Extreme Temperatures
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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 ยฃ700 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.

Igloo

Best of the Web: Earth could plunge into sudden ice age

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© 20th Century FoxThe film "The Day After Tomorrow" was all good fiction when it came out in 2004, but now scientists are finding eerie truths to the possibilities of sudden temperature swings.
In the film, The Day After Tomorrow, the world gets gripped in ice within the span of just a few weeks. Now research now suggests an eerily similar event might indeed have occurred in the past.

Looking ahead to the future, there is no reason why such a freeze shouldn't happen again - and in ironic fashion it could be precipitated if ongoing changes in climate force the Greenland ice sheet to suddenly melt, scientists say.

Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger Dryas and nicknamed the "Big Freeze," geological evidence suggests it was brought on when a vast pulse of fresh water - a greater volume than all of North America's Great Lakes combined - poured into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

This abrupt influx, caused when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks, diluted the circulation of warmer water in the North Atlantic, bringing this "conveyer belt" to a halt. Without this warming influence, evidence shows that temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere plummeted.

Igloo

Best of the Web: Study of lake in Ireland shows last ice age took just months to set in

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© UnknownBlackhead Lighthouse, where the Burren meets Galway Bay, Co. Clare, Ireland
It wasn't quite The Day After Tomorrow but it's closer than we thought. An analysis of mud from Lough Monreagh, a lake in Co Clare, has revealed that Europe was struck by a sudden mini ice age 12,800 years ago, suggesting the kind of rapid climate change previously seen only in Hollywood disaster movies.

It was believed that the "Big Freeze" took about a decade to set in. Based on an analysis of Greenland's ice cores, scientists have estimated that the Younger Dryas, as the event is also named, occurred gradually.

However, after analysing mud deposits from Lough Monreagh, William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, has found that the freeze took only months to take hold.

Using a very precise robotic scalpel, Patterson and his colleagues shaved 0.5mm layers from the lake bed, each representing up to three months of sediment. Carbon isotopes in the samples recorded changes to biological activity in the lake, while oxygen isotopes revealed temperature and rainfall patterns.

The tiny mud deposits showed for the first time that temperatures in Ireland dropped suddenly in the space of several months at the time of the Big Freeze.

Comment: We can add this to the growing body of data pointing to the very real prospect of a sudden onset ice age:

Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorow


Bizarro Earth

Mini Ice Age Took Hold Of Europe In Just Months

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© Tancrediphoto.com/Stone/GettyBig freezes can happen fast
Just months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.

Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.

Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues.

The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail.

Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. "It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard" in the Arctic, says Patterson, who presented the findings at the BOREAS conference in Rovaniemi, Finland, on 31 October.