Extreme Temperatures
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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

The mini ice age starts here

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© Jeremy SelwynA composite photograph released last year to propagandise the issue of melting ice and global warming
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world's most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions - based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans - challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 - and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Info

Bering Strait influenced ice age climate patterns worldwide

Boulder -- In a vivid example of how a small geographic feature can have far-reaching impacts on climate, new research shows that water levels in the Bering Strait helped drive global climate patterns during ice age episodes dating back more than 100,000 years.

The international study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), found that the repeated opening and closing of the narrow strait due to fluctuating sea levels affected currents that transported heat and salinity in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As a result, summer temperatures in parts of North America and Greenland oscillated between warmer and colder phases, causing ice sheets to alternate between expansion and retreat and affecting sea levels worldwide.

While the findings do not directly bear on current global warming, they highlight the complexity of Earth's climate system and the fact that seemingly insignificant changes can lead to dramatic tipping points for climate patterns, especially in and around the Arctic.

Igloo

Best of the Web: Ice Age Cometh: Death toll rises to 22 as Britain braces for coldest night yet

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© Neodaas / University of DundeeNasa satellite picture of Britain doused in snow received by the University of Dundee
The death toll from Britain's biggest freeze for decades reached 22 today as the country prepared for its coldest night so far, bringing the promise of even more treacherous conditions.

Thousands of homes have been left without power, schools have closed and travellers have faced chaos as the weather hit roads, rail services and airports over the last two days. The disruption is estimated to have cost businesses around £700 million.

Councils continued to struggle with a growing salt emergency as police warned drivers in many areas not to travel unless their journey was essential.

The AA expect to have attended 20,000 breakdowns today - compared with about 9,000 for a normal Thursday - and warned that conditions were expected to remain "treacherous".

Meanwhile, the shutdown of an offshore Norwegian gasfield pushed Britain's gas infrastructure into emergency mode, forcing the closure of industrial companies in the north of England in order to preserve supplies to homes, shops and offices.

Although major airports stayed open, some air passengers had long waits for their flights, particularly at Gatwick, on the outskirts of south London, where more than 130 flights were cancelled. EasyJet had to axe more than 100 flights and British Airways was among other carriers that had to cancel some services.

The body of Philip Hughes, 45, from Slough, was recovered from beneath ice at the Lakeside Country Club in Surrey where he was watching the world darts championship. A spokesman said it appeared to have been a "tragic accident".

Igloo

Best of the Web: Ice Age Cometh: US braced for more heavy snow, wind chills as low as 50 below zero

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© Associated Press / Nati HarnikVehicles travel in white out conditions caused by blowing snow on Interstate 80 west of Omaha, Neb., Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2010. A storm system with sub-freezing temperatures and high winds is traveling through the Midwest.
Des Moines - Snow was piled so high in Iowa that drivers couldn't see across intersections and a North Dakota snowblower repair shop was overwhelmed with business as residents braced Thursday for heavy snow and wind chills as low as 50 below zero.

Frigid weather also was gripping the South, where a rare cold snap was expected to bring snow and ice Thursday to states from South Carolina to Louisiana. Forecasters said wind chills could drop to near zero at night in some areas.

Dangerously cold wind chills were anticipated in the Midwest overnight, including as low as 35 below in eastern Nebraska, minus 45 in parts of South Dakota and negative 50 in North Dakota, according to National Weather Service warnings.

Another 10 inches of snow was expected in Iowa, buried in December by more than 2 feet of snow, while up to 9 inches could fall in southeast North Dakota that forecasters warned would create hazardous zero-visibility driving conditions. Wind gusts of 30 miles per hour were expected in Illinois - along with a foot of snow - while large drifts were anticipated in Nebraska and Iowa.

Cloud Lightning

Best of the Web: The Coming Ice Age

Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.... Global warming predictions by meteorologists are based on speculative, untested, and poorly constrained computer models.... our knowledge of ice ages is based on a wide variety of reliable data, including cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. ... By reducing our production of carbon dioxide, we risk hastening the advent of the next ice age. Even more foolhardy and dangerous is the Obama administration's announcement that they may try to cool the planet through geoengineering. Such a move in the middle of a cooling trend could provoke the irreversible onset of an ice age. It is not hyperbole to state that such a climatic change would mean the end of human civilization as we know it.


Comment: The above remarks from this thoughtful article provoke the unavoidable speculation that the PTB are TRYING to induce another ice age with their global warming nonsense. Who needs WMDs when you can kill billions by starvation and freezing cold?


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Our near future?
Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously.

On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously.

Cloud Lightning

Best of the Web: CNN Segment Warns of Coming Ice Age


If you're fortunate enough to have it - don't sell that oceanfront property for fear that the icecaps will melt, and rising seas swamping your property. A segment on CNN's Jan. 13 Lou Dobbs Tonight explored the possibility that earth isn't warming, but is, in fact, cooling.

Igloo

Best of the Web: Science: Another Ice Age?

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© TimeCover of Time magazine from December 1979
Comment: This article was originally published in Time Magazine on June 24, 1974. Now, considering the revelations about "Climategate", perhaps we need to return to what was known before greed and manipulation took over science?

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Bizarro Earth

Is Nature Warning Us of a New Ice Age?

Global warming fears aside, all students of climate science know that the Earth is presently in an Ice Age and has been for approximately the past 2 to 2.5 million years. This Ice Age has been characterized by successive advances and retreats of a glacial ice sheet, originating in Greenland and extending across the northern portions of the North American and Eurasian continents. Just 12,000 years ago, the undisputed geological evidence shows that New York, Chicago, and all of North America up to the Arctic regions were under a sheet of ice, estimated to have been from 1 to 2 miles thick. Mountain glaciers also extended downward from the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians in regions further to the south than the main glacial mass. A similar situation prevailed over most of Germany, northern France, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Poland and other parts of eastern Europe, and Russia.

Such had been the state of things on Earth for probably at least 100,000 years. Before that, a short period known as an interglacial had allowed for a warm climate somewhat like the present, and before it another extended period of glacial advance. The thaw which produced our present geography--the Great Lakes, the southward flowing Ohio River, and much else we take for granted--was not completed until about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, according to the best estimates of geologists and climatologists. Not only were there changes in the internal geography, but the continental boundaries were also greatly changed during the glacial period. Calculations of the volume of water that must have been contained frozen in the continental glaciers, indicate that the global sea level, was lower by as much as 300 to 400 feet at times of glacial advance. A glaciation does not mean sea level rise, but a sharp fall in sea level exposing the continental shelf for miles out to sea. Much of the coastal-dwelling civilization of the past 100,000 or more years, thus lies buried offshore beneath hundreds of feet of ocean.

Can this happen again? The most plausible theory of the causes of the ice ages, the theory of astronomical determination, suggests that the time is ripe for it to happen sometime soon. A Jan. 11 article in the online edition of the Russian daily Pravda was titled "Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age."

Magnify

Mystery Volcano May Have Triggered Mini Ice Age

Scientists say evidence in the ice of Antarctica and Greenland shows a volcanic eruption, probably near the equator, contributed to global cooling early in the 19th century.

Global warming may be making some people nervous now, but from 1810 to 1819, people worried because the Earth was colder than usual.

For an entire decade, the Earth cooled almost a full degree Fahrenheit. In fact, 1816 was known as the year without a summer. And until recently, scientists weren't quite sure why everyone was shivering.

The chill of 1816 has long been blamed on an Indonesian volcano called Tambora, which erupted the year before. But no one could figure out why the years before Tambora's eruption were also colder than usual.