The first sentence, in the body of the story, does a pretty good job of explaining why the "Global Warming" warning just has trouble taking hold. When they cannot forecast the weather for a week, how in the heck do they expect us to believe they can tell us what is going to happen in 10 years.
Not only this forecast, but the complete 2006 hurricane forecast was 100% wrong.
I guess global warming did them in, again.
Snow just keeps piling on in Denver and Rockies
By Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003501918_snow30.htmlWILL POWERS / AP
The second major snow storm in a week pounded Colorado on Friday, disrupting flights at Denver's airport on Friday.
DENVER Just after Thanksgiving, climatologist Klaus Wolter released his long-term forecast for the Denver region. The next few months, he said, would be warm and dry. No big snows until at least late February.
Oops.
Denver and smaller communities along the front range of the Rockies hunkered under a thick padding of snow and ice Friday, buried by the second monster storm in a week, with more snow expected overnight. Colorado Gov. Bill Owens declared a statewide disaster.
Hundreds of flights at Denver International Airport were canceled; major highways were temporarily shut down, including a 200-mile stretch of Interstate 70 into Kansas. All Greyhound bus trips out of Denver were canceled.
And, under leaden skies, residents grimly shoveled out. Again.
"It's been a tough week," Denver Councilwoman Rosemary Rodriguez said.
From his office at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Wolter tried to explain where his forecast had gone wrong.
"I wish I could say I was misquoted," he said. Instead, he could only conclude that Mother Nature had pulled a fast one. Scouring meteorological records, Wolter found that it has been at least 100 years since the region has been hit with back-to-back midwinter storms of this intensity. "It's unprecedented," he said.
Up in mountain-resort towns such as Aspen and Vail, skiers had a different word for the double-barreled blast: phenomenal.
"The ski conditions are fantastic," said Molly Cuffe, of the trade group Colorado Ski Country USA.
At the Denver airport, the nation's fifth-busiest passenger hub, nearly 300 flights were canceled because the weather forced incoming planes to go elsewhere. But unlike last week's storm, which closed the airport for a record 45 hours and left thousands of travelers to sleep on benches and baggage carousels, the airport did not cease operations Friday.
Managers said more than 80 percent of scheduled flights were expected to operate over the weekend.
Winter storm warnings extended from New Mexico to South Dakota, and blizzard conditions were forecast for the eastern Colorado plains and parts of southwestern Nebraska, western Kansas and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.
Tornado watches were issued for parts of Texas and Oklahoma on Friday evening as the leading edge of the storm approached. A tornado killed one person when it struck a home in west Texas, authorities said.
The latest storm was less problematic than the Christmas week blizzard because it came in waves, with a foot or more of snow Thursday and several additional inches expected overnight Friday.
The lull gave plows a chance to catch up. Also, the wind was mild, nothing like the powerful gusts of last week, which tossed the snow around so ferociously that airport runways could not be kept clear.
Still, there were disruptions. Unable to get fuel deliveries, gas stations across the city and suburbs were shut down Friday. Many groceries were out of staples.
Government offices and businesses closed Friday in Denver and other Colorado cities. The almost total absence of traffic on Denver streets made life a little easier for snowplows dispatched by Denver's mayor, John Hickenlooper.
The popular mayor ran into the first major criticism of his political career this week for the city's failure to clear snow left by the pre-Christmas storm. Facing an election for his second term in May, Hickenlooper promised this weekend's dig-out would be better than the previous effort.
