Comment: This is a story about a freak cold weather incident that is rather astonishing and at the end, to stave off reasonable doubt about global warming, which would creep into the mind of anyone who has been paying attention to the actual data regarding the state of our planet, someone decides to throw in some of the most ridiculous propaganda we have ever read considering the story that includes it.

Read and weep with despair at the lies being delivered to the public without a blush, and the public that doesn't immediately boycott all mainstream media in protest!


Hailstorm swamps one small town in 6ft drifts - and it's still only October

Hailstorm
© Daily MailHailstones pelted down burying cars in a sea of ice in Ottery St Mary, Devon
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© Apex News and PicturesCars buried under three feet of hail stones in the town of Ottery St Mary
These astonishing scenes are the aftermath of a deluge of hailstones that buried a town in a river of ice.

Ottery St Mary, in Devon, was plunged into chaos by the storm in the early hours yesterday.

First, the area was battered by an astonishing 12in of hail in just two hours. This blocked drains, which led to widespread flooding as the rain began to fall.

More than 100 people had to be evacuated from their homes and 25 were airlifted to safety or rescued by firefighters.

After a day of heavy rain on Wednesday more than three inches of rain and hail fell between 6pm and 8am yesterday morning.

The Met Office said the 'hugely localised' weather system was less than 4 miles across and seemed ' to be centred on Ottery St Mary'.

The most severe weather hit just after midnight on Thursday but by 5am the entire town was cut off and coastguards scrambled helicopters to airlift residents.

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© Daily MailA map shows the location of Ottery St Mary, near Exeter in Devon
Emergency services were inundated with calls from terrified home owners who watched helplessly as flood water rose to 5ft high in some places, and there were fears that hundreds of animals may have been killed in the floods.

Residents in Ottery St Mary said the town was unrecognisable after the hail storm..

Sarah Galliford said: 'I was woken up by the sound of hailstones thundering down on the roof. I thought it was the end of the world. I looked outside at about 1am and there was a river of ice coming down the street. It was a total freak of nature. It wasn't even on the weather forecast. They said there would be rain but nothing like this. It was absolutely crazy.'

Clara Pedmore added: 'There is 2ft 6ins of water on the road. I can't get out of the house.One farm nearby has lost about 500 sheep which were out in fields which are now completely underwater.'

Emergency crews also sent in jeeps and fire appliances and boats to take residents to an evacuation centre at the local hospital.

Tony Fabry, who runs the town's post office, said: 'At one point I was watching beer barrels, sandwich boards and even a children's slide floating down the road.

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© Daily MailAwash: The Otter burst its banks near Ottery St Mary
'It was absolutely horrendous. It was a nightmare and it happened so quickly. The drains became blocked with hail and so when the snow melted it was just a deluge.'

David Garland, whose home was completely flooded, said: 'It happened in a matter of minutes and all of a sudden the whole house was deluged. I didn't have time to save anything at all because it happened so quickly. Everything was ruined.'

Fire crews rescued an elderly couple at 10.30am who were stranded on the roof of their car. The two pensioners had scrambled on top of their vehicle after they became trapped and the car started to quickly fill with water.

Susanne Reed from Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service said: 'It has been absolute chaos. It started just after midnight when we were out rescuing people stuck in their cars in flood water. It got worse and worse and one of our own crews got stuck in a 6ft hail drift. We have been rescuing people constantly.'

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© PAChildren play in debris today left behind by the storm
The Environment Agency said an 'unforeseeable and freakish' combination of factors had led to the extreme conditions in Ottery St Mary.

A spokesman said the area was 'pelted' by extremely heavy hail and rain which triggered the floods and bizarre ice-logged landscape.

He said: 'What we've seen is a very unusual combination of extreme weather - and circumstances that were unforeseeable and freakish. The heavy hail and rain seem to have solidified into what looks more like snow than anything else - it is not the normal sort of hail you would encounter.


Comment: No doubt about that. Can there be a reason for it? Like the beginnings of Global Cooling, as in a coming Ice Age? An Ice Age that may, in fact, descend upon us a lot faster than any of the scientific models predict?


'This is likely to have contributed to the problem by blocking drains and culverts along with other debris.'

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© PATaking baby steps: The roads remained icy and treacherous
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© apexnewspix.comAnother car stuck in a giant drift of hailstones in the Devon village
A spokesman for Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service added: 'Around 1ft of hail fell in just two hours between 1am and 3am. Cars in the town were left tightly packed in ice and the drains were blocked meaning the water had nowhere to go.

The surrounding villages of Awliscombe, Rockbeare and Newton were also affected.

An evacuation centre was set up at Ottery St Mary Hospital, where people who were flooded out of their homes received care and shelter.

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© John Williams / SWNS.COMSix feet of hailstones overnight blocked drains causing extensive flooding with 100 people evacuated to the town's hospital
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© John Williams / SWNS.COMThe freak hailstorm swept through the small village leaving giant puddles for motorists and pedestrians to negotiate
Police say scores of minor roads in East Devon were closed by landslips, standing water or flood damage and motorists were urged not to make journeys.

The town had been preparing for a carnival this weekend, ahead of its annual Tar Barrel Rolling festival on 5 November - but its bonfire was flooded out.

Ottery St Mary, population 7,000, is the birthplace of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and is renowned for its thatched cottages and picturesque winding streets.


Comment: Now, prepare yourself for the "human interest" story that is supposed to turn on your emotions and soften you up for the propaganda at the end.


The baby boy who stormed into the world

The hailstones were thundering down all around, the flood waters were rising and it was the middle of a freezing night.

But Juliet Hall knew that she and her husband had to brave the storm.

Her waters had just broken - and she was sure the baby wasn't going to wait for the foul weather to subside.

Born during storm
© Daily MailJuliet and Phil Hall with baby Nathan who was born during the storm
Mrs Hall, 34, and her husband Phil set out for the hospital around midnight in the appalling conditions, but were soon forced to stop.

The new mother, a PhD student, recalls the drama of the moment: 'I was kneeling in the back of the car and when we stopped and I saw the flashing lights I said "please don't let the road be closed" but of course it was.'

'When the police said we could not go on I was about to cry but we told them I was in labour and they said they would do what they could.'

She and Mr Hall, 42, a software company boss, had a nail-biting ten-minute wait by the side of the road.

'A police 4x4 came in about ten minutes,' Mrs Hall said.

'They transferred us to another ambulance on the other side of the flood and by the time I got to hospital I was in quite a lot of pain.'

Yesterday afternoon, after giving birth to a healthy 6lb 10oz boy at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, she was able to look back on the episode with a smile.

'It was an exciting way for a child to be brought into the world,' she said.

The couple named their son Nathan Christopher Michael - rather appropriate given that St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers, and legend has it that he carried the infant Jesus across a river.


Comment: Oh, geeze! Spare us! They are actually playing the "Jesus Card"!


'Christopher is very appropriate but in fact he got the name from his great-grandfather,' Mrs Hall said.


Comment: Now, here it comes, the slam-dunk propaganda tucked in there right at the end of the article.

For the first time, scientists have proved that mankind is to blame for the warming of the Antarctic.

The study by the Met Office used temperature records from the last 50 years in new computer models.

The results showed that the collapse of the ice shelves cannot be explained by natural variations in weather. The report in Nature Geosciences means that man-made climate change has now been shown to be taking place on every continent.

Comment: Don't say we didn't warn you! For the first time what? "Scientists have proved that mankind is to blame for the warming of the Antarctic."

The facts are that there are are dozens of studies that show man's contribution to any current global warming is very minuscule without discounting the fact that climate change is a reality. We certainly think that the climate is changing dramatically and have been saying so for years. Just have a look at our series of articles linked from the left sidebar under Al "Comet Head" Gore.

The following link is just one such story that critically looks at many other possibilities, rather than making such simple nonsense statements that the above article closes with.

Sun Warms and Cools the Earth
To fit these data into a global carbon cycle IPCC assumed a speculative lifetime for man-made CO2 in the atmosphere as 50 to 200 years, ignoring observational evidence from 37 studies (based on natural and nuclear bomb carbon-14, Suess effect, radon-222, solubility data and carbon-13/carbon-12 mass balance) documenting that the real lifetime is about 5 years [4]. With CO2 atmospheric lifetime of about 5 years the maximum amount of man-made CO2 remaining now in the atmosphere is only 4%, and not 36% (see review in (Segalstad, 1998).
This is a prime example of the inability to think critically. Just because some polar warming cannot be explained by natural variations in the data (who's data?) from the last 50 years in no way implies that the climate changes are at all man-made. How about millions of years of data that warming periods precede ice ages when there was no man supposedly around to cause the warming?

How about recent reports that suggest that polar warming may be due to volcanic processes beneath some areas of ice?

A few comments about this article were written by a Cass Forum member, "Ocean"; they are well worth repeating here:

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory (hypothesis).

It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations.

Let's see what data points we now have:

1) Average annual temperatures have not surpassed 1998 (NOAA) (University of Alabama)

2) Average annual temperatures are now trending downward since 1998 (NOAA) (University of Alabama)

3) Ocean temperatures have not risen since 2000 when the 3000 Argo buoys were launched. The buoys even show a slight decrease in ocean temperatures

4) The Arctic ice froze to February levels by December 07, there are 1mm more per sq km than before (previous was 13mm sq km)

5) The Arctic ice is 20cm thicker than "normal" (whatever that is)

6) All polar bear pods are stable or growing (NOAA/PBS)

7) Mount Kilimanjaro is not melting because of global warming, rather "sublimation"

8) The Antarctic is not "melting", it is growing in most places, the sloughing off at the edges is normal as the ice mass grows

9) The majority of the Antarctic is 8 degrees below "normal" (again, whatever that is)

10) The coveted .7 degree rise in temperatures over the last 100 years has been wiped out with last years below "normal" temperatures (NOAA coolest winter since 2001)

11) Al Gore's film was just deemed "propaganda" in a court of law in the UK as many points could not be substantiated by scientists

12) It was also just revealed that some of the footage in Al Gore's film was CGI. The ice shelf collapse was from the movie The Day After Tomorrow (ABC)

13) One of the scientists that originally thought that CO2 preceded the warming has now found with new data that the CO2 rise follows the warming (Dr David Evans)

14) Solar minimums magnify cold spells. August 2008 was the first time since 1913 there were no sun spots.

15) The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the 20th century (no SUVs)

16) Many scientists are now predicting 30 years of cooling.

17) The greenhouse effect is real, our small contribution to it cannot even be measured

18) Several publications, including those that are 'warmist' have recently written that the 'natural' cycles of the earth may 'mask' AGW. Give me a break.

19) 31,000 scientist have signed a petition against AGW!

With China (1 new coal fired plant coming on line each week) and India spewing millions of tons of CO2 in to the atmosphere, along with the rest of the world increasing their CO2 'production' over the last ten years, these results should be impossible.