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Two porpoises found washed up on Sussex coast in UK


The Argus
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 15:19 UTC
Image
© William Kent
A porpoise washed up on a Bexhill beach following heavy winds and stormy conditions - making it the second in a week.

The five foot long animal was found dead lying on the shingle of South Cliff beach just before 11am on Saturday.

This comes after dog walkers discovered a decomposing baby porpoise the week before.

A spokesman for Sussex Wildlife Trust said it was impossible to know if the two deaths were linked but Bexhill Coastguard reported that the deaths were likely to be down to the bad weather.

Danny Groves, from the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, added: "The large numbers of whales, dolphins and porpoises found dead or stranded around the world's coastlines each year are often helpless, and usually die within a few hours or days if not attended to in the right way.

"Cause of death could be for a number of reasons - old age, illness or due to man-made threats such as injury from boat propellers or entanglement in fishing nets and gear.

"Nets and fishing gear are the biggest killer of whales and dolphins across the globe, causing terrible injury and typically death by suffocation."

The latest porpoise to be washed up was removed by the council.
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Clock

U.S.: 4,406 record cold temperatures in January; 1,073 snowfall records

Mark Morano
Climate Depot
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 07:34 UTC
Image
© HAMweather
4406 Record Cold Temps, 1259 Record Warm temps, 1073 Snowfall records

http://wx.hamweather.com/maps/climate/records/4week/us.html?cat=maxtemp,mintemp,snow,lowma x,highmin,

Related Links:
Climate Scientist Who Got It Right Predicts 20 More Years of Global Cooling: 'For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC," said Geologist Dr. Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including "Evidence Based Climate Science," which was published in 2011.

Forget global warming!? Earth undergoing global COOLING since 2002! Climate Scientist Dr. Judith Curry: 'Attention in the public debate seems to be moving away from the 15-17 year 'pause' to the cooling since 2002' - Growing number of scientists are predicting global cooling: Russia's Pulkovo Observatory: 'We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years'

Record snowfall in New York City

Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is 26% above normal as of Jan 30 2014: 'On track to have the highest minimum in the modern satellite era'
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Red Flag

Winter storm prompts state of emergency in New Jersey and New York - running out of salt


The Raw Story
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 12:32 UTC
Image
© Raw Story
Treacherous snow and freezing rain struck the northeastern United States on Wednesday, disrupting thousands of flights and causing traffic chaos for millions of Americans.

A state of emergency was declared in the states of New Jersey and New York, where dwindling reserves of salt - used to melt snow and road ice - was a problem.

By late January, New Jersey had already used 277,000 tonnes of salt, 18,000 more than during the entire previous winter.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy on Wednesday ordered all non-essential employees to stay home and a number of schools were also closed.

Huge snowfall was expected across a swath of the northeastern United States, arriving in New England from the central United States. Snow will be followed in several places by freezing rain, forecasters said.
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Info

More than half of Chinese rivers have "disappeared" since 1990s

Emily Ford
dgrnewsservice.org
Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:45 UTC
Image
About 28,000 rivers have disappeared from China's state maps, an absence seized upon by environmentalists as evidence of the irreversible natural cost of developmental excesses.

More than half of the rivers previously thought to exist in China now appear to be missing, according to the 800,000 surveyors who compiled the first national water census, leaving Beijing fumbling to explain the cause.

Only 22,909 rivers, covering an area of 100 square kilometres were located by surveyors, compared with the more than 50,000 present in the 1990s, a three-year study by the Ministry of Water Resources and the National Bureau of Statistics found.

Officials blame the apparent loss on climate change, arguing that it has caused waterways to vanish, and on mistakes by earlier cartographers. But environmental experts say that the disappearance of the rivers is a real and a direct manifestation of headlong, ill-conceived development, where projects are often imposed or approved without public consultation.

The United Nations considers China one of the 13 countries most affected by water scarcity, as industrial toxins have poisoned historic water sources and were blamed last year for causing the Yangtze to turn an alarming shade of red. This month the carcasses of about 16,000 dead pigs dumped in the river have been pulled from its waters, and 1,000 dead ducks were found dumped this week in the Nanhe River in the southwestern Sichuan province.

Ma Jun, a water expert at the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said that the missing rivers were a cause for "great attention" and underscored the urgent need for a more sustainable mode of development.
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Ice Cube

Heavy snow, ice, rain bury two-thirds of U.S.


breitbart.com
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 11:27 UTC
Image
© Matt Rourke
A downed tree covered in ice lays atop a minivan after a winter storm Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014, in Philadelphia.

A major winter storm advancing across the U.S. midsection Wednesday brought heavy snow, heavy ice accumulation and heavy rainfall to two-thirds of the country.

At least 115 million people in more than a dozen states -- more than a third of U.S. population -- were under some form of winter weather alert, the Weather Channel reported.

More than 2,000 flights were canceled and nearly 1,100 were delayed as of early Wednesday, flight-tracking website Flightaware.com said.

Roads and highways were closed due to the weather and accidents, and mass transit was curtailed in many areas.

Government offices and schools were shut in hard-hit areas. Many school districts already exceeded their "snow day" allotments, so they were now deducting days from students' spring break or adding days to the school year.

The governors of at least three states -- Mississippi, Kansas and New Jersey -- declared states of emergency to deal with storm response.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said late Tuesday New York had 1,789 plows, 359 loaders and 4,185 operators "stationed and ready for the storm, along with 259,605 tons of salt."

New York City's Office of Emergency Management issued a hazardous travel advisory.

Other Northeast cities declared snow emergencies.
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Ice Cube

Rapid ice coverage of the Great Lakes surges to 62 percent, may bring significant consequences for Michigan weather

Mark Torregrossa
MLive.com
Wed, 29 Jan 2014 10:16 UTC
Image
© Space Science And Engineering Center- University of Wisconsin - Madison
This higher resolution satellite photo from Tuesday January 28, 2014 shows ice along the western side of Lake Michigan. It also shows the point at which open water starts, the lake effect bands of snow form.
The Great Lakes have reached 62 percent ice coverage due to extreme cold, and in the weeks ahead that can have a triple-barreled consequence on Michigan's weather: More cold. Less lake-effect snow. More sun.

The coverage is growing rapidly. The ice area more than doubled in just one recent week, from 22 percent coverage on Jan. 15 to 48 percent by Jan. 22. From Jan. 22 to Jan. 28 the average Great Lakes ice grew another 14 percent.

Lake Superior is 69 percent covered in ice. Lake Michigan has 46 percent ice cover, while Lake Huron is 71 percent ice covered. Lake Erie is almost totally covered with ice, at 96 percent. Lake Ontario has 26 percent ice cover.

George Leshkevich, physical scientist at NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, says the oddity this year is how early in the winter this amount of ice cover has formed.

The 62 percent ice cover already ranks this year as 17th in maximum ice coverage in the last 40 years. 1994 had the highest ice cover at 94.8 percent.

Dry arctic air has taken over much of the Great Lakes region, allowing for clearing skies over land, and even over parts of the lakes. That gave us a high resolution satellite photo posted Tuesday Jan. 28, 2014 by the Space Science and Engineering Center.

The photo shows a large area of ice formed on the west side of Lake Michigan, off the shore of northern Indiana through the Chicago area, and up the Wisconsin shoreline.
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Ice Cube

'Climate Scientist Who Got It Right'

Anthony Watts
wattsupwiththat.com
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 09:53 UTC
Image
© Wikimedia Commons.
Earth at the last glacial maximum of the current ice age
Dr. Don Easterbrook - a climate scientist and glacier expert from Washington State who correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase - says to expect colder temperatures for at least the next two decades.

Easterbrook's predictions were "right on the money" seven years before Al Gore and the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for warning that the Earth was facing catastrophic warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide, which Gore called a "planetary emergency."

"When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they're not even close. They're off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That's more than the entire amount of warming we've had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it's luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button," Easterbrook told CNSNews.com.

"For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC," said Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including "Evidence Based Climate Science," which was published in 2011. (See EasterbrookL coming-century-predictions.pdf)
      Read More...
Cloud Lightning

Yet another storm batters UK


BBC
Wed, 05 Feb 2014 09:06 UTC
Image

A section of rail track dangles over the sea after the wall collapsed at Dawlish

UK storms wash away railway line and leave thousands without power

Parts of Britain are being hit by a powerful storm which has washed away a stretch of railway line and left thousands of homes without electricity.

The Environment Agency says around 328 homes have been flooded since Friday evening - with more heavy rain forecast into the weekend.

A section of the sea wall in Dawlish, Devon, collapsed and left the main railway line suspended in mid-air.

David Cameron has announced an extra £100m for flood works.

At Prime Minister's Questions he pledged £75m for repairs over the next year, £10m for urgent work in Somerset - where several rivers have flooded - and £15m for maintenance.

He said: "Whatever is required, whether it is dredging work on the rivers Tone and Parrett, whether it is support for our emergency services, whether it is fresh money for flood defences, whether it's action across the board, this government will help those families and get this issue sorted."
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Cloud Precipitation

Apocalypse in Slovenian forests due to freezing rain and snow


MMC RTV SLO
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 19:38 UTC
Slovenia ice storm forest damage
© 2014 Mariša Bizjak
In some areas up to 80 per cent of the forest has been damaged. Some forests in the regions of Postojna and Pivka are completely in tatters due to sleet and snow.
Devastating sleet, which has been crushing trees under its weight all over the country, has caused the largest catastrophe ever to hit Slovenian forests.

Damjan Oražen, director of the Slovenian Forest Institute, has stated that according to early estimates as many as 500,000 hectares are damaged, i.e. almost half of all Slovenian forests. According to Oražen, the total volume of fallen wood amounts to 4 million cubic metres, which equals the entire average annual harvest. What is more, since the current conditions do not allow forestry teams to estimate the damage on the spot, the estimated numbers are not final.

Falling branches and trees pose danger throughout the country at the moment, and it will continue to be so until the ice melts. Therefore, walkers through forested areas are advised caution, and should be aware that the situation is not likely to fully return to normal until the spring.
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Snowflake Cold

Update! Now 25% of Slovenia is without power, 40% schools closed as blizzards compound ice storm

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sun, 02 Feb 2014 08:01 UTC
Slovenia Ice Storm Road Cleanup
© www.rtvslo.si
Firefighters work through the night to clear fallen tree limbs

Heavy freezing rain in Slovenia has caused widespread power outages and the closing of many roads across the European nation. Approximately 10% of the country was without power due to downed power lines and damaged transformers.

Prime Minister Alenka Bratušek announced that Slovenia had requested aid from the European Union, as well as help from neighboring Italy and Croatia to help repair the country's damaged electrical distribution network. She also stated that it may take up to a week to complete all the repairs, as current icy conditions and fallen trees and branches on roadways are impeding repair crews.

Comment: Update 5 February 2014

Further blizzards have hit Eastern Europe, leaving 25% of Slovenians without power and 40% of schools closed.

Image


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