Extreme Temperatures
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Snowflake

Spain registers first snowfall of season high in the Sierra Nevada

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Sierra Nevada
Just a few days before the start of October, the first snowflakes have fallen in Spain, on Europe's most southerly ski resort.

Summer is well and truly over in Spain, and winter sports fans are getting excited as the first snowflakes fall in one of the country's best ski resorts.

Spanish ski resorts: Eight of the best

The Sierra Nevada ski station in Granada, southern Spain, recorded its first snowfall on Monday and posted a series of videos and photographs, welcoming the wintery weather.
Breve vídeo grabado esta mañana en el corazón de #SierraNevada mientras nevaba #Monodenieve #Winteriscoming pic.twitter.com/Z8TloVbaZa

— Sierra Nevada (@websierranevada) September 28, 2015
The highest points of the ski resort - the most southerly in Europe and Spain's highest with peaks of 3,300m - were sprinkled with a fresh snowfall on Monday (see video above).

Snowflake

Record breaking September snowstorm hits Northern Alaska

Snow Fairbanks
© University of Alaska/TwitterThe first measurable snow of the season blanketed the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus on Sep. 25, 2015.
Fall's arrival may have been greeted with a collective warm shrug of the shoulders in the Lower 48 states, but Alaskans have already broken out winter coats.

Officially, 6.7 inches of snow blanketed the city of Fairbanks Friday, turning the city into a winter wonderland just days into fall. Not only was this the city's first measurable snow of the season, but this was the city's third heaviest calendar-day September snow on record, topped only by Sep. 13, 1992 (7.8 inches) and Sep. 29, 1972 (7 inches). This was the city's heaviest September snow event since a four-day, 17.3-inch snow blitz from Sep. 11-14, 1992.

Fairbanks only averages 1.9 inches of snow during the month of September. Two observers in College Hills north of downtown Fairbanks measured 9 inches of snow as of Friday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service.

The Alaska DOT reported about 10 inches of snow in the hills near Nenana west-southwest of Fairbanks along the Parks Highway, the primary link between Fairbanks, Denali National Park and Anchorage.

Comment: Winter is coming!


Snowflake

Winter snowfall makes early visit to Salzburg, Austria

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© APA/GindlThe Böcksteinstrasse in Gasteiner Tal.
After a summer of record high temperatures winter has already arrived in some parts of Austria - with the Grossglockner alpine road in the state of Salzburg closed on Thursday for safety reasons after snowfall.

"We've had 50 centimetres of snow. Between the Fuscher Törl and the Hochtor, there are snow drifts of up to two meters," deputy police superintendent Peter Embacher said. "We have three snowploughs and two snow blowers on the go. We hope that today we can clear all the snow and reopen the road by Friday," he added.

The spa town of Bad Gastein also saw snow, and the road to Sportgastein had to be closed on Wednesday, after 40 centimetres of fresh snow. On Thursday morning drivers were told to use snow chains on the B99 road.

Arrow Up

A step closer to the end? Syria war prompts pull from doomsday seed vault

Svalbard Global Seed Vault
© Associated Press Photo/John McConnicoSnow blows off the Svalbard Global Seed Vault before being inaugurated at sunrise.
A seed storage vault built into the side of an Arctic mountain to protect global food supplies in case of global cataclysm is being tapped by researchers in the Middle East who say the Syrian war has devastated their crops.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built in 2008 by the Norwegian government as the world's largest secure seed storage, is intended to protect thousands of varieties of essential food crops against things like nuclear disaster, disease and climate change.

Now, the devastation brought on by the war in Syria, which has raged on for four years and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, has prompted researchers to request some of the samples they gave to the vault, as their collection of crops in Aleppo was destroyed in the fighting.

Among the samples requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) crops resistant to drought that could help scientists develop and secure food supplies in the face of climate change in dry areas worldwide.

Protecting the world's biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault," said Brian Lainoff, spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground store, located on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

Snowflake Cold

Blizzard-like conditions strike Mt Ruapehu, New Zealand

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Mt Ruapehu , Whakapapa ski area.
A dose of severe spring weather has snowed in skiers on Mt Ruapehu.

The blizzard-conditions have dumped more than 20 centimetres of snow on the mountain side but has confined a number of skiers to their digs high on the Whakapapa ski fields.

Ruapehu Alpine Lifts commercial executive manager Simon Dickson said about 20 or 30 people were this morning taken in two convoys of snow grooming trucks back to their cars at the ski field's main car park. Many of these had to get back home for work or school tomorrow.


Snowflake

Early-season snowfall for Hatcher Pass, Alaska

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© Matt TunsethIndependence Mine State Park in Hatcher Pass.
The snow line crept down to about 3,000 feet last week, as heavy rains in the Valley made for wintry conditions in the mountains.

Hikers and berry pickers have been flocking to Hatcher Pass to check out the early-season snowfall, which dumped a couple inches at the Independence Mine State Historical Park. Although the area is still a ways off from being skiable, the park access road is now closed. However, the parking lot below the park is open year-round, and hikers need only walk about a half-mile to access the park, which contains mine ruins and abandoned out-buildings that remain from the 20th century gold mining operations.

Snowflake

Winter begins in western US as snow falls in California, Idaho, Utah and Colorado

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Literally the day after a dire report of the bleakest snow conditions in 500 years for the Sierra Nevada, snow began falling. It's not much and certainly won't matter for the four-year drought, but it's welcome.

The system was forecast to bring rain to the Valley Fire area, and a dusting of snow above 7,000 feet in Northern California, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.

In Lassen Volcanic National Park, Caltrans closed Highway 89 Wednesday because of snow. The closure was from the southern boundary to the junction with State Route 44.

Already, social media is lighting up with photos of Mammoth Mountain in the Central Sierra getting a good coating of snow earlier this week, and other resorts getting snow overnight into Wednesday. Utah and Colorado also got a good dusting, with snow flurries continuing across the Western United States.

Mars

Earth's pull is 'massaging' our moon

The Moon in front of Earth
© NASAThe Moon in front of Earth
Many scientists deny that factors external to the Earth can have a significant impact upon the Earth's climate yet there is considerable evidence that this indeed the case. Their instincts tell them that they must always look for internal factors, and internal factors alone, to explain the Earth's climate systems. Most will admit that Moon might have some influence upon the Earth's climate through the dissipation of its tidal forces in the Earth's oceans but beyond that they have little time for thinking outside the box.

It is now emerging that those who reject the idea that factors external to the Earth can have a significant influence upon the Earth's climate are increasingly at odds with the evidence.

One quirky way to show that this is the case is to reverse the argument around. This can be done by asking the question: Is there any evidence to show that the Earth can have a significant influence upon the Moon and nearby planets? If this is indeed the case then would it be so hard to imagine that it might possible for the reverse to happen (in specific cases). One piece of evidence that shows that the Earth can have a significant impact upon external astronomical bodies is the gravitational interaction between the Earth and Venus.

Every time the planet Venus passes between the Earth and Sun it presents the same face towards Earth. This happens because the slow retrograde rotation rate of the planet Venus (approximately 243 days) has allowed the Earth's gravity to nudge Venus's rotation period into a resonance lock with the Earth's orbital period.

Attention

California governor Jerry Brown warns: 'Climate change will cause mass migration in the US'

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© Sacramento BeeCalifornia Governor Jerry Brown
Gov. Jerry Brown said Monday that his legislative setbacks on climate change last week should be viewed "not in terms of me," warning California will endure European-style effects of mass migration if the state fails to act on global warming.

"What we've in Europe now with mass migrations, that will happen in California, as ... Central America and Mexico, as they warm, people are going to get on the move," Brown told reporters at a Mather news conference on California's wildfires.


Comment: Brown is confusing two issues here. People in central America, the Middle East and Africa aren't on the move northwards because it's 'warming'. They're on the move because the US and Europe shafted their home countries. In addition to that, far more people will soon be on the move because of catastrophic climate change, which is Nature's way of reflecting back to us the chaos caused by the psychopaths in power who lead the US and Europe to do such destructive things. This climate change is gradually building up to what looks like a climate shift into ice age conditions, and this climate change will cause massive movements of hundreds of millions of people.


Heat, rising sea levels and drought are expected to disrupt populations around the world in coming decades, though the current refugee crisis in Europe speaks to other causes of migration. Millions of people have fled Syria as a result of civil war.

Brown, who has made climate change the signature issue of his administration, suffered a setback when he and legislative leaders - facing opposition from oil companies and moderate Democrats - were forced to abandon a proposal to require a reduction in petroleum use in motor vehicles in California. Another bill, to increase California's greenhouse gas reduction targets, also fell apart.

Brown maintained that he will continue to seek petroleum reductions under his executive authority.


Comment: Although he's off the mark in terms of attributing climate change to human causes, Brown's remarks are prescient in light of what Niall Bradley wrote here:

Syrian refugees in Europe, regime change in Damascus, and the mass migrations still to come
This is not a drill

While the focus is currently on Europe, an 'immigration crisis' has 'coincidentally' been brewing in the US. Decades of abuse by the US government and US corporations in their 'backyard' have brought ever-growing numbers of 'migrants' (or 'refugees', if you consider that parts of northern Mexico are effectively in a state of civil war) northwards, resulting in steel wire border fences, over-stretched security and social services, and a buffoon running for the White House on an anti-immigration platform.

These synchronous developments lead me to wonder whether something beyond geopolitical concerns may be taxing minds at the top of the food chain: mass migrations resulting from abrupt climate shift. A 2004 report commissioned by decades-long Pentagon foreign policy strategist Andrew Marshall provided the following future scenario to the Bush administration...
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

"Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," concludes the Pentagon analysis. "Once again, warfare would define human life." [...]

By 2020, "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated. [...]

Randall [co-author] told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. "This is depressing stuff," he said. "It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat."

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. "We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years," he said. [...]

Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.
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An increasingly common scene: vehicles abandoned on a highway in Chicago in 2011
While the liberal British Observer assumed the report's authors had the 'official' climate change scenario in mind (man-made CO2 increase warming the planet and gradually producing dire consequences in 50 or 100 years' time), it's fairly clear that the authors were thinking of something else entirely: a rather sudden onset of extreme weather and planetary upheaval, including - or culminating in - a return to glacial conditions in much of the inhabited world, which is apparently what happened 8,200 years ago.

Note also the reference to "mass migration of populations". While what's happening now as a result of NATO's wars is bad, and may well end up being comparable to migrations in Europe during WW2, mass migration on a much larger scale may be around the corner.

What if, with one eye on the climate chaos to come, those 'Secret Government' types "across the pond in the US who feel like they're in a lab running all sorts of experiments on the rats" - as Putin aptly described them last year - are taking advantage of the 'resource war' they created in the Middle East to effect some sort of drill in which they test control methods, responses in the population and system capacities to sudden migrations of really large numbers of people caused by 'mother nature', who appears to be mirroring the planetary chaos created by psychopaths in positions of power?



Igloo

Arctic has gained hundreds of miles of thick ice in the last 3 years

Red shows the September 2012 minimum extent. Green shows the current extent, which is likely the minimum for 2015. The Arctic has gained hundreds of miles of ice over the past three years, much of which is thick, multi-year ice.
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Nobel Prize winning climate experts and journalists tell us that the Arctic is ice-free, because they are propagandists pushing an agenda, not actual scientists or journalists.