volcanic, and there are not that many folks (10x more sheep than people!) wells are expensive and hard to dig. We have two 5000 gallon tanks that collect from our roof and garage roof, and another 500 gallon tank on the shed to collect for the four horses. Right now in the dog days of summer, we probably have about three or four days water left in the big tanks and the small one is empty - siphoning off the big ones.

We need a good thunderstorm to dump for a few hours - or overnight. Or else we will have to get a tanker out to drop us their 14,000L. But, not having worked since August - I would rather eat that money than pour it down the drain.

El Climate-chango.

[Davidg]

"Global warming" is a bad misnomer. But believe it or not, it's causing this. Heat pumped into the air causes it to expand and move...it moved north to the pole, it is melting.

People are running around in T-shorts at the Olympics...the cold air has to move when it's displaced by warm air...guess where it went?

"climate change" is a way better term. What is happening is the world's weather patterns are being disturbed. Not to mention it's inhabitants.

All the proof is there about climate change and these guys are never wrong:

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population. -- Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971)



The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer -- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)



I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 -- Paul Ehrlich in (1969)




In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)



Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion -- Paul Ehrlich in (1976)



This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century -- Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976



There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it. -- Newsweek, April 28, (1975)



This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976



If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age. -- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

[bfish]

Let's not devolve to a political debate on global warming please. It'll just end up bad, and eventually locked.

I know my own dislike of winter has childhood roots, so here's a story to elaborate;

I was about 10, and our Missouri farm had just experienced an ice storm. Come morning, Dad and I went to chore the cattle. First, the tractor wouldn't start until we'd removed the air cleaner and dosed the carb with ether. The trip to the silo was nasty, almost putting us in the fence a couple times. We finally got the cows fed and headed back to the house. I opened the gates for Dad to pass, by then he was plenty pi**ed. He had on those thin rubber slip-on boots, and was having to use the tractor brakes to steer. At the last gate, he got his foot caught between the left and right brake, putting the tractor in a tight spin with the right brake locked. What did Dad do in his pain and anger? He pulled the throttle down wide open... It would have been funny, but I could feel his frozen foot with an 1/8" of rubber caught in the brake.

The next winter, we had the worst snow I've experienced. 3 feet before the drifts. It caught Mom by surprise at work, and at noon she called, saying she was headed home. After an hour late, Dad and I took off on two tractors to try to find her. We got only a mile or so before the blizzard blinded us, and I follwed Dad right into the ditch. We had to follow the fence hand over hand to get back home, and I was sure Dad was gonna die before we got there. We made it OK, and later learned that Mom had hit the ditch also, but had found shelter with a neighbor. 3 days before the plows came through, and 5 before Mom could get home.

Yeah, I made snowmen and tunnels as a kid, but the hardship and pain are memories far more vivid.