BREAKING: Ellicott City, Pretty Maryland Town, Being Devastated Now For 2nd Time In 2 Years

Water approaching second floors of downtown Ellicott City, Maryland
today. The second devastating flash flood there in 2 years. 

Two years ago, Ellicott City, a very pretty, historic city in Maryland, was devastated by an enormous flash flood. 

The gorgeous downtown was destroyed, and the city had just now gotten back on its feet.

Tragically, the exact same thing seems to be happening again this afternoon.

A flash flood emergency has been declared there, and this new video just out of Ellicott City looks just as bad as the last one. If not worse.

The Baltimore Sun reports that water has reached the second floor of Portalli's Italian Restaurant, which didn't happen last time. (Portalli's was the source of many of the dramatic videos from the last flood.)  

Downtown Ellicott City, Maryland today 

There have been several water rescues. Trucks and cars are zipping down the main drag, pushed by the floodwaters.

Downstream from downtown, people are reporting cars and pieces of buildings floating by in the raging river.

Severe flash flooding is hitting surrounding areas, too.



Very sad. Here's the video:

BREAKING: Large Tornado Causes Big Damage, Injuries In Dallas Suburb

Flashes from snapping power lines light up
a large tornado east of Dallas this evening. 

Numerous live feeds and media reports are showing a large tornado in the eastern suburbs of Dallas, Texas this evening.

Major damage has been reported in the community of Rowlett near Garland, Texas. Video images showed the tornado causing numerous power flashes as it tore through electrical lines.

The Rowlett damage is just one of several reports of destruction from twisters near and east of Dallas today.

Preliminary reports suggest a supercell thunderstorm dropped a large tornado near Ovilla, south of Dallas, causing major damage, then another even bigger tornado near Rowlett.

The tornadoes in Texas  were ongoing as of 8:30 p.m. EST. Several tornado warnings were in effect.

Reports from local media say several homes have been destroyed, with personal belongings from the homes blown out onto roads and highways.

It was unclear as of 8:30 p.m. whether there were any deaths, or how many injuries occured. An NBC affiliate in Dallas was reporting four deaths in Garland, a report everybody is hoping isn't true.

Fox 4 News images showed widespread debris and a large fire, apparently related to the tornado, burning in Garland.

Fox 4 News showing tornado debris and a large
fire burning in Garland, Texas after a big
Saturday evening tornado. 

On Twitter, @28storms quoted Dallas-Fort Worth police and emergency scanner traffic with reports of dozens of injuries and dozens of buildings destroyed in Rowlett, Sunnyvale and Garland, Texas.

Texas is a study in extreme, dangerous weather contrasts this evening, with the tornadoes, a blizzard warning in the northwest, winter storm watches and warnings central and flood watches and warnings in eastern Texas.

Conditions ranged from snow, temperatures in the 20s and winds gusting over 60 mph over the Texas panhandle to oppressive summerlike humidity near the Gulf Coast.

The destructive Texas twisters are part of an intense storm system that's bringing a blizzard to New Mexico and northwestern Texas, and flooding rains in a large are in the center of the country from Texas to Ohio.

Flash flood warnings covered a stripe from central Oklahoma to southwestern Illinois Saturday evening. Up to a foot of rain was forecast.

A broad area of the Plains from Texas to Minnesota were under winter storm watches, warnings or blizzard warnings Saturday. Parts of northern New England were in for snow, sleet and freezing rain Sunday as well.

BREAKING: NOAA And NASA Confirm 2014 Was Hottest Ever By Far

You're going to hear this phrase over and over again for the next few days:

So much for the "pause" in global warming

Click on this image to make it
bigger, but the record hot
2014 makes it clearer than ever
that global warming continues 

As expected, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center confirmed that 2014 was the hottest year on record since detailed analyses started in 1880.

Here are some of NOAA's highlights:

* The year was 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. That doesn't sound like much, but on a global basis, that's huge

* The year beat the old record for hottest global by 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit.

Again, that sounds miniscule, but in the past, when a record global hottest temperature was set, it was almost always by about 0.03 degrees or less, so this is big.

* 2014 was the 38th consecutive year of warmer than normal global temperatures. If you're 37 years old, you've never seen a cooler than normal year. And never will, unless something incredibly extraordinary happens.

* Four of the Top 10 global hottest years have occurred in the past five years. Nine of the Top 10 hottest years have happened in the 21st century.

* Sealing the deal for 2014, December was the hottest 12th month on record for the globe.

* In a separate analysis using a slightly different methodology and data set, NASA also concluded 2014 was easily the warmest global year on record. 

* Oceans really drove global temperatures in 2014. The combined land/ocean temperature is in the numbers I've cited already. But if you just look at the oceans without looking at land, the seas were also by far record hot in 2014. If you just look at land without considering the oceans in 2014, the year just past was "merely" fourth hottest.

* This was the first time since 1990 a global record high temperature was set without an ongoing El Nino, which is a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific. El Ninos tend to raise the world's temperatures, with or without global warmng.

That the record was broken by a large margin in a non-El Nino year is quite remarkable.

Global warming denialists up until now have been saying global warming stopped. That's because if you just looked at the past 15 years of warming on a chart, the pace of rise seemed to slow.

Plus if you cherry pick the data starting with what was once the extraordinarily hot year of 1998, which had a mega- El Nino, the rate of warming did look slow, but really wasn't.

Going back through the entire record of 120 years or so, there are periodic slow downs and speed ups of global warming. Human-caused climate change doesn't make natural climate cycles go away, and those natural cycles will influence the pace of warming over a period of years.

Of course, adding 2014 to the yearly chart of global temperatures kind of ruins the meme that warming has topped.

My bet is the denialists will now say that NASA and NOAA are fudging the data and making it look like it's warming up.

But if that actually happened, there would be so many whistleblowers coming forward with proof that it just boggles the mind that NOAA and NASA would fake the data.

Of course that won't stop politicians. Climate denying politicians now control both houses of Congress, so they'll try to end funding for any climate research or climate measurements.

Worse, Senator Ted Cruz, a real "winner," now heads the committee that controls NASA's purse strings, and Cruz still thinks global warming is a crock.

Don't misinterpret my reporting on 2014 being the hottest on record as anything resembling gleeful.

Quite the contrary. It would have been better for me and the rest of humanity if 2014 started a trend toward some global cooling, and I would have been SO happy to report that.

But that is not to be.