A late season storm is expected to intensify as it moves over the heavy populated upper eastern seaboard through Tuesday bringing a heavy wintry mix to much of New England. It even has a name:
Stella may undergo bombogenesis Monday evening into Tuesday evening, the Weather Channel said — an ominous-sounding term frequently used in the winter to describe powerful storms that intensify rapidly. The word is a combination of cyclogenesis, which describes the formation of a cyclone or storm, and bomb, which is, well, pretty self-explanatory.
Stella is expected to drop over a foot of snow in some places, and once upon a time, that would only be a political problem for the occasional local mayor who didn’t get the streets plowed in time. But after Sen. Inhofe’s (R-OK) stunt where he brought a snowball into the Senate and pronounced that it meant global warming didn’t exist—a move that’s been compared to strolling into the room with a Big Mac and saying it ends world hunger—expect the worst.
There will probably be similar dodges regarding Stella from the usual suspects, be ready for it. Remember that record snow does not mean record cold. In fact record cold and record snow rarely go hand in hand. And when we are talking about global warming, i.e., temperature, it’s not the snow that matters. All that ultimately counts is what the mercury reads over time, averaged across the planet.