Monday's snowfall was a shock to the system for Calgarians, who were basking in balmy weather just hours earlier.

The temperature plummeted from a summery high of 25 C (77 F) Sunday to the freezing point (32 F) Monday, and several centimetres of snow accumulated in many parts of the city and surrounding areas.

"It's just a shock to the system," Environment Canada meteorologist Bill McMurtry said.

"Many people were out in the sun, enjoying nice warm temperatures (Sunday) and (Monday) people are looking out their windows going, 'It's snowing.'

#snow #Alberta #cbc #yeg #september #global
pic.twitter.com/wvwAmZxQQ4

- Hunter & Olivia (@HunterOlivia) September 8, 2014

"It just shows you how much things can change in 24 hours. The general consensus is it's too early."

The people aren't wrong.

Even from a scientific standpoint, it's strange to have a significant dump of snow this early in the transition to fall.

Cold is about to sweep into the northern U.S. Plains from Canada and drop temperatures to winter-like levels.

Readings in Calgary were forecast to drop to 27 Fahrenheit (minus 3 Celsius) later this week and snow was flying there yesterday, according to Environment Canada.

That will be a welcome change for energy traders after a mild summer, although it's just a glimpse of what may come.

While the temperatures will drop, they won't be falling too far where it counts.

Chicago, for instance, will end this week with highs in the 60s and lows in the 50s, according to the U.S. National Weather Service. New York will reach into the 80s during the day and 60s at night.

The big cities of Canada also won't see much of the cold. Overnight temperatures in Toronto and Montreal will drop into the 40s by the end of the week.

In New England, conditions like that are called "good sleeping weather."

In Grande Cache, the snow was so heavy and thick, it cut power to many homes.
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"Fall is still two weeks away, but Mother Nature clearly has different weather plans for Alberta," says this article in the Huffington Post.

People around the province woke up to snow Monday morning, after an "unseasonably cold Arctic airmass" descended over the province.

Environment Canada issued snowfall warnings for Airdire, Cochrane, Hinton, Grande Cache, Kananaskis, Canmore, Nordegg and area, Okotoks, High River, Rocky Mountain House, Whitecourt, and Edson.

Grande Cache so far got the worst of it, recording 15 cm (5.9″) by Noon MDT.

People in Alberta's major cities took to Twitter Monday morning, to lament the early snowfall.


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At least 174 people are missing and around 200 people are trapped in Pakistan's northern mountaineer 'Deosai' glacier site as massive snowfall which continued over the last three days has blanketed the region, local officials said.

Around 200 people, including women and children, are trapped in the Charagah area of Deosai while 252 people were rescued Saturday night, Tariq Hussein a local administration official told reporters.

Many among the rescued people are injured as the region faces an unseasonal amount of snowfall, the official said. The trapped and missing people are mostly shepherds and their families who move with their herds during the season.

He's the new President of the British Science Association (I bet they are loving this media coverage) and has decided to move on from the old technique of debating scientific points on their merits. It's too slow (especially if you don't have... evidence).

Instead he's going with retro-science - Do you believe, sinner? It's so retro, it's retro-the-renaissance.

From The Daily Mail, UK

Politicians who do not believe in climate change should be 'crushed and buried', according to the new president of the British Science Association.

How much belief is enough, I wonder, to avoid the crushing? If a politician believed in the greenhouse theory but not the catastrophe, is that half crushed, or do we skip the squishing and go straight for the burying?

Heaviest calendar-day snow on record anytime from August through the first week of September.

Barrow, Alaska, was blanketed by its first significant snowfall of the season Tuesday, turning the town into a winter wonderland just one day after Labor Day.

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Megadroughts are extreme dry spells that can last for a decade or longer. They have parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s

California is in the third year of one of the state's worst droughts in the past century, one that's led to fierce wildfires, water shortages and restrictions, and potentially staggering agricultural losses.

The dryness in California is only part of a longer-term, 15-year drought across most of the Western USA, one that bioclimatologist Park Williams said is notable because "more area in the West has persistently been in drought during the past 15 years than in any other 15-year period since the 1150s and 1160s" - that's more than 850 years ago.

"When considering the West as a whole, we are currently in the midst of a historically relevant megadrought," said Williams, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

Megadroughts are what Cornell University scientist Toby Ault calls the "great white sharks of climate: powerful, dangerous and hard to detect before it's too late. They have happened in the past, and they are still out there, lurking in what is possible for the future, even without climate change." Ault goes so far as to call megadroughts "a threat to civilization."

What Is A Megadrought?

Megadroughts are defined more by their duration than their severity. They are extreme dry spells that can last for a decade or longer, according to research meteorologist Martin Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Megadroughts have parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s.

More than 40,000 people were brought to hospitals to be treated for heatstroke and 54 have died since the beginning of the hot season in Japan, Japan's Fire and Disaster Agency reported Tuesday.

According to the statement, from May 19 to August 31, 3,290 people in Tokyo Region have been hospitalized due to heat-related issues. Saitama, Osaka, Aichi and Chiba prefectures have seen more than 2,000 heat hospitalization cases each.

Summer isn't even over yet, but snow has already fallen in some parts of southern Alberta.

Areas south of Chain Lakes got a sprinkling of snow on Wednesday morning, much to the surprise of many who are still trying to enjoy the last days before fall.

"It seems like it's going to be an early winter," said Michael Kosolofski. "The geese are already flying south, and it seems like it's colder than normal for September."

Highway cameras also captured photos of snow along Highway 22X, and ski resorts such as Sunshine Village and Fernie Alpine Resort have also reported snow falls.

Bookmark this classic 1995 article in the Canberra Times. This guy had the entire scam nailed from day one.

By Neil Winton

Although conventional wisdom states that global warming is a proven fact, many scientists do not accept its validity. Dr Jack Barrett of London's Imperial College is one.

To conclude that CO2 emissions are a threat to the environment would be doubtful and premature. Only a closer examination of the atmosphere over a long period and further detailed studies will decide the matter," Barrett said in a recent scientific paper which caused frissons of anger among scientists.

Barrett, from Imperial College's chemistry department, pours thinly veiled scorn on the arguments of the "warmers", saying they are based on unreliable data, misunderstand the self-correcting nature of the earth's atmosphere and represent science-by-committee. He says IPCC scientists based their theories on the fact that the earth's temperature has increased by 0.8°C in the 20th century.

"This is within the expected margins of error for such a study," he says. "A hard scientific view would be that there has been no discernible change in the earth's temperature despite the significant increase of 25 per cent in the level of carbon dioxide. To blame the increase in carbon dioxide level for this alleged slight temperature increase seems to be a piece of poor scientific judgment that only a large committee could achieve.

"The lPCC's reports do indicate that the conclusions are not unanimous but none of the doubters' arguments is published. Proper science is not carried out by voting."

The world's climate had fluctuated naturally over the centuries. In Roman Britain, the climate was warm enough to allow grapes for red wine to be cultivated in the south.