A new paper just published in Geophysical Research Letters by Roger Davies and Mathew Molloy of the University of Auckland finds that over the past decade the global average effective cloud height has declined and that "If sustained, such a decrease would indicate a significant measure of negative cloud feedback to global warming."

Davies and Molloy are quick to point out that part of the decline from 2000 to 2010 in cloud height is due to the timing and variability of El Niño/La Niña events over the same period, however, there still seems to be evidence that at least part of the decline may remain even when El Niño/La Niña variability is accounted for.

Figure 1 (below) shows the history of the effective cloud height, as determined by Davies and Molloy from satellite observations, from March 2000 through February 2010.

Acrid smoke from a fire at a sprawling trash dump blanketed swaths of Jamaica's capital Thursday, and officials warned people to stay indoors to avoid exposure to potentially dangerous pollutants.

Jamaica's emergency management office said it would likely take three more days to bring the fire under control and five days after that before the foul-smelling smoke stopped billowing from the Riverton City solid waste dump.

Firefighters have struggled to extinguish the blaze at the seaside dump since it erupted Monday night. On Thursday, the waste management authority appealed for help to people with water trucks and heavy-duty equipment.

More than 20 children have recently died due to the cold weather in Kabul which the Afghan capital has been experiencing its worst cold-snap and heaviest snows in at least 15 years, the National Weather Center said Wednesday. According to an Afghan based TV channel, some of the internally displaced people of the country warn that cold weather may claim more lives. Lack of food and firewood is said to be their main problems in the winter.

This year's severe cold weather has raised concerns among the Afghan population, especially the displaced families. "In this winter, eight children, three old men and women have so far lost their lives," one of the displaced people said. "We cannot pass the winter by burning plastic, paper and pieces of clothes. We really need help.""Living under these tents is very difficult," said another displaced person. "Life is difficult when you don't have anything to eat or burn."The families living under the tents in Kabul are badly in need of help and most of them may perish if not helped."We ask everyone to help these needy families, they can help one family and protect them from cold weather," Head of the Afghan Red Crescent, Fatima Gilani said.

The Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Returnees rejects reports about the death of 20 children due to severe cold in Kabul, a spokesman for the Ministry, Salamuddin Jurat said on Tuesday.The refugees living under the tents have not faced any kinds of losses so far, he added. "The reports are baseless and untrue," the spokesman said.Meanwhile, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health confirms the deaths due to the severe cold in Kabul."Because the cold weather was unprecedented and they were living under the tents, they died before arriving to our health facility during last month," Spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health, Ghulam Sakhi Kargar told the channel.

There are currently more than 30,000 poor families living under tents in Kabul. There reports of high level of maternity deaths in these camps with 144 out of 1,000 children under five years of age.This comes as the recent avalanches in Badakhshan province claimed lives of more than 40 people.Several houses have reportedly been destroyed in these avalanches. Several routes in Badakhshan, Ghor and Daikundi provinces have been closed due to heavy snow falls.

Belgrade - Thick ice closed vast swathes of the Danube on Thursday, crippling shipping on Europe's busiest waterway, as the death toll from bitter cold across the continent rose to at least 460.

As it has every day for nearly two weeks, the brutal cold claimed lives in several countries and killed dozens more in weather-related accidents.

The 2,860-kilometre (1,780-mile) Danube, which flows through 10 countries and is vital for transport, power, irrigation, industry and fishing, was wholly or partially blocked from Austria to its mouth on the Black Sea.

This week more than 200 dolphins were found dead along a 106-kilometer stretch at the beaches of Lambayeque.

Authorities have not yet been able to determine the cause of the deaths.

According to El Comercio, Edward Barriga, head of Peru's Ocean Institute (Imarpe) in Lambayeque, ordered samples be sent to Lima, for further analysis.

More strandings are expected after 129 dolphins beached themselves on Cape Cod in the last three weeks, with 92 dying in "the single largest stranding" of dolphins in the Northeast since at least 1999, the International Fund for Animal Welfare reported Monday.

On Sunday, four dolphins were stranded along Cape Cod's hook-shaped peninsula and were quickly helped back to sea. The Massachusetts peninsula sees many dolphin strandings each year, but the 129 since Jan. 12 is typically about what rescuers see over an entire year, based on records that go back to 1999, IFAW marine mammal rescue manager Katie Moore told msnbc.com.

More than 30 more deaths have been reported as a result of the bitterly freezing weather that has swept across Europe.

A dam wall broke and flooded an entire village in southern Bulgaria when snow melted rapidly as a result of heavy rain.

Four residents drowned and four others died when their cars were swept away by the torrent of water.

"There are demolished houses and people in distress," the interior ministry said in a statement.

Over the last few weeks, we've seen a number of high-profile studies come out looking at global climate that refer to a mystery. According to ice core and sediment core records from many places on the globe, there was a very large volcanic eruption in 1258 A.D. - so big that it injected somewhere between 190-270 megatonnes into the atmosphere (to put in another way, it produced between 300 and 600 megatonnes of sulfuric acid).

This would make the 1258 eruption ~8 times larger than Krakatau in 1883 and two times larger than Tambora in 1815 (when comparing their sulfate injection mass; Emile-Geay et al., 2008). So, how does the geologic community (or historical community for that matter) not have any record of such an massive eruption that happened less than 800 years ago?

First, I should discuss a little bit of the evidence for the 1258 A.D. eruption. As mentioned above, there is a record of increased sulfur and ash particles in ice cores from both the North and South Poles, along with other places such as sediment from Lake Malawi (Emile-Geay et al., 2008). Now, many of these ice cores and sediment records have been dated, so we can correlate them across the globe (within error). The combined data points towards an eruption that occurred in 1258 (or possibly 1259) - in fact, based on some of the weather records from Europe, the date could be constrained to between January and mid-May 1258 (Stothers 2000).

At first glance, it may appear as though tsunami is poised to crash over the Florida coastline.

But much to the relief of Panama City residents, this breath-taking series of photographs shows a natural phenomenon far less destructive - waves of clouds.

Helicopter pilot JR Hott captured these breathtaking images, which show the low-lying haze swooping over high-rise buildings down the coast.

KATU reports Mr Hott captured the images hovering over the Gulf of Mexico after one of his pilots came in from a flight on Sunday.

Before his chopper could be engulfed by the heavy fog, Mr Hott flew up to capture the wave-like formations.

'We jumped into helicopter and took off,' he said. But he didn't have long to descend. 'Within a few minutes after we landed, it covered up the helipad,' the seasoned pilot said.

Video of a dead whale shark being pulled from the sea off of Pakistan raises more questions about the school-bus-size fish's demise than it answers, scientists say.

Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune posted video on Tuesday (Feb. 7) of a crane hauling a whale shark carcass onto a pier in Karachi. According to the newspaper, the owner of the nearby Charai Fishery, spotted the animal floating "unconscious" 10 days earlier, 93 miles (150 kilometers) from the fishery.

But sharks don't fall unconscious, said Bob Hueter, the director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. And if they stop swimming for any reason, they aren't likely to bob along with the currents.

"If and when they die, they don't float, they sink," Hueter told LiveScience. "So to have one just kind of wash up is very rare. I can only think of a few cases over the years around the world where this is happened."

It's impossible to tell from the video and news stories what really happened to the whale shark, said Jennifer Schmidt, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies whale sharks.