Tomorrow is looking like it’s going to be the hottest day of the year—possibly the hottest day in many years—in the D.C. metro area. According to the National Weather Service, our high temperature is expected to be 101°F tomorrow with a heat index as high as 107°F. In fact, NWS has issued a somewhat-rare ‘Excessive Heat Warning.’

Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to it. I hate hot weather. I’d originally planned to do a bike ride tomorrow, but I think I’ll stay inside—where it feels a lot better than 107°F—and anxiously await the return of normal weather.

In the mean time, here’s a picture I took on my phone Monday just after a nice summer storm came flying through. Look closely and you’ll see the hint of a second rainbow above and to the right.

The Federal Government has been closed all week (did you notice?), and my employer closes their office when the Feds do so I’ve been working from home all week. Personally I’d rather have gone into the office Monday and Tuesday since the roads were passable, but oh well. I like working from home now and then, but more than a couple days is overkill. I find it easier to avoid distraction in the office, plus the lag of logging into the VPN is pretty annoying and slows down the work.

The Feds have already announced they’ll be closed tomorrow too, which has to be some sort of record. I think the blizzards of 1996 and 2003 only warranted a day or two of Fed closures each, if I remember right.

Anyway, tomorrow will be another day of shoveling, which should be an interesting adventure since I’m running out of places to shovel the snow to. No big deal. I might even make it to the mailbox to see if the Postal ‘Service’ has decided to start delivering mail again.

USPS has quoted from this saying itself in advertisements and other materials, so it would appear that they approve of the sentiment. Snow is the first poor climatic condition listed.

As such, I’m always a little surprised when USPS suspends service. They announced a suspension on Saturday due to the blizzard, and while I haven’t heard anything from them since I certainly didn’t get any mail yesterday. Will there be mail today?

I’m no fan of the Postal Service, and haven’t been for a long time, but lots of stubborn organizations—particularly doctors and other medical facilities—have not embraced the Internet age and still want bills paid by mailed-check (or even mailed-credit-card information). For the time being, this is still a public service.

Between USPS’s failure to obey their own [admittedly unofficial] creed, and VDOT’s failure to clear our roads, I’m starting to wonder if I can trust the government.

That was a joke.

Update 2/14/2010: For the record, mail was delivered to our house on Saturday, 2/13/2010…for the first time since Friday 2/5/2010. Yes, you read that right. Our incredibly reliable USPS decided to skip an entire week.

I am enjoying our little blizzard. I am a snow lover and this stuff is great. We’re somewhere around 25″ I would guess. Melissa has a show in Chantilly today and tomorrow, so we and the Subaru got to have a little winter adventure. The car (and driver) handled it just fine, but the roads are really bad. Worst I’ve seen ‘em.

Other than that I just have a ton of time-eating busywork-some of which terrible overdue. I owe Melissa some work on her site, bills to pay, etc. Hopefully I can get a lot of that kind of stuff done tonight. I’ll also post some blizzard pics.

I love it! This winter is shaping up to be a great one for us snow-lovers.

The Prime Minister of Haiti estimates that over 100,000 have been killed. Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot of the Catholic Archdiocese of Haiti is among the dead.

As the magnitude of this catastrophe becomes clearer, I urge all of my readers to donate to reputable private and religious aid agencies. Haiti is among the poorest countries in the world and its people are in desperate need of assistance. The government of Haiti is, however, among the world’s most corrupt, so government-to-government aid may just go to waste. Our efforts are better spent on non-governmental aid groups.

I recommend making a donation to Catholic Relief Services (especially given the large Catholic presence in Haiti) or the Red Cross, both of which can very quickly put the money to good use.

The Capital Weather Gang, a group of weather bloggers with a solid, conservative [read: realistic] track record of accumulation predictions, estimate 8-16″ for much of the region with 10-18″ in some areas. They characterize this storm as a ‘Major Event’ for the DC area and predict widespread hazardous road conditions.

Those of us who have lived a long time in the DC area know that this area doesn’t handle snow very well. The various Departments of Transportation have an annoying tendency to spontaneously forget to treat major highways, and the MetroRail system was apparently designed to fail if exposed to winter precipitation (because they have exposed electronics [!] on train underbellies). Drivers in the region seem to fall into two camps: one, those that refuse to go anywhere at all even days after most of the roads are clear; and two: those (usually with SUVs) who believe you can drive on snow at full speed as if the road is perfectly clear. Reality, as usual, is in-between.

Off on a Tangent recommends the following: don’t be afraid of a little bit of snow, but don’t drive like an idiot either. 4WD and AWD vehicles are generally good in winter weather, but every car has 4-wheel braking and every car will take longer to stop than it would in clear conditions and any car can spin-out if you take a turn too fast on a slick highway. So, even in your 4WD and AWD cars, drive careful. If you don’t have to go anywhere, don’t. Make sure you have enough supplies at home to last you a couple of days.

Have fun and be safe!

There’s a problem though. You see, most chemicals regulated by the EPA as public health threats are…you know…dangerous. They’re poisons, pollutants, and toxins. CO2 is not; it is a natural byproduct of animals breathing. You produce CO2 every time you exhale. CO2 is also very important for plants, which take it in and produce oxygen. Plants thrive in CO2-rich environments.

So let us accept, for a moment, the argument that CO2 is a ‘greenhouse gas,’ is causing a rise in global temperatures, and that all this is a bad thing. There are all kinds of problems with this argument (which I will get into some other time), but let’s accept it as fact for a moment. Even if this is true, the idea that CO2—a naturally occurring chemical essential for life on this planet—is a grave public health threat is just insane. Why don’t we declare oxygen to be a threat too, since it’s explosive in its pure form. How about water; people can drown in water. I think it’s time that the EPA stepped in and did something about water.

Even if a reduction in CO2 emissions from artificial sources like internal combustion engines is a worthwhile goal (which, despite claims to the contrary, has not been conclusively proven), the chemical itself cannot be called a public health threat with a straight face. We need CO2. Maybe we need less of it, but CO2 in-and-of itself isn’t a danger and should not be treated as such by the EPA.

The political reality here is that the EPA has made this declaration, likely having been ordered to do so by President Barack Obama (D), so that Obama can put new environmental policies in place without direct Congressional approval. As a largely-harmless byproduct of humans and animals breathing, CO2 can’t be regulated without Congressional action. As a dangerous public health threat, however, EPA can regulate it unilaterally under preexisting environmental law.

If CO2 is so dangerous, then maybe the EPA should limit our exhalations. They might want to start in Washington, DC (at the Capitol and White House, specifically); lots of hot air around here.