SHOULD YOU PRE-BUY YOUR PROPANE GAS THIS SUMMER?

The Hill Spirit tries to let the people of Elkmont know about things that might affect the pocketbook.  One thing that costs a lot is heating your home during the winter.  Some of us use propane gas for that or the hot water heater.  As a propane customer, you might consider buying gas for the winter during your supplier's summer pre-buy program.  It allows you to lock in the price for the amount of gas you think you will use until next summer.  

Joe Bastardi, my favorite forecaster at Weatherbell.com,  predicted a cold winter last year so the Hill Spirit ordered extra gas. I bought 700 gallons at $2.35 last summer. That paid off as the price went over $3.50 per gallon last winter; didn't have to buy a single gallon at that price.  Joe  believes we are in for rough weather this winter.  

Hill Spirit is again planning ahead and is buying 800 gallons for this winter. If you are a blog reader, you know that the Hill Spirit is big on being prepared.    If we get a big ice storm, and we are due for one, how prepared are you for power outages? The time to prepare for a storm is before the storm hits, not after.

HOW COLD IS IT GOING TO BE?

PRECIPITATION

SNOWFALL

Article from Accuweather Blog:

Joe Bastardi believes there is a significant chance for particularly frigid winters in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 into 2014-2015. Bastardi said these winters could be similar to winters of the late 1970s. He said, “While the most consistent of the cold is to the north, severe bouts of cold deep into Texas and Florida would be capable of affecting agriculture more so than we’ve seen in that last 20 years or so.”

A combination of factors that parallel the precursors to historically cold winters is leading Bastardi to this forecast. He said, “We have a cold Pacific now. We had a La Nina, El Nino, then a stronger La Nina [similar to the cycle] that happened in the early to mid ’70s that set up the winters of the late ’70s.”

These weather patterns, plus the wild cards of volcanic activity and solar activity, have Bastardi looking ahead. “The last time we had arctic volcanoes go off, in 1912—similar to what we had two winters ago—the winters three years removed got very bad across the United States,” Bastardi said. “If we put together the combination of La Nina, El Nino, La Nina again and we look at what happened when that happened before with a cold Pacific, and we also understand that the volcanoes may be involved along with the low sunspot activity, one could come to the conclusion that a series of very cold winters … could be on the way,” he said.

Bastardi said this is all part of a natural pattern of reversal which he believes will lead to a crash in global temperatures over the next nine months, from the very warm levels set off by El Nino—as forecast globally by AccuWeather.com.

In the longer term, this is all part of a cyclical event which Bastardi believes will return the earth’s temperatures by 2030 back to where they were in the late ’70s at the end of the last cold PDO [Pacific Decadal Oscillation or El Nino like pattern] and the beginning of the satellite era of measuring temperatures objectively.