National Weather Forecast

An active Monday is expected across the nation, with showers and storms possible from the Mississippi Valley to the East Coast. Some snow could mix in across parts of New England. Meanwhile, a developing system will spread heavy snow across the Northwest to the Great Basin and Northern Plains.

In those heavy snow areas through Tuesday evening, easily over a foot of snow could fall (with two feet possible for some). That snow will continue into parts of northern Minnesota into Wednesday. The heaviest rain is expected in the Southern Plains, with 3”+ possible for some.

Forecast loop from 7 PM CDT Monday to 7 PM CDT Wednesday.

As we head through the first half of the week we will be watching that developing strong system bring heavy snow, blizzard conditions, icing, and heavy rain to the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest – with severe weather on the south side from Iowa and Illinois south to Texas.

Total snow of 1-2 feet of snow will be possible from the Great Basin to the Upper Midwest, and with 40-50+ mph wind gusts, we will have to watch the potential for an extended period of blizzard conditions.

Due to the snow and wind potential, Blizzard Warnings and Winter Storm Watches have been issued.

Tuesday marks what could be another dangerous severe weather day in the central United States, as a couple of Enhanced Risk areas (threat level 3 of 5) are in place from Iowa and Illinois down to Texas – in many areas that were just hard hit by severe weather on Friday. Once again, strong tornadoes, large hail, and damaging winds will be possible.

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Conserving Wildlife Can Help Mitigate Climate Change

More from Yale School of the Environment: “Protecting wildlife across the world could significantly enhance natural carbon capture and storage by supercharging ecosystem carbon sinks, a new study led by Yale School of the Environment Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology Oswald Schmitz has found. The study, published in Nature Climate Change and co-authored by 15 scientists from eight countries, examined nine wildlife species — marine fish, whales, sharks, grey wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants, and American bison. The data shows that protecting or restoring their populations could collectively facilitate the additional capture of 6.41 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually. This is 95% of the amount needed every year to meet the Paris Agreement target of removing enough carbon from the atmosphere to keep global warming below the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold.

American cities want to recycle their plastic trash in Mexico. Critics call it ‘waste colonialism.’

More from Grist: “Just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl in February, the City of Phoenix, Arizona, published a peculiar press release touting its strategy for waste diversion. Thanks to its relationship with Direct Pack Incorporated, a multinational company that makes and recycles plastic, the city said it would be able to send much of its plastic waste to Mexico for recycling. “[T]he City of Phoenix stands ready to achieve its goal of hosting the greenest Super Bowl events yet,” the announcement from Phoenix’s public works department said. The city was referring to a forthcoming Direct Pack facility for recycling plastic items called PET thermoforms — clamshells, berry containers, salad boxes, egg cartons, and similarly shaped containers made from polyethylene terephthalate, one of the seven main kinds of plastic. Direct Pack already has a recycling facility in Guadalajara that it says can recycle tens of thousands of tons of PET thermoforms each year, and it’s been constructing a new one in Mexicali, Mexico, just across the border from California.

Tesla has installed very few solar roofs, despite Elon Musk’s hype

More from Canary Media: “In 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk boasted, ​“This is the year of the solar roof.” The next year, he said the pioneering EV company would soon be installing 1,000 integrated solar roofs tailored to the building per week. It turns out that 2019 absolutely was not the year of the solar roof — not even close. And neither was 2020, nor any year since. This reporter estimated in 2021 that Tesla had installed fewer than 1,000 integrated solar roofs total — an assessment bolstered by new analysis. A report released today by energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates that Tesla has installed approximately 3,000 solar roofs in the U.S. since the launch of the product in 2016. That’s several hundred thousand roofs short of Musk’s hallucinatory forecasts.

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– D.J. Kayser