The "Queen of Hills" was witness to the record breaking single day highest snowfall in the month of January in the last eight years.

The heavy snowfall continued on second consecutive day on Friday till late night and recorded a total of 63.6 cms of snow in two days in Shimla.

Arctic air sweeping through Canada and parts of the United States sent temperatures plunging to record lows on Wednesday with a wind chill of minus 40 degrees (Celsius and Fahrenheit).

Canada was the coldest nation in the world at the start of the day with with temperatures as low as minus 43.1 degrees Celsius (-45.6 Fahrenheit) in the Northwest Territories, according to public broadcaster CBC.

In Ottawa, buildings cracked in the cold, making sounds like the crash of a wrecking ball.

Tropical Storm Oswald's heavy rains have caused flooding in Queensland, Australia and NASA's TRMM satellite measured almost two feet of rain fell in certain areas.

Tropical cyclone Oswald's sustained winds have never been greater than 35 knots (~40.2 mph) but the storm's extreme rainfall has resulted in widespread flooding in Australia over northern Queensland. Many roads have been reported flooded resulting in some communities being cut off.

Floods in southern Mozambique have displaced up to 70 000 people and cut power exports to energy-hungry neighbour South Africa in half, officials said on Thursday.

The south and centre of the country have been placed on red alert after experiencing the heaviest rainfall since devastating floods killed some 800 people in 2000.

In some places current water levels are higher than they were during that disaster.

As the Limpopo River raged through the southern town of Chokwe, people slept in the open, many by the roadside, local media reported. The record flood levels submerged houses in some places, emergency officials said.

"We are sending seven days of food for 70 000 people," the country's international humanitarian head Lola Castro told AFP.

Report says thousands of lives could have been saved and damage to ecosystems avoided if early warnings heeded.

Europe has failed to learn the lessons from many environmental and health disasters like Chernobyl, leaded petrol and DDT insecticides, and is now ignoring warnings about bee deaths, GM food and nanotechnology, according to an 800-page report by the European Environment Agency.

Thousands of lives could have been saved and extensive damage to ecosystems avoided if the "precautionary principle" had been applied on the basis of early warnings, say the authors of the 2013 Late Lessons from Early warnings report published on Wednesday.

They accuse industry of working to corrupt or undermine regulation by spinning and manipulating research and applying pressure on governments for financial benefit. "[It has] deliberately recruited reputable scientists, media experts and politicians to call on if their products were linked to possible hazards. Manufacturing doubt, disregarding scientific evidence of risks and claiming over-regulation appear to be a deliberate strategy for some industry groups and think tanks to undermine precautionary decision-making."

The peer-reviewed study, which is aimed to improve understanding of scientific information, looks at 18 areas including radiation from mobile phones, birth control pills in the aquatic environment, and invasive species. It found that governments often introduced laws much too late to prevent deaths and massive financial costs, but were highly likely to ignore scientific warnings and resist any regulation. The authors found more than 80 cases where no regulation was introduced when it later turned out that the risk from a technology or chemical was real, or still unproven.

More counterpunch to Obama's recent speech.

Rocket scientists -vs- James Hansen, "in God we trust, all others bring data"

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ - A group of 20 ex-NASA scientists have concluded that the science used to support the man-made climate change hypothesis is not settled and no convincing physical evidence exists to support catastrophic climate change forecasts.

Beginning in February 2012, the group of scientists calling themselves The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) team received presentations by scientists representing all sides of the climate change debate and embarked on an in-depth review of a number of climate studies.

If you have not read this yet, now is the time. Given what president Obama recently said about skeptics in his inauguration address, I thought this 2010 article would be worth revisiting.

In Germany, there's a revolution going on. That revolution is that they are backing away from the global warming issue, and taking on much more pragmatic outlook on it an many things "green". For example, they are going big on coal power. Below is one excerpt from the series, describing the David and Goliath story of Steve McIntyre. Links to all eight articles of the series follow. I suggest sharing this far and wide, because it tells the skeptic story quite well. - Anthony

Need proof that human activities can influence the environment? Consider this Facebook update from the National Weather Service office in Pittsburgh Tuesday evening:

Check out the band of snow being generated by the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Plant near Shippingport. Up to an inch of snow has fallen as a result of the steam billowing from the stacks.

A formal investigation was launched Tuesday to determine the cause of death of about 280 sea turtles in the Gulf of Dulce, on the southern Pacific coast, a situation that was denounced by environmentalists, the Costa Rican Environment Ministry said. "The initial aim is to collect information and verify if it was ... caused by human action," the ministry said.

The alert over the finding of the dead turtles was given by the environmental organization Widecast, which had received a report from residents of the Osa peninsula. The reports of the environmentalists say that along with the turtles, other sea creatures had turned up dead along the coast, including sailfish and marlin.

Although authorities have not yet been able to determine the turles' cause of death, some hypotheses point to fishing in the area using lines that may be several kilometers (miles) long.

An unusual event playing out high in the atmosphere above the Arctic Circle is setting the stage for what could be weeks upon weeks of frigid cold across wide swaths of the U.S., having already helped to bring cold and snowy weather to parts of Europe.This phenomenon, known as a "sudden stratospheric warming event," started on Jan. 6, but is something that is just beginning to have an effect on weather patterns across North America and Europe.

While the physics behind sudden stratospheric warming events are complicated, their implications are not: such events are often harbingers of colder weather in North America and Eurasia. The ongoing event favors colder and possibly stormier weather for as long as four to eight weeks after the event, meaning that after a mild start to the winter, the rest of this month and February could bring the coldest weather of the winter season to parts of the U.S., along with a heightened chance of snow.