The National Weather Service is projecting lower-than-average highs of 77 degrees today, 84 on Sunday and 87 on Monday. Historically, the temperature this time of the year hits an average of 97 degrees.
The mild weekend comes after an unusual week in which the Valley saw its first triple-digit temperature of the year, including a blistering 110 degrees on Monday, followed by showers Thursday and Friday that broke a three-month dry spell.
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where weather officially is gauged, recorded 0.39 inch of rain between Thursday and Friday.
Chandler logged the most rainfall across the Valley, 1.34 inches… May is the second-driest month of the year (June is the driest) in Phoenix. This week’s showers surpassed the 0.16 inch of rain the Valley sees on average for the entire month.
Precipitation was minimal in Tucson where only .02 inch of rain fell on Thursday, but Mount Lemmon got dusted with about 3 inches of snow.
In Flagstaff, where more than 3 inches of snow had fallen by Friday afternoon, a winter advisory remains in effect until 6 a.m. today.
In Greenlee County in eastern Arizona, 12.5 inches of snow hit Hannagan Meadow.
We took my wife’s Passat up to Payson for the day instead of the Avalanche because at almost $4.00 per gallon, we need to get rid of the SUV.
Let’s think about that for a second. If indeed, Global Warming was the most dangerous threat to mankind since the Plague or SARS or AIDS or Bird Flu or… If it is the worst thing ever, we can argue the effectiveness of Cap and Trade policies or Kyoto or whatever other idiotic measures our leaders want to enact. But what IS ACTUALLY PRETTY DAMNED EFFECTIVE is gas in the $4-5 per gallon range. People actually make responsible choices and use less fuel. Sure, some folks don’t but lots of others start feeling the pain.
So let’s suggest that in order to save Polar Bears and Caribou and the Planet, we simply prevent investing any money at all into developing more fuel resources and we simply allow escalating price pressures to drastically cut the consumption of fossil fuels. If we raise prices enough, we can cool the Earth. And if Oil Companies do make a buck or two, we take it away from them because it is a “windfall profit” based on rising prices that we are using to cool the entire earth.
Unless fossil fuels are a completely insignificant contributor to the climate of Earth and drilling in ANWR will have a completely insignificant effect on Caribou and tundra. In which case, we will not have saved a single polar bear or caribou, had no effect on the temperature of the planet at all, but impoverished the entire plant by limiting their ability to move from place to place and escalating the cost of every single item that requires petroleum to make. And most specifically food which requires vast amounts of energy to produce and transport to the third world. But that is less of a problem since we have stopped growing Rice and Wheat so that we can grow Corn to make into Ethanol because of how profitable the subsidies are.
Don't let the same folks that tell you they care about the little man and the mill worker and the school teacher that are trying to make ends meet in middle America in the same breath tell you that Global Warming is a crisis of the utmost importance and we need to stop any oil development or drilling in order to save the earth. The two are completely incompatible.