Extreme Temperatures
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Snowman

US: Snowy owls soar south from Arctic in rare mass migration

snowy white owl
© U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
Bird enthusiasts are reporting rising numbers of snowy owls from the Arctic winging into the lower 48 states this winter in a mass southern migration that a leading owl researcher called "unbelievable."

Thousands of the snow-white birds, which stand 2 feet tall with 5-foot wingspans, have been spotted from coast to coast, feeding in farmlands in Idaho, roosting on rooftops in Montana, gliding over golf courses in Missouri and soaring over shorelines in Massachusetts.

A certain number of the iconic owls fly south from their Arctic breeding grounds each winter but rarely do so many venture so far away even amid large-scale, periodic southern migrations known as irruptions.

"What we're seeing now -- it's unbelievable," said Denver Holt, head of the Owl Research Institute in Montana.

Igloo

Southern India Shivers: 7 die in AP; Karnataka Coldest in 100 Years

hands at fire/India
© n/a
Hyderabad/Bangalore: The unprecedented cold wave sweeping across southern India has claimed seven lives so far in Andhra Pradesh and broken century-old temperature records at several places in neighbouring Karnataka.

Chilly winds blew across coastal and north Telangana districts, claiming the lives of four elderly persons at Gudipudi village near Sattenapalle in Guntur district on Monday. Two women each died in Bapatla and Visakhapatnam.

In interior Karnataka, the harsh weather has broken records. Madikeri registered its lowest temperature in 132 years on Monday, with the minimum dropping to 4.8 degrees Celsius.

At 7.7 degrees Celsius, Mysore recorded its coldest day in 120 years and Bangalore saw its coldest day of January in 19 years with minimum temperature touching 12 degrees Celsius. In the plains, Belgaum was the coldest at 7.2 degrees.

Igloo

Australia: Cold snap sets new record low temperatures

Summer Snow in Oz
© Gillian DobsonA message is written on a car windscreen after Mt Buller in the Victorian Alps received a sprinkling of snow on January 11
The weather bureau says an extreme cold front has broken a series of low temperature records for Canberra, Goulburn and the Snowy Mountains.

The southern tablelands and Victoria's Alpine region have also been hit by the summer chill.

A rapidly moving cold front from Antarctica moved though Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT yesterday.

The icy and changeable weather delivered a low of -4 degrees Celsius and a dusting of snow to the Snowy Mountains.

Igloo

Best of the Web: Ice Age "News" is Wrong--It's Coming Sooner Than Later

Liberty in Ice
© Warning Signs

When you consider the millions of words published as "news" about global warming, a massive hoax based on the theory that an increase in the Earth's levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), a minor atmospheric gas (0.0380%), it boggles the mind that reporters for a respected newswire, Reuters, would still be writing utter rubbish about it.

Just as the "news" about global warming was demolished in 2009 and again in 2011 with the leaked emails of the conspirators behind the fictions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main agency behind the hoax, on January 9, Nina Chesney of Reuters London Bureau, reported about a paper in the journal, Nature Geoscience, that the "Next Ice Age not likely before 1,500 years: study."

The paper claimed that "Concentrations of the main gases blamed for global warming reached record levels in 2010 and will linger in the atmosphere for decades even if the world stopped pumping out emissions today, according to the U.N.'s weather agency."

The U.N. does not have a "weather agency." It has a propaganda agency devoted in its own words to "climate." The two are not the same. Weather is what is occurring right now and climate is the measurement of trends over centuries.

Igloo

Cold Wave in North India, Toll 39

Cold Wave in UP, India
© Times of IndiaThe entire north India shivered on Monday as 11 more people succumbed to the cold sweeping the region pushing the death toll to 39.
New Delhi: The entire north India shivered on Monday as 11 more people succumbed to the cold sweeping the region pushing the death toll to 39. Dense fog and dipping temperatures threw normal life out of gear at several places as nine deaths occurred in Punjab and two in Uttar Pradesh since last evening.

The death count from the harsh weather has risen to 30 in Uttar Pradesh where Fatehgarh with a minimum temperature of 3.9 degrees was the coldest place in the state. The national capital woke up to a thick blanket of fog which reduced the visibility to almost zero in some areas and disrupted rail and air traffic.

Dense fog also hit rail services in the region with over 40 trains running behind schedule, a railway spokesperson said.

Cold conditions prevailed in Kashmir with the minimum temperatures dropping several degrees below freezing point as the weather department forecast light to moderate snowfall at many places. Sub-zero night temperatures have resulted in freezing of water supply lines in many areas. Mercury in the skiing resort of Gulmarg in north Kashmir plummeted to a minimum of minus 6.8 degrees Celsius.

Sherlock

Dropping sea temperatures: Mysterious appearance of sea turtles on British Columbia, Canada beaches baffles experts

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© Nick Procaylo, PNGDr. Marty Haulena tends to a sick green sea turtle at the Vancouver Aquairium.
For the third time in two weeks a green sea turtle - a prehistoric species that's 150 million years old and that's now threatened - has washed up on B.C.'s shores, a rare appearance that's baffling ocean experts.

The sub-adult male was spotted by a visitor on Combers Beach in Pacific Rim National Park on Wednesday, the Vancouver Aquarium said Friday.

The giant turtle - females can weigh up to 200 kgs -- was in poor shape and wasn't expected to survive, said Dr. Dennis Thoney on Friday at the aquarium, where the turtle was transported for an examination.

"It's just too far gone," he said. "If they're on the shore, that's usually an indication there's something wrong with them."

MIB

US: Supreme Court Will Hear Secret Service Agents' Immunity Claims Over Arrest at Cheney Event

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© duilawyersusa.com
Washington - The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear an appeal from Secret Service agents who say they should be shielded from a lawsuit over their arrest of a Colorado man who confronted Vice President Dick Cheney.

The justices will review a federal appeals court decision to allow Steven Howards of Golden, Colo., to pursue his claim that the arrest violated his free speech rights. Howards was detained by Cheney's security detail in 2006 after he told Cheney of his opposition to the war in Iraq.

Howards also touched Cheney on the shoulder, then denied doing so under questioning. Appellate judges in Denver said the inconsistency gave the agents reason to arrest Howards.

Even so, the appeals court said Howards could sue the agents for violating his rights - an unusual twist that the agents and the Obama administration said conflicts with other appeals court decisions and previous high court rulings in similar cases.

Justice Elena Kagan is not taking part in the case, probably because she worked on it while serving in the Justice Department.

Arrow Down

So much for Global Warming scare: Arctic ice shrank during Little Ice Age and now in longest decline seen over past 1,450 years

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© Francois Lenoir/ReutersThe sun shines low in the sky just after midnight over a frozen coastline near the Norwegian Arctic town of Longyearbyen in this April 26, 2007 file photo.
Research published in a top scientific journal says Arctic sea ice has declined more in the last half-century than it has any time over the last 1,450 years.

The study, which gives the most detailed picture ever of the northern oceans over the previous millennium-and-a-half, also concludes the current decline has already lasted longer than any previous one in that period.

"When we look at our reconstruction, we can see that the decline that has occurred in the last 50 years or so seems to be unprecedented for the last 1,450 years," Christian Zdanowicz of the Geological Survey of Canada said Wednesday.

"It's difficult not to come up with the conclusion that greenhouse gases must have something to do with this," added Mr. Zdanowicz, one of the co-authors of the report in Nature.

Igloo

US: Early season record cold temperatures stun residents of Alaska

Image
© AccuWeather.com
A mid-November cold snap seems to have caught even seasoned Fairbanksans off guard.

"I don't think anybody was really expecting this," 43-year-old Shawn Ross, a lifelong Fairbanksan, said. "This came out of the blue."

For the second time in three days, Fairbanks set a new low temperature record on Thursday. A temperature of 41 degrees below zero - the first 40 below temperature of the season - was recorded at Fairbanks International Airport at 6:29 a.m., according to the National Weather Service in Fairbanks. That broke the old record of 39 below set in 1969.

The cold air settling in the flatlands has concentrated air pollution. The Fairbanks North Star Borough issued air quality advisories on Wednesday and Thursday because particulate matter was above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's standards and rated as unhealthy for sensitive groups.

Fairbanks set a new record of 35 below on Tuesday and the temperature bottomed out at 39 below on Wednesday, two degrees shy of the record.

Thursday's record low of 41 below marked the sixth earliest 40-below temperature recorded by the National Weather Service in Fairbanks since 1904. The earliest it's ever hit 40 below in Fairbanks was Nov. 5, 1907, when it hit 41 below.

Info

Ice Age Hominins and Their Adaptability to Climate Change

Early Hominins
© Michael Barton/Arizona State UniversityComputer agents (colored dots) simulating prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups are superimposed over a map of Late Pleistocene western Eurasia. Gray shows Pleistocene land area with lowered sea levels, black lines show modern coastlines, white areas show ice sheets. The blue dots represent groups of “modern” humans, red dots represent groups of Neanderthals, and yellow dots represent groups with biological mixtures of modern and Neanderthal genes. This is a snapshot of the simulation after hundreds of cycles in which the hunter-gather groups have higher mobility in response to changing glacial climate. The data and corresponding analyses were cited by archeologists from Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Denver in findings published in the December issue of the journal Human Ecology, available online Nov. 17.
Complex computational modeling provides clues to Neanderthal extinction

Computational modeling that examines evidence of how hominin groups evolved culturally and biologically in response to climate change during the last Ice Age also bears new insights into the extinction of Neanderthals. Details of the complex modeling experiments conducted at Arizona State University and the University of Colorado Denver will be published in the December issue of the journal Human Ecology, available online Nov. 17.

"To better understand human ecology, and especially how human culture and biology co-evolved among hunter-gatherers in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia (ca. 128,000-11,500 years ago) we designed theoretical and methodological frameworks that incorporated feedback across three evolutionary systems: biological, cultural and environmental," said Michael Barton, a pioneer in the area of archaeological applications of computational modeling at Arizona State University.