Oklahoma's 79 tornadoes in 2013 was the second-greatest total in the nation, according to preliminary data released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The total topped the state's average of 57 tornadoes per year between 1981 and 2010, according to NOAA data. But the number didn't eclipse the 145 reported in 1999, the most since officials began recording tornado data in 1950.

Kansas, Texas and Florida annually average more. Only Texas, with 81 tornadoes in 2013, had more than Oklahoma last year.

The agricultural industry is notoriously slow to react to changing conditions, which leads some researchers to believe that climate change will inevitably lead to higher food prices in the future.

According to research done by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, climate change will likely contribute to increasing prices for basic foodstuffs in the coming decades. The study suggests that, as in the past, the agricultural industry cannot adapt to the changing climate, and everything it entails, leading to a drop in food production.

Of course, the result is not the same everywhere, as shortened growing seasons in one area may reduce food production, lengthened growing seasons in other areas may increase food production. At the same time, climate change may increase the incidence of agricultural pests and diseases in certain areas, reducing food production. Climate-change-driven rainfall, sunlight, and temperature variations also account for drastic changes in food production.

This video compiles footages of strange phenomena of all kinds, including awesome natural events or beautiful phenomena from around the world in the last few weeks.

In just the last couple of weeks, we've seen:

Volcanic eruptions in Sicily and Indonesia and elsewhere - 'Sky trumpet sounds' in Iceland, and loud booms shaking homes all over the US - Large earthquake in New Zealand, and an ongoing heatwave in Australia - Giant boulders falling off a mountain Italy and record flooding across Europe - More 'spinning ice-river' circles, this time in Norway - Strange cloud cover producing pretty sunsets and unusual light refraction, including a spectacular sun halo over Moscow - More mass animal deaths - More meteor fireballs falling from the sky, and 'hole-punch clouds'! - More UFO sightings - Massive electrical storms, including a super-electrical storm in Rio de Janeiro that produced an interesting omen: a thunderbolt struck the giant statue of Jesus above the city!... There were also major electrical storms in Europe... and this in the middle of winter! - Tornado outbreaks in the UK, which are unusual even in the summer - Thousands of wildfires breaking out in some of the coldest places on the planet - UK's wettest January in 250 years as the island continues to be pummeled with storm after storm...


I covered events from earlier in January and late December 2013 here.

Check out the rest of this series here.

The "Little Ice Age" impact on Europe was sudden and ferocious.

Using its weapons of plague, famine and (perhaps controversially) earthquake, the so-called "Little Ice age" reduced the population of Europe by around 30 to 50 percent. The virulence and death toll of the 1348 AD plague is totally unmatched by modern examples. Further, the world mega-famine of 1315 AD, due to both weather and pestilence, was catastrophic. The relentless temperature drops combined with erratic weather are nearly impossible to explain, but mankind had no hand in its inception. What forces of nature caused this catastrophic scenario? Greenland is a classic example of death and abandonment. Let's travel back in time and see what happened.

Although the Little Ice Age is a scientific reconstruction, it covers a period when there was a significant and chaotic down-turn in climate, compared to the present era. It is classified into four periods from around 1280 AD to 1850 AD. These erratic cold periods are referred to as the Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and Dalton weather minima. Those dramatic climatic deteriorations were not only cooler, wetter and windier on average, but also vastly more chaotic in their fluctuations, creating the prime ingredients for famine and (curiously) plague.

The Little Ice Age followed a period known as the "Medieval Maximum" that is dated to between 900 AD - 1280 AD, which copious records reveal was much warmer than modern times. For instance, grapevines grew in the area of today's shivering Wales! This was generally a period of prosperity for civilizations. There was a large increase in world population and an era of colonial expansion. During the years 800 AD - 1200 AD, Greenland and Iceland were settled by the Vikings. The "Medieval Warm Period" allowed this great migration to flourish. Drift ice at later dates posed the greatest hazard to sailors but reports of drift ice in old records do not appear until the thirteenth century.

Following HRH Prince Charles intemperate remarks about 'headless chickens' reported at the talkshop last week, Lord Monckton has written him an open letter, reproduced below.

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales,
Clarence House, London.

Candlemas, 2014

Your Royal Highness' recent remarks describing those who have scientific and economic reason to question the Establishment opinion on climatic apocalypse in uncomplimentary and unroyal terms as "headless chickens" mark the end of our constitutional monarchy and a return to the direct involvement of the Royal Family, in the Person of our future king, no less, in the cut and thrust of partisan politics.

Now that Your Royal Highness has offered Your Person as fair game in the shootout of politics, I am at last free to offer two options. I need no longer hold back, as so many have held back, as Your Royal Highness' interventions in politics have become more frequent and less acceptable in their manner as well as in their matter.

Option 1. Your Royal Highness will renounce the Throne forthwith and for aye. Those remarks were rankly party-political and were calculated to offend those who still believe, as Your Royal Highness plainly does not, that the United Kingdom should be and remain a free country, where any subject of Her Majesty may study science and economics, may draw his conclusions from his research and may publish the results, however uncongenial the results may be.

The line has been crossed. No one who has intervened thus intemperately in politics may legitimately occupy the Throne. Your Royal Highness' arrogant and derogatory dismissiveness towards the near-50 percent of your subjects who no longer follow the New Religion is tantamount to premature abdication. Goodnight, sweet prince. No more "Your Royal Highness."

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'

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.

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.

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)

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.