Earth ChangesS

Bizarro Earth

Record Cold Conditions Kill Nine People in Czech Republic

Record cold temperatures in the Czech Republic have taken a severe toll, with nine deaths from exposure recorded by the end of the weekend. Most of those who died were homeless, among them three people in Prague and four in Ostrava. Michael Raymond Stannett is the head of the Salvation Army in the Czech Republic; he described the situation on the ground.

"We have a night shelter that is full - 40 beds - and we also have a very large day centre which we've now opened up at night to allow people to sleep on the floor or in the chairs during the emergency cold period. Over the last week or so we've been allowing an extra 100 people to sleep on the floor in the day centre. With the hostel capacity at 52, and with the night shelter, you are talking more than 200 people sleeping in our accommodation."

I imagine this is something that is difficult to keep up in the long term...

Igloo

Record Snowfall Blankets Moscow

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© Photo: RIA Novosti
Monday's heavy snowfall in Moscow of at least 19 centimeters beat the 2002 record of 9 centimeters for December 21, meteorologists say, citing 50-centimeter high snowdrifts still in place on the city's streets.


Bizarro Earth

Winter Freeze Kills 79 in Poland

Warsaw - Ten people have died of cold in Poland over the past day, taking the toll since winter set in earlier this month to 79, police said Tuesday.

A national police spokeswoman told AFP that 10 people had been found dead since Monday.

The majority of the victims were homeless men who died while drunk, police said.

Fifty-two of the 79 deaths recorded since December 1 occurred since Friday, as temperatures plunged to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit).

Bizarro Earth

Big Freeze Brings Misery and Death to Europe

Freezing weather which has killed more than 90 people is continuing to cause transport problems across Europe.

Air, rail and road services have been severely disrupted but some routes have now resumed.

Eurostar resumed a limited service and flights restarted from Europe's third-biggest airport - in Frankfurt - on Tuesday after it was closed overnight.

In Poland, where 10 people died in a single day, the winter death toll now stands at 79.

Alarm Clock

Deadly Cold Across Europe and Russia

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A wave of frigid air spilled down over Europe and Russia from the Arctic in mid-December, creating a deadly cold snap. According to BBC.com, at least 90 people had died in Europe, including 79 people, mostly homeless, in Poland. In places, the bitter cold was accompanied by heavy snow, which halted rail and air traffic for several days during the week of Christmas.

This image shows the impact of the cold snap on land surface temperatures across the region from December 11 - 18, 2009, compared to the 2000 - 2008 average. The measurements were made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite.

Places where temperatures were up to 20 degrees Celsius below average are blue, locations where temperatures were average are cream-colored, and places where temperatures were above average are red. Light gray patches show where clouds were so persistent during the week that MODIS could not make measurements of the land surface temperature.

Attention

St. Petersburg experiences heaviest snowfall in 130 years

More than 3,000 people have been recruited by City Hall to clear the snow as Governor Valentina Matviyenko said that St. Petersburg stands on the verge of collapse.

Around 1,000 civilians and more than 2,000 soldiers have been out on the streets on a round-the-clock basis saving the city from what some have described as a snow siege. According to the State Meteorological Center, over the past weekend St. Petersburg experienced its heaviest snowfall in 130 years. In some parts of the city there were over 35 centimeters of snowfall.

In most parts of the city parking was severely restricted, while traffic jams almost brought the city to a standstill. Average speeds on city roads since Friday have been under 30 kilometers per hour according to the traffic police. Many dual-carriageway streets have in effect been turned into single-carriageway thoroughfares as a result of the massive piles of snow on each side.

Igloo

4 More Die of Cold in Uttar Pradesh; Toll Reaches 18

Four more persons, including a woman, died of nipping cold overnight, taking the toll of cold-related deaths in Uttar Pradesh to 18.

According to reports, three people died of cold in Saraikhawaja and Nevriya areas of Jaunpur district in the last 24 hours.

Earlier, two more persons died of chilly weather in Jaunpur district.

As per reports from Bijnore, a woman died due to cold during bonfire arrangement in Tikkopur village today.

Propaganda

Peru's mountain people face fight for survival as bitterly cold winter follows bitterly cold summer

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© Martin Mejia/APA farmer walks with her son during a potato harvest in Huancavelica, southern Peru.
Climate change is bringing freezing temperatures to poor villages where families have long existed on the margins of survival. Now some must choose whether to save the animals that give them a living, or their children

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru's Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

The few hundred people who live here are hardened to poverty and months of sub-zero temperatures during the long winter. But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early. First their animals and now their children are dying and in such escalating numbers that many fear that life in the village may be rapidly approaching an end.

In a world growing ever hotter, Huancavelica is an anomaly. These communities, living at the edge of what is possible, face extinction because of increasingly cold conditions in their own microclimate, which may have been altered by the rapid melting of the glaciers.

Comment: What planet do Guardian contributers inhabit? Clearly not Earth in 2010! It is freezing in Cuba, Portugal, Thailand!

Igloo

Fruits freeze, iguanas drop from trees in Freezing Florida

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© Wilfredo Lee/APA stunned iguana lies on the sidewalk after having fallen from a tree Wednesday in Surfside, Florida. The non-native species becomes immobilized in the cold.
Tourist beachgoers wrap up as Arctic blast hits so-called Sunshine State

Across the so-called Sunshine State, oranges and strawberries are freezing, icicles are hanging off palm fronds, and iguanas paralyzed by the cold are falling out of trees.

Temperatures have plunged as low as the 20s in recent days, forcing people used to wearing flip-flops year-round to put on earmuffs.

"I am a warm-weather boy. There's no way I'm going out there," laughed Archie Adkins of Pensacola Beach as he pointed at bundled-up beachgoers.

Igloo

Cold Weather: Winter is Coldest in Peoples' Memories

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© Tony Dejak/APGert Chisholm, Linda Brockett, and Sandy Sotak walk the streets of Beachwood, Ohio, Tuesday. Forecasters say snow will continue to fall on parts of northeast Ohio that already have two feet or more on the ground.
Cold weather across much of the East has orange growers pulling all-nighters in Florida, city workers in Atlanta scrambling to fix burst pipes, and the homeless struggling in Memphis.

Atlanta

Remember those nasty 1970s winters?

Well, Americans are reliving those cold old days right now as cold weather threatens orange and strawberry growers in Florida, has social service crews working overtime in Tennessee, and fracturing old water mains in Atlanta.

Across the South, Midwest, and Eastern seaboard, a stubborn "arctic outbreak," tacked onto an already cold return to work for many Americans, augurs what meteorologist at AccuWeather.com are calling "the coldest winter in many people's memory."