Interesting Theory: Man Thinks Roundabouts Create Tornadoes

A Pennsylvania man thinks that roundabouts like this one
cause tornadoes. I'm not sure how, but this guy is confident.

For some reason, there has arguably been more tornadoes than usual this year and last year in Pennsylvania.

Nobody is sure why.  It's probably just bad luck. But a Pennsylvania man has a novel theory as to why his state has had more than its share of twisters.

Traffic roundabouts. That's right. Traffic circles.  This guy is convinced that the growing popularity of traffic circles and roundabouts is causing those Pennsylvania twisters. 

By the way, the man has an alternative pronunciation of the word "tornado." He pronounces it "tornader."

Here's what he said when he called into television station WNEP's "Talkback 16" segment:

"We didn't have tornaders here until we started putting in traffic circles. Cause, on account of the - you want to know why? When people go round and round in circles, it causes disturbances in the atmosphere, and causes tornaders."

That is, um, interesting explanation for Pennsylvania's bad weather. And laughable. Which means of course, this unidentified dude has gotten a lot of reaction on Twitter.

One person wrote: "Not to mention that carousel rides ramp up in the spring. A mere coincidence?"

Another Twitter wag said Donald Trump should appoint this tornader guy as EPA chief.

Yet another person wrote: "Jesus, tornado alley must be in England then. There is a roundabout everywhere there."

For the record, Great Britain, on average gets about 30 tornadoes per year. The United States, though admittably much larger, gets more than 1,000 twisters annually.

Where I live in Vermont, they've installed several roundabouts on the states roads in the past few years. The Green Mountain State averages one tornado per year, but we haven't had one in five years. I wonder what "tornader" guy thinks of that?

So Much Snow That Big Good Boy Had To Dig Path For Small Good Boy

The area around Durango, California just received about 80 inches of snow in about a week, with maybe three feet in just three day.

That's a TON of snow by any measure. People had trouble getting around, and so did their best friends.

Case in point is the video below, in which a small good boy has trouble making it back home through the deep drifts. Luckily a bigger good boy was available to clear a path for the stuck little guy.

Here's the sweetness in the snow:

Tucson, Arizona Police Investigate A Mysterious White Powder

In the video below, the hard-working police force in Tucson, Arizona have been scrutinizing a strange white powder that appeared in the area this past week. Locals hadn't seen anything like this before.

The Tucson area doesn't generally see things like this, so the crime lab got involved, and police helpfully held a "press conference" to update the media on their investigation. Flake news, anyone?

Here is the video of the Tucson police at work a few days ago, which reveals the outcome of the investigation:

After Rain And Flash Freeze, We Can Relate To This Guy

A coupel stills from a Virginia man's epic slip and slide

For the past week, this video has been making the rounds, truly a viral one.

The security camera footage shows a guy setting off to go to work in the morning. Looks like he's headed toward his vehicle to start the daily commute.

But it's been chilly, and there's been a bit of freezing rain. Enough, apparently, to make the start of his day unhappy.

The man's wife, Kelly Bonser Besecker, spotted the video on their home security camera system in Virginia, and just had to post it on Facebook. The rest, as they say, is viral video history.

As of last Friday, the Facebook video had been viewed 52 million times with 1.2 million shares.

Besecker reports her husband, Tim Besecker, is uninjured, at least physically. He told the Washington Post that this is not his first spill, but it was, apparently, his most dramatic.

He also told the Washington Post that, with another spell of cold, possibly icy weather in the forecast, he's going to be more generous when he spreads the rock salt. Here's the video:

"Climate Change Anthem" Won't Warm Your Heart In Warming World, But Enjoy!

Watch this chorus perform an "inspirational"
Climate Change Denier Anthem. 

Funny or Die has a wonderful spoof out mocking climate denialists.

Sometimes, a movement will put out an inspirational song to back their cause. Maybe the most famous is "We Are The World" in the 1980s, to combat famine in Africa.

The anthem from Funny or Die purports to be from the Koch Brothers, the conservative billionaires who don't believe that climate change is happening, or at least don't think it's a big deal, so they back politicians that seek to block action on climate change.

The anthem is the typically schmaltzy inspirational music you get in these kinds of anthems. It's kinda set to the music from "We Are The World."  Pay attention to the lyrics to the Climate Change Deniers Anthem, which are also helpfully displayed in the video.

The video hits all the cliches of these things, too. For the record, I don't think climate change denialists are as ridiculous in real life, but like just about everything else in the world (including me!) they deserve to be spoofed.

Watch and enjoy:

Mean, Brilliant Video Skewers Climate Deniers With Their Own Arguments

A YouTube video with this title
skewers people who think climate change
doesn't exist, or don't think it's an issue. 

You've heard the arguments from people who don't believe climate change is real, or that it's unimportant, or nothing should be done about it.

I'm sure I'll get some maybe deserved howls of protest from them from posting the video you'll see below, but it puts their arguments into more, I don't know, human situations.

The video has actors using the same arguments used in climate change in reacting to a traffic light turning red, a cancer diagnosis, a house fire, a romantic breakup and other situations.

It's hilarious.

Is it unfair or fair? You be the judge:

Global Heat Records, Data Coming Fast And Furious

NOAA says the globe had its warmest
March in modern record this year. The only
major cold spot was the northeast U.S. and
eastern Canada.  

While I continued to shiver in winter cold up here in northern New England during March, the world as a whole had yet another record warm month, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. 

On a global basis, March averaged 0.85 degrees above the 20th century average for the month. But if you take the whole world into account, it's impossible to get a month that is several degrees warmer or colder than normal.

That 0.85 degree departure from normal in March is the third greatest of any month since the NCDC has kept track of such things.

The only notable cold area on Earth in March was the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.

This is the latest in what has seemingly become a constant string of new heat records across the globe.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center said Arctic sea ice reached its lowest extent on record for the month of March.

As Dr. Jeff Masters noted in a recent blog post, five nations or territories have already recorded their hottest temperatures on record so far in 2015, and the year is still young. The year with the most nations or territories with new all time heat records was 2010 with 21 such records, but two of those records have since been broken.

The fingerprints of human-induced global warming are all over this latest barrage of hot climate data,   but it's not the only hand in the mix.

A developing El Nino is very likely helping to boost the nearly worldwide heat.  When this periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean hits, global temperatures tend to spike upward, no matter what humans might be doing to the planet.

The combination of global warming and El Nino means there's a good chance 2015 will be the hottest year in modern records for the Earth as a whole. Right now, 2014 stands as the hottest times man has experienced since well before the 1880s, when record keeping got a whole lot more detailed.

Very likely, there might be some years, maybe 2017, or 2018, that are "cooler" than 2014 or 2015, because El Nino, if it develops, will have probably ended by then. This could bring on a very subtle, very temporary global cooling for a couple years, maybe.

When we get a year or two that's not a new worldwide heat record, we'll hear the inevitable, "See, the world is cooling." from those who would oppose any efforts to combat global warming.

But those are just political talking points. Because of the myriad factors and cycles that affect climate, some years will be warmer than others, even as the general trend line goes up and up and up.

That's what you need to follow, the general trend line. And certainly not a random cold spell in which some U.S. Senator can declare global warming a non-issue because he went outside and made a snowball during the winter.

Bill Maher, that very blunt political comedian, had a blistering segment on climate change during his show this week. You might agree with the guy, you might not on all kinds of subjects he touches upon, but you have to admit, Maher cuts to the chase.  

Bill Maher mocking Ted Cruz for when Cruz
compared himself to Galileo while saying
he doubted climate change exists.  

Like him or not, Maher goes for the kill.

In his climate rant, he mocked politicians who continue to say they don't know enough about global warming because they're not scientists.

Kind of like saying legislators can't appropriate funding for a new road because they are not dump trucks.

Maher said many GOPers' public stance on climate denial isn't for the general population. He says it's for the corporate donors who keep them in office..

Or as Mahar crudely put it: "It's not why politicians suck more than ever, it's who they're sucking more than ever.

The whole video is worth watching, if only for the bitter laughs. So go ahead:

Hilarious Angry Man Stuck In Snow, Does Everything Wrong

A very angry man has a long battle while
stuck in snow, and we respond by laughing at him.  n

As I'm sure everyone in Buffalo, New York knows, tis the season for getting your car stuck in the snow.

In that spirit, I bring you a video from last winter of a guy who is perhaps not the best person to get his SUV out of a snowbank.

He also proves, as you'll see in the video at the bottom of this post,  that getting angry just makes the job less effective.

He does everything wrong. He's got lousy tires, but it's too late to fix that here. He guns the engine rather than trying to gradually ease himself out of the ice.

There's a patch of bare pavement behind the vehicle that he can back up onto to give him a good start, but, nope.

And worse, he spins and spins and spins his tires, probably ruining the SUV in the long term, and in the short term, creating smooth, slick ice under the tires which means he'll never get out. Maybe.

The video, all seven and a half glorious minutes of it, were shot by a gleeful man filming from an upper floor apartment window.

The guy who shot the video said several passersby tried to offer help to the guy, but the Angry Man cursed them out. And notice an itty bitty Toyota Prius drove through all the bad slush and seemed to have no problem with it.

One commenter on the YouTube video had this perfect bit of wisdom about the situation, that I wish I had thought of:

"I heard that if you throw enough curse words at the snow and slam  your car doors hard enough, it scares the snow and causes it to melt faster. Who can blame him for knowing that information ahead of time?"

I know we shouldn't laugh at angry people, but what the hell:

For Those Of You Sick Of Winter: A Hilarious Forecast

Some people are rejoicing in the snow that has slammed the eastern United States. Skiers and riders and beyond ecstatic.

Sick of winter? The video in this post
might lighten your mood. Or infuriate you.  

Others aren't so enthusiastic. To many, winter is a pain in the butt. The cold hurts, the roads are lousy, the shoveling is backbreaking, the gloomy weather sends people off into the deep end.

The sick of winter subset might like the parody of those Weather Channel local forecasts, you know the ones with the soft jazz in the background, and the blue screen giving you the updated forecast for your area.

Hat tip to reader Margo Howland for alerting us to the following hilarity: (Some swear words on screen, so maybe NSFW)