It is a weekend of extreme weather across the country. Much of the nation is hot. There have been heat advisories in the Midwest and Southwest. There's a heat warning in Phoenix tonight after another day of triple-digit temperatures.
But as you travel north you'll find something you don't expect this time of year: lots of snow.
CBS News correspondent Tony Guida reports that some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Robert Frost's words clearly were not on the minds of holiday skiers at Crystal Mountain, Washington.
"I'm so excited. It's great. Get a tan. All this snow is awesome," says Lukas Holland, a snowboarder.
Actually, it's 50 feet of awesome. This has been the mountain's best season in 12 years. All across the West this weekend, skiers are flocking to mountains flush with snow: 40 feet at Arapahoe Basin, west of Denver; 70 feet at Squaw Valley, Idaho.
But record snowfalls mean dangerously swollen rivers. Nowhere has that been more evident than Minot, N.D., where heavy rains compounded the massive snowmelt. Thousands are still homeless, while many returning this weekend found conditions unlivable: flooding forced sewage into their homes.
Comment: Let us suggest a reason, why instances of noctilucent clouds are intensifying.
What we suspect has been happening, based on our research thus far, is that the upper atmosphere is cooling because it is being loaded with comet dust, which shows up in the form of noctilucent clouds and other upper atmospheric formations.
Magnificent and mesmerizing noctilucent clouds (also called polar mesospheric clouds), were once considered to be rare. But now they are puzzling scientists with their recent dramatic changes. Apparently, the clouds are growing brighter, are seen more frequently, are visible at ever lower latitudes and are now appearing even during the day. If scientists were allowed to conduct honest interdisciplinary research, such changes wouldn't be a mystery.
They would be able to figure out that comet dust is electrically-charged which is causing the earth's rotation to slow marginally. The slowing of the rotation is reducing the magnetic field, opening earth to more dangerous cosmic radiation and stimulating more volcanism. The volcanism under the sea is heating the sea water which is heating the lower atmosphere and loading it with moisture.
The moisture hits the cooler upper atmosphere and contributes to a deadly mix that inevitably leads to an Ice Age, preceded for a short period by a rapid increase of greenhouse gases and "hot pockets" in the lower atmosphere, heavy rains, hail, snow, and floods.