It’s a record! Snow is falling in Houston today, the earliest snowfall ever recorded in the city’s history. The white stuff was already falling by 8:30 in the morning, sending parents scrambling for school-closing info. Forecasters are predicting one to two inches over the course of the day, with some areas possibly looking at up to six inches.
“We’re not expecting that kind of event here in Houston,” Frank Haley, interim chief operating officer of the Houston airport system, told the Houston Chronicle. Airports have sand trucks and chemical trucks at the ready, as does the highway department. Emergency officials are worried about icy roads, as a 12-hour freeze period has been predicted after sundown today.
As a paranoid individual, I immediately thought: climate change! I know they call it global warming, but the changing climate has the effect of disturbing normal weather patterns, not just bringing hotter weather all the time. Eric Berger on the Houston Chronicle’s SciGuy blog, however, put the kibosh on my theory. “What snow falling in Houston has to do with global warming,” he writes. “Nothing. Nada. Zip.”
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