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So it's officially a cold day in . I wonder what the snowball's chance of surviving there is.
A first! Snow falls in Baghdad
By CHRISTOPHER CHESTER
Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD (AP) -- After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But Friday morning, as muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer, the people here awoke to something certifiably new.
For the first time in memory, snow fell across Baghdad.
Although the white flakes quickly dissolved into gray puddles, they brought an emotion rarely expressed in this desert capital snarled by army checkpoints, divided by concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings - delight.
"For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this falling in Baghdad," said Mohammed Abdul-Hussein, a 63-year-old retiree from the New Baghdad area.
"When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had fallen in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern Baghdad," Abdul-Hussein said, referring to snow as a type of rain. "But snow falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent scene was beyond my imagination."
Morning temperatures uncharacteristically hovered around freezing, and the Baghdad airport was closed because of poor visibility. Snow is common in the mountainous Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, but residents of the capital and surrounding areas could remember just hail.
"I asked my mother, who is 80, whether she'd ever seen snow in Iraq before, and her answer was no," said Fawzi Karim, a 40-year-old father of five who runs a small restaurant in Hawr Rajab, a village six miles southeast of Baghdad.
"This is so unusual, and I don't know whether or not it's a lesson from God," Karim said.
Some said they'd seen snow only in movies.
Talib Haider, a 19-year-old college student, said "a friend of mine called me at 8 a.m. to wake me up and tell me that the sky is raining snow."
"I rushed quickly to the balcony to see a very beautiful scene," he said. "I tried to film it with my cell phone camera. This scene has really brought me joy. I called my other friends and the morning turned to be a very happy one in my life."
An Iraqi who works for The Associated Press said he woke his wife and children shortly after 7 a.m. to "have a look at this strange thing." He then called his brother and sister and found them awake, also watching the "cotton-like snow drops covering the trees."
For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar s s routinely zoom across to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. As of late afternoon, there were no reports of violence. The snow showed no favoritism as it fell faintly on neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, and (with apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead.
So it's officially a cold day in . I wonder what the snowball's chance of surviving there is.
thats awesome.
Someone was going to say it.
If not you it would have been me.
Thank God for Global Warming, or else they might have had snow that would stick!
I'm thankful those poor folks had at least a short time of happiness! I thought my husband said they'd had snow when he was there, but then he was in Balad, not Baghdad
yes... he is a geniusanthropocentric global climate shift
so you're arguing that snow in baghdad is testament AGAINST the notion that the earth's climate is becoming out of whack?
I only argue against the anthropogenic part. Yes, our climate is erratic right now. It has been several times throughout history of our planet.anthropocentric global climate shift
so you're arguing that snow in baghdad is testament AGAINST the notion that the earth's climate is becoming out of whack?
What arrogance to think we affect the world climate so much, when Paleoclimatologists have proven the earth has been even more erratic long before mankind was industrialized.
The history and science is against the notion of antropogenic global warming.
Just curious if Global Warming was around in 1940 the last time it snowed there.
I always love how those on the far right blow isolated episodes out of proportion when discussing global warming.
Meanwhile, there's this just today:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080112/...vrBJWy7ScDW7oF
ALBANY, N.Y. - Earlier blooms. Less snow to shovel. Unseasonable warm spells.
Signs that winters in the Northeast are losing their bite have been abundant in recent years and now researchers have nailed down numbers to show just how big the changes have been.
A study of weather station data from across the Northeast from 1965 through 2005 found December-March temperatures increased by 2.5 degrees. Snowfall totals dropped by an average of 8.8 inches across the region over the same period, and the number of days with at least 1 inch of snow on the ground decreased by nine days on average.
"Winter is warming greater than any other season," said Elizabeth Burakowski, who analyzed data from dozens of stations for her master's thesis in collaboration with Cameron Wake, a professor at the University of New Hampshire's Ins ute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space.
I'll take a 40-year trend over a single isolated event, thank you.
or people with common sense.I always love how those on the far right
I always wonder, when they show the record highs in the winter time were recorded sometimes back in like 1911, was there global warming back then?
Im just askin...
There may very well have been.
Just because global warming may exist naturally to a certain extent doesn't mean that we should ignore the things we, as a society, are doing to speed it up. Forest fires occur naturally, too, but that doesn't justify a person tossing a lit match into the woods.
First time they saw snow? What ever happend to Global Warming Mr. Gore?
"An Inconvenient Truth" is a scary-ass movie. Every week when I'm filling up the 36 gallon gas tank on my Ford extended cab truck I think of that movie and shudder a little bit.
Does anyone remember that we were supposed to be wiped out by the impending GLOBAL COOLING first forecasted in the 1970s. How did that work out buddy?
How can anyone not understand that the Earth has climate shifts going back thousands of years?
No but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
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I think $108 is my current fill-up record. I only get about 12 mpg in town so it gets a little pricey.
What???? Damn, I do have a SUV that gets about 12 mpg also, luckily I only use it about once a month.
I drive my truck about 1200 miles a month so I actually don't fill up every week.
I have other vehicles, too, but my truck is my company vehicle so I'm using it 5+ days a week.
If you'll pardon me, I'm going to go outside and pet my little 1993 Ford Escort GT (you know, before all the really well designed "fuel efficient" cars came out) with 140,000 miles on it that gets 39.5 highway/33 city and still doesn't use a drop of oil.
How about a couple billion year old trend?
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