UK weather “going Mediterranean” so fast it overshoots to South Pole

The Guardian is covering the current Red Alert version of the Great British Snap Freeze

UK weather: Met office issues new red warning as wind and snow cause chaos – live

Having prepared so well for shorter winters, the National Grid in the UK warns that they may be running out of gas.

Hundreds are trapped on the M80 in cars and trucks between Glasgow and Stirling. Seventeen hours and counting…

But what about those UK vines and cacti?

Tony Heller reminds us that 10-15 years ago scientists were predicting that Drought may be the new norm,  and that Climate Change may turn UK Mediterranean. Plant experts were telling Brits that passionfruit and cacti will “thrive in warmer climates”. They even painted what it will look like:

Future British Garden

Future British Garden

Look out for those “milder, wetter UK winters“:

A 2C rise  – which some climate scientists say is inevitable by the end of the century – would see the South East of England experiencing conditions similar to south west France, while a 4C rise would expose gardens to conditions seen in south-west Portugal, the Trust said.

Herbaceous borders and water-loving English country garden plants from foxgloves to delphiniums could struggle in hotter drier summers, while milder, wetter winters could threaten spring bulbs such as tulips and hyacinths.

But plants from hotter climates such as passion flowers and cacti will thrive in warmer temperatures.

These of course are just predictions by mere plant experts, not climate scientists — who always knew that extreme snow was coming, but didn’t think to mention it to their plant science colleagues:

Mike Calnan, the National Trust’s head of gardens and parks, said the predictions were based on computer models generated by the Met Office Hadley Centre.

Oh.

No wonder the punters are confused. The Guardian now has to do articles to help them make sense of the snow:

Q&A: What does all this snow mean for climate change?

  Q: Snow in winter. That feels reassuringly normal. Does this mean the climate has fixed itself?

Who but a Global Warming Devotee would describe extreme red alert snow dumps as “reassuringly normal”?

There are 60 million people in the UK — how many of them are asking “Has the climate fixed itself”? How about “three” and they all work at The Guardian.

Having served up a hand-ball Dorothy-dixer, the answer converts calm to impending panic:

A: Unfortunately not. In fact, many scientists are concerned this is a prelude to more extreme and less predictable weather.

Perhaps  those scientists could’ve told the Brits they’d need more gas instead of solar panels?

Best wishes to all our British and EU friends faced with too much “global warming”.

9.7 out of 10 based on 98 ratings

232 comments to UK weather “going Mediterranean” so fast it overshoots to South Pole

  • #
    RAH

    Joe Bastardi was forecasting this Artic blast hitting western Europe a month ago just as he forecast the Nor Easter that is going to strike the East Coast here in the US over a week ago and has said it’s just the first of several that will hit the coast. It is all just WEATHER and Joe was telling people it was coming. But the climate change ambulance chasers and their mouth pieces, neither of which could have forecasted this weather, and in fact have been said the opposite would happen in many cases, will claim it’s due to climate change.

    So who is a rational person to believe that they know what their talking about? The guy who forecasts weather accurately the vast majority of the time and explains the why before the what or those that could not forecast but after the what say they knew it all the time and blame it on human caused factors?

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    • #
      sophocles

      The guy who forecasts weather accurately the vast majority of the time and explains the why before the what or those that could not forecast but after the what say they knew it all the time and blame it on human caused factors?

      There is a similar tension between Piers Corbyn of Weatheraction and the UK Met Office. The UK Met Office is still wedded to the CO2 and AGW mythology (it was one of the primary myth makers) right down to a very recent super-Super computer which still outputs garbage, just faster than the previous one.

      Corbyn, at one stage, made money from some British bookmakers by betting on his forecasts. The bookmakers, of course, got their forecasts from the Met Office. Corbyn won. 🙂

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    • #
      Hasbeen

      Wouldn’t it be dreadful to be arguing against Jo.

      She can use such simple gentle language to make her adversary look utter idiots. Perhaps they are helping her there.

      Such a sweet lady, but so deadly to the fools she is showing up.

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      • #
        Ted O'Brien.

        Yes but!

        I haven’t seen her match Western Power Distribution’s: “weather-related and normal fault activity”.

        Which was only par for the course from services spokesmen in that Guardian report. Words for sure, but not much activity. unless you count “3,221 pro-active telephone calls”. Nothing extra mural, please!

        Fault activity! Good grief!

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  • #
    Jonesy

    “I’m going to make this tide go out…even if it takes me twelve hours!” THE WIZARD OF ID

    That was over forty years ago, in the midst of ice age climate change hysteria. Still works today. The moral is simple. Projecting your special thing on a naturaly occuring event, claiming you are controlling it…really is hocus pocus wizardry.

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    • #
      Dennis

      Now if we stop burning coal here and burn more coal over there …….

      190

      • #
        Graham Richards

        There will be plenty of coal available. President Trump will be mining it but you will have to pay for it. Oh & don’t forget if it’s gas you’re after President Putin has more than enough as well.
        UK & rest of Europe will be totally dependent on America & Russia for their energy. So sad.
        Maybe the cold starving rioters will take car of all the dumbass politicians once & for all??

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    • #

      Luckily, normal people never bought into any ice-age hysteria in the 1970s. A small minority of scientists were peddling the idea that it could be possible, if insolation continued to decline, which is obviously a basic fact.

      Similarly, some people are peddling the idea of global cooling at present. How much credibility are you according them?

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      • #
        Graeme No.3

        Craig:
        “How much credibility are you according them?” Not a lot but far more than you get.

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      • #
        el gordo

        ‘Similarly, some people are peddling the idea of global cooling at present.’

        That’s me sir, I have history.

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      • #
        el gordo

        ‘How much credibility are you according them?’

        They were correct, but the Great Climate Shift of 1976 changed all that, an over active sun and too many El Nino.

        These days the armed Forces have been called in as death toll rises to 10 in ‘coldest spring day on record.’

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      • #
        MudCrab

        Remember kids, if first you don’t like the answer you are given, keep rewording the question until someone stumbles. Then you can point and laugh.

        The real question Young Craig here should be asking, instead of making passive aggressive suggestions and changing the subject, is ‘If man made CO2 emission were proven to be ‘Cooling the World to Heck’ would you agree to completely changing the economy of the Western World in order to pay for them?’

        Face it, Craig, you don’t really care what we believe in, you are just narky because we refuse to submit our wallets to the Green Overlords.

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        • #
          sophocles

          MudCrab said:

          …Craig, you don’t really care what we believe in, you are just narky …

          More because he knows he is right, just as a member of <name-your-religion-of-choice-here> all know they’re right and everybody else is so very, very wrong.

          Trouble is, Craig, like all those others, just can’t get their heads around just how big planet Earth really is and just how small mankind and his industries really really are. And because they can’t get their heads around those size differences, there is absolutely no way their head can fit in the Sun.

          So I’m mean: I keep pointing at the galaxy and it’s contributions to our climate so he’s lost. Poor little puppy. Can’t scale orders of magnitude with any ease …:-)

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      • #
        Wayne Job

        Read below Carbon 500 Craig for a bit of real climate history. You are pointing the fickle finger of fate at people asking if they believe in global cooling.
        Odd for you are obviously wedded to the myth of global warming. I have replied to you before and said look at history, we are due for some cooling I
        just hope it is not a L.I.A. or a big ice age as cold kills, a little bit of warming makes food grow. Wake up and smell the roses.

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      • #
        Richard S Courtney

        Craig Thomas:

        Global climate continues to fluctuate naturally as it always has.

        There has been a trend of global cooling for the 10 millennia since the end of last glaciation, but the cooling has been intermittent.

        Within that 10,000 year trend of global cooling there have been shorter periods of warming which formed the Minoan, Roman, Medieval and present warm periods. The peak of each of these warm periods was cooler than its predecessor. And there were cool periods between these warm periods with the Little Ice Age (LIA) being the most recent of them.

        There has been a short period of intermittent warming from the LIA for about 300 years.

        The most recent century of the warming from the LIA had warming to the 1940s, then cooling to about 1980, then warming to about 2000, and little warming since.

        Charlatans claimed the global cooling to about 1940 was climate change caused by human activities emitting SO2 from industrial activity.

        That claim could not be sustained When the natural variation of global climate had been causing global warming for the decade to 1980, so the same charlatans and their associates morphed their claim.

        Charlatans claimed the global warming from about 1970 was climate change caused by human activities emitting CO2 from industrial activity.

        Global climate will continue to fluctuate naturally as it always has.
        The charlatans are making a living from the climate change scare. Are you really claiming they will not again change their tune to sustain the scare as global climate continues to fluctuate as it always has?

        Richard

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        • #
          Richard S Courtney

          Ooops! A typo.

          I intended to write.
          Charlatans claimed the global cooling from about 1940 was climate change caused by human activities emitting SO2 from industrial activity.

          Sorry for any confusion.

          Richard

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        • #
          sophocles

          Just to add to your post, Richard:

          From the first peak of the Holocene, approx 10,000 years ago, there was a gentle background cooling trend of nearly 0.05°C per millenium. The ups and downs from other climate forcings tended to modulate it as thermal noise. This is the underlying trend Richard mentioned.

          At the end of the Minoan warming, c 4KYA or 2000 BC, a tipping point occurred when this background cooling trend increased to c. 0.5°C per millenium. The Holocene has passed its Best-Before Date and is now cooling towards a resumption of the ice-age.

          All the other warmings and coolings are effectively temperature noise on top of this overall trend. For this reason, nothing happening on this planet is anything to be alarmed about. The real ice will return but not in our lifetimes.

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      • #
        Phoenix44

        And how many scientists are peddling global warming? It’s a tiny number as well, but as with global cooling scare, too many people are giving them too much credence. Why you think “science” was wrong then but right now us beyond me – us it because you have ore-existing prejudices perhaps?

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        • #
          Lawrie

          Ask dr David Viner if he has brought a new toboggan for his kids yet. He sold the ones they had because it would never snow again. Fools then and fools now.

          40

      • #
        toorightmate

        Craig,
        You are WRONG (again).
        It was a slight majority of “”climate scientists”” who were predicting cold times ahead in the 1970s.
        You know, the ones who give their blurb to Scientific American, National Geographic and other rags which are also now well and truly left wing.

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        • #
          sophocles

          In the 1970’s there was quite a lot of ice around Iceland during winters, and it blocked the strait between it and Greenland. It also seemed to be growing, year on year. The cooling was sufficient to spark a large international climate/weather experiment. All this was written up by Nigel Calder in his book: The Weather Machine; How The Weather Works and Why It is Changing. The book was the printed version of a BBC documentary of the same name.

          There currently isn’t much winter ice between Greenland and Iceland, but it will return—a sure sign of cooling.

          20

      • #
        Philip Mulholland

        A small minority of scientists were peddling the idea that it could be possible

        Including Hubert H. Lamb perhaps?

        Once the climatic trend was noticed, speculation began about the causes and possible future consequences. Some of the first scientific work on the subject, published in the 1950s, attributed the warming to Man’s output of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, etc.), which increased the quantity of this gas in the atmosphere by almost 10 per cent in the first half of this century.
        Carbon dioxide is a minor constituent of the atmosphere, only about three parts in ten thousand by volume; but its effects on the heating of the Earth are important. It is much less transparent to the outgoing long-wave radiation from the Earth (which it therefore traps and re-radiates, partly back towards the Earth) than it is to the incoming radiation from the sun (which it allows to pass almost without loss).
        The effect is therefore something like that of a blanket or a glass-house, holding in heat which the Earth has received. It was calculated that a doubling of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should increase the overall temperature of the Earth by 3 to 4°C.
        It soon became clear, however, that carbon dioxide was not the whole story. Despite increasing production of this gas, with more and more industrialization and the ever-increasing burning of oil and other fuels, the temperature trend reversed.

        Lamb, H.H (1973) Is the Earth’s Climate Changing? For the past 30 years the temperature of our planet has been steadily dropping. The UNESCO Courier: a window open on the world; Vol. XXVI (8/9), 17-20.

        HUBERT H. LAMB of Great Britain is an international authority on the long term processes of climatic change. He is director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (U.K.) and for many years has been actively engaged in international research on climate, in particular polar meteorology and the study of climatic fluctuations. Among his many writings are “The Changing Climate” (1966) and, most recently, “Climate: Present, Past and Future”, a major study of which Volume I, “Fundamentals and the Climate Now” appeared last year (Methuen, London; Barnes and Noble, New York)

        10

    • #
      Graham Richards

      It was King Farouk who sat on the beach telling the tide waters to recede. That was long before anyone heard of global whatever!

      52

    • #
      sophocles

      It is said Practice makes perfect.
      She has had plenty of practice. 🙂

      20

    • #
      toorightmate

      Jonesy,
      It’s the sun that has me beat.
      There must be an endless supply of them.
      Every morning another one comes up.

      70

  • #

    The usual mouthpieces are busy farting around with ‘Global Warming is indeed responsible for this ten-inches of snow and forty-m.p.h. winds straight from Siberia’, but, with the usual badly-educated clowns (all sixty-five million of us) only listening with half-an-ear, they will never be challenged, never be placed straight, and we will keep on heading down the road towards Gaia country.

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    • #
      C. Paul Barreira

      And what have they to offer people who cannot afford to keep warm?

      UK hospital admissions are doing what? In South Australia—whereat the true path to Gaia—the hospitals are full to bursting and no sign of “cold”.

      110

      • #
        Chris Edwards

        Heat puts people in hospital, any place corrupt enough to close coal plants and depend on wind will have badly rune services too! Cold however cuts out the middle man and puts people straight in the morgue!

        10

  • #
    Leonard Lane

    If they claim CO2 controls the climate and want us to use renewables then we know they are loony.

    290

  • #
    manalive

    Snow in winter. That feels reassuringly normal. Does this mean the climate has fixed itself?

    That assumes there was something about the climate that needed to be “fixed”, it’s called Begging the Question, to assume the point in dispute, i.e., ‘to smuggle into the premise the conclusion about to be deduced’.

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  • #
    Carbon500

    Here’s my ‘take’ on it. I’m now 69 years of age and have lived in the UK for all of that time. Endless hype and doom-mongering aside, the UK climate has not changed, despite the fraction of a degree thermometer changes over the years which have been made so much of. We still get the variety of weather we always have – hot summers, cool summers, rainy summers, milder winters, cold winters, plus the occasional unusual events.
    1975 for example saw a hot summer, with a snowfall in June. On a lesser scale, this happened in 2009 as well. No doubt global warming would be the explanation these days for the summer snow!
    I’m not a climatologist of any stripe, hence I’ve had to read and sift material on the global warming issue. Comments made for example by meteorologist Williams James Burroughs in his book ‘Climate Change’ (Cambridge University Press, 2001) are relevant here. On p186 he comments that the range of extreme UK temperatures for January during the period 1772-1821 compared with 1946-95 is virtually unchanged, but a large shift in the median temperature (half the population lie above it, and half below) is seen. He goes on to comment that the changes affecting winter temperatures in the British Isles over the last 200 years or so are a matter of a shift in weather patterns rather than a significant warming of the northern hemisphere.
    Moving on from this, the Köppen climate classification stresses that a range of temperatures are relevant in describing climate – how often do we see this in any discussion of the issue? Never – all ‘bloggers’ seem obsessed with fractional claimed global averages.
    A favourite observation of mine is a reader’s letter from the UK’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper ( page 23 on Tuesday October 1st 2013) from Captain Derek Blacker RN (retd.), Director of Naval Oceanography and Meteorology 1982-84. He said this:
    “I was a meteorologist during the Seventies when glaciers in Europe and other continents had been growing for the previous ten years, and pack ice had been increasing during winters to cover almost all of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. Scientists were then warning that the Earth could be entering another ice age. The current deliberations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have conveniently overlooked this. Before insisting that humans have been the main cause of global warming an explanation of this apparent anomaly should be promulgated.”
    In connection with this letter, a look at information supplied by the Icelandic Meteorological Office is interesting. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, “heavy sea ice was quite common along the coasts of Iceland, but in the 1920s a drastic change occurred. Sea ice along the coasts of Iceland became an uncommon event, and almost a forgotten phenomenon around the middle of the century. An abrupt change occurred in the mid-1960s. Heavy sea ice formed almost each year following that period, but since 1980 widespread and long-lasting sea ice off Iceland is seen at rather irregular intervals.”
    Some of the important fishing areas around Iceland are located on the shallow banks off the coast of Greenland at about 63ºN. These banks can be ice-covered during most of the year, causing difficulties for the fishing vessels. Ice edges form ‘tongues’ which extend like giant hooks when viewed from a satellite, extending for many kilometres (over 100km for example) and curving back towards the main ice sheet. These ice tongues, which can change rapidly from one day to another, are particularly important for fishing vessels operating near the ice edge. In some cases the ice tongues can turn back towards the main ice pack and vessels near the ice edge can be trapped. Consequently trawlers need accurate ice edge maps updated every day.
    These are real world observations rather than suppositions based on modelled temperature based on the assumption that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming matter.
    To end, William James Burroughs comments in his book referred to above that the Central England Temperature (CET) ‘confirms the exceptionally low temperatures of the 1690s and in particular the cold springs of this decade. Equally striking is the sudden warming from the 1690s to the 1730s. In less than forty years the conditions went from the depths of the little ice age to something comparable to the warmest decades of the twentieth century’.
    Let’s wait and see what happens next!

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    • #
      Kinky Keith

      🙂

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    • #
      PeterS

      Carbon500, you are using observational evidence while the climate scientists are using flawed computer models to support their claim of catastrophic global warming caused by mankind that have been proven to be false many times over. That makes you more of a real scientist than all of them put together. No need to be so modest. You have the likes of Feynman on your side wrt the scientific method. That’s how science is supposed to work. What passes off as science today in climate studies is more akin to Voodoo.

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      • #
        Carbon500

        PeterS: Thank you for your kind comments. From what you say, I think you and other readers will be interested in the following point of view from a professional scientist.
        A few years ago, I bought a booklet published by Nils-Axel Mörner, the well-known Swedish geologist and scientist with a special interest in sea-level changes, and the author of many papers published on the subject.
        The book’s title is ‘The Greatest Lie Ever Told’
        On page 3 he comments: “In human history, we have built up a common way of handling scientific questions which is based on three fundamental steps: observation – interpretation – conclusion.”
        He goes on: “The IPCC introduced a new way of handling a question, which has a totally different basis; viz: idea – modelling to prove the scenario – lobbying to endorse the scenario. It also includes the choice of loyal persons instead of relevant experts.”
        A telling and scathing indictment of the ‘climate change industry’!

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    • #
      sophocles

      … and the disappearance then the reappearance of icy/ice-free intervals strongly suggests the presence and operation of cycles which are not apprehended, either, except by the people having to work with them.

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    • #

      Let’s wait and see what happens next!

      Da Religious claim GOD is both all powerful and all knowing, NOT OUR GOD who prefers to bet on da super bowl! 🙂

      21

    • #
      WXcycles

      UHI overprinting Natural Variability = Myth of Human-induced climate change.

      And urban heat island effect is actually anthropogenic … but no, it’s not global … and it does not ‘drive’ natural variability … or heat oceans.

      The whole thing is measuring and scale delusions.

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  • #
    Curious George

    Who would have expected snow now, in winter? Surely not climate scientists.

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    • #
      PeterS

      That’s right. They have been expecting the opposite including disappearing polar ice caps. Hows does real science goes? All one needs is one piece of evidence to disprove a theory/hypothesis and it must be discarded. There have been so many repeats of this for the CAGW myth it’s not funny anymore. Science has been tainted.

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    • #
      OriginalSteve

      Actually the Animal Farm chant of 4 legs good, 2 legs bad comes to mind here…..I believe Animal Farm was a crack at Stalin and Russia at the time.

      60

  • #
    oldbrew

    Running out of gas, yes – but not running out of gas power stations, just not enough fuel for them. Shutting down the UK’s largest gas storage facility last year now looks like a seriously bad move.

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  • #
    Don B

    “Who but a Global Warming Devotee would describe extreme red alert snow dumps as “reassuringly normal”?”

           Global Warming Devotee = Zealot, who is Barking Mad, Insane.

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    • #
      robert rosicka

      Craig Thomas would say exactly that !

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    • #

      I think the whole point about extreme weather events is that they aren’t the norm.
      And as anybody who has looked at the data knows, the norm is trending towards fewer days of snow.
      http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/511200/1/N511200CR.pdf

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      • #
        Hold My Beer

        And in the US, snow coverage has increased. I guess that’s evidence of global warming too?

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      • #
        robert rosicka

        Real world observations counter the less snow sermon CT and while people freeze to death refusing to believe the white stuff around them is snow because the warmist scientists and Sharmans told told them there would be no more snow .
        You have nothing but faith and worn out excuses .

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      • #
        el gordo

        ‘…the norm is trending towards fewer days of snow.’

        Anyone with google fingers can see reality in an instant.

        https://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1

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      • #
        Environment Skeptic

        ‘Bollocks’ Craig, kindly.
        A temperature map of the northern hemisphere as we speak. The areas below zero showing the extreme cold ongoing weather event trending towards the new freezing normal extends far beyond the official Arctic. From a merely visual subjective perspective of the real-time temperature map, the below zero area is so huge it appears to be three times the size of our modest Antarctic in the south. This massive temperature differential between the above and below zero regions closer to the equator naturally has vigorous consequences with respect to the mixing of cold and warm air..
        https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=0.63,88.07,274/loc=-126.424,89.738

        It is as though the north pole had to gestate ‘two’ polar vortexes to accommodate its increased size.

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      • #
        el gordo

        Craig the system requires a strong El Nino to pull the world out of this nose dive.

        http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_February_2018_v6.jpg

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      • #
        MudCrab

        I think the whole point about extreme weather events is that they aren’t the norm.

        So, having opened with this line, Young Craig, can we now conclude that you believe the ’35 Degrees Above Average’ panic in the Arctic is also hysterical knee jerk reaction?

        Remind us, are you a Warmist or a Realist? Just asking as your arguments tend to jump all over the place.

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      • #
        sophocles

        the whole point about extreme weather events is that they aren’t the norm.

        The real problem you have Craig, is that everything happening so far is not extreme, it is well within natural variation..

        Give it a few more years, Craig, and what seems extreme after the last twenty years, will have become the norm. Global Warming ended in 2016 and cooling began in 2017. In another two years, it may be even more “extreme,” especially if Prof. Valentina Zharkova’s solar research [pdf] of a Grand Solar Minimum [2020-2050]like the Maunder Minimum is accurate. You will then know just what to expect.

        The IPCC, on the other hand, in true bureaucratic arrogance, is doing a good imitation of a present day Titanic: it thinks it’s “unsinkable” and is steering straight for the icebergs.

        If you want to find out what to expect, you should read Brian Fagan’s book about the Little Ice Age, It just might scare you. 🙂

        FAGAN, Brian: “The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850” [2001] Basic Books
        ISBN-10: 0465022723 ISBN-13: 978-0465022724
        Available from Amazon.

        No, Dr Fagan is not a climate scientist but a now retired (emeritus) Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, so his waffle about the causes of the seventeenth century climate changes is about the same as yours. But the history of the results has been well researched.

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        • #
          sophocles

          Actually, cooling began in 2003, but people like Brian Jones of the CRU tried hard to play it down by calling it statistically insignificant. [in an interview in 2008 with the BBC].

          That probably no longer holds. In another two years we can declare it no longer holds. 🙂

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        • #
          Environment Skeptic

          In those dark age frigid days, they burnt witches to warm things up or as sport, as though it would help crops and prevent the black death. A similar pattern emerges today with respect to those who as much as merely ‘sitting on the fence’, not satisfied with the doctrine of CO2.

          Burnt at a makeshift group-think cross as heretic Carbon Dioxide deniers.

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      • #
        toorightmate

        Craig,
        Who is that gathers your data?
        It must be the FBI.

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      • #
        Radical Rodent

        Sorry, dude, but extremes are, erm, extremely normal. When you get a vacillating system like climate, you will generally get what might be termed “normal”, where the climate ranges between within a comfortable zone, but these WILL be interspersed with extremes, high or low. It’s not rocket science, you know…

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  • #
    PeterS

    Hollywood has already made a number of movies depicting the world freezing over due to global warming. So people are already educated indoctrinated to be believe it can happen, and have been seeing more and more evidence of global warming cooling. I can already imagine seeing actors like George Clooney standing outside in the freezing snow still claiming global warming is real and a major threat to civilisation. Actors should stick to what they do best; pretending and living in a fantasy world while the rest of us have to deal with reality, including the possibility that the world will suffer famine as crops fail from global cooling.

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    • #

      Or maybe George Clooney isn’t barking mad enough to use local weather conditions as a proxy for global climate trends?

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    • #
      Hold My Beer

      Come in Spinner…or Craig Thomas. Can’t help but laugh at the global warmists when they claim the occasional series of high temperature days is evidence of global warming, and the occasional series of cold temperature days is also evidence of global warming and the prolonged series of regular days is also evidence of global warming. Nice to have your argument supported all ways Craig. That Kool-Aide losing its appeal yet?

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      • #
        King Geo

        CT is very active today on this fine blog promoting “AGW Theory”. If he had a CT scan I wonder if any “hotspots” would show up?

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    • #
      Ted O'Brien.

      Actors, more than most of us, follow the dollar.

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  • #
    John in Oz

    As there is snow in Italy and many other Southern parts of the Continent, the UK IS experiencing a Mediterranean climate.

    Shouldn’t Italian CAGW doomsters be predicting that their climate will become more like Britain’s given the current conditions (or is that just ‘weather’?)?

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  • #
    Ruairi

    The warmists some decades ago,
    Said Britain would see no more snow,
    As the warming at hand,
    Would warm up the land,
    Which by now would let oranges grow.

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  • #
    Eugene S. Conlin

    Seems to me that the weather is similar to that we had in the 1950’s in Mid Wales in the Berwyns and Cambrian Mountains.
    I had only a mile to walk to school, sometimes through two feet of snow, others had to walk further through fields with deeper snow.
    For some reason, schools did not close, and the snow/rain/sunshine was never the “wrong” type that stopped trains, closed schools and hospitals.
    We could have 3 months of snow and to everyone this was not “catastrophic climate change – it was just your average “Winter weather” … … talk about snowflakes!

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      Phillip Bratby

      It helped that in those days most people lived within walking distance of their workplace (teachers lived near their school, for example).

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      Eugene S. Conlin

      Phillip, 3 miles was definitely within walking distance then, seems that now any distance over 200 yards is difficult without a 4WD vehicle.

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      Eugene S. Conlin

      … the other advantage we had was that we expected Winter (and the other seasons) to come round every year, whereas now it seems to take politicians and post science modernists by surprise (annually).

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        el gordo

        ‘…take politicians and post science modernists by surprise (annually).’

        That is because their mindset is elsewhere, they can’t believe this is happening, its not in the script.

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    Geoffrey Williams

    I was un Uk for christmas and all of January . .
    Unfortunately I was unable to stay for the Spring.
    GeoffW

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      Annie

      It’s not Spring until the Equinox as far as I’m concerned (nor Autumn here DownUnder until then either).

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        • #
          Annie

          That sums it up. As far as I’m concerned the astronomical seasons are the natural ones. The others give a greater opportunity to say ‘hottest day ever in March’ here and ‘coldest day ever in March’ in UK…when really it has all happened before! Perhaps that’s why the Met Office and BOM prefer them!

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            WXcycles

            Bingo!

            UHI overprinting Natural Variability = Myth of Human-induced climate change

            After that, there’s only bias, and other statistics.

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            Ted O'Brien.

            Without doing a proper count, i would expect that a proper count would show that locally we have had a rarely if ever matched number of days over 30 degrees since last equinox, and are still getting more. Forecast 34 for today and tomorrow.

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    It’s like this: the warning about England’s climate becoming Portuguese was a one-in-five-hundred year alarm about a turn of the century event. The latest red alert is a one-in-one-year alarm in case people start to notice all that snow on the Thames and even the Tiber today.

    There’s a big difference.

    The five-hundred-year alarm is much more important because it beats the other by 499. The whole thing is based on statistical likelihoods based on…well, stuff. The predictions are not so much predictive as educational. And when you get educated these days you get that predictions don’t need to be predictive if they’re based on computer models. So if you are still expecting predictions to be predictive you need more educating.

    Having troubling getting your head around it all? Ask some educated type who understands about Upholstery in Space and other such modern marvels.

    By the way, this comment of mine is a one-in-a-thousand-years comment…so all you wallies better pay attention.

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    OriginalSteve

    All the better to surf in jolly old Englande….just BYO artic wetsuit…..might make getting up on a board a bit cumbersome though…..

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      sophocles

      Herbaceous borders and water-loving English country garden plants from foxgloves to delphiniums could struggle in hotter drier summers, while milder, wetter winters could threaten spring bulbs such as tulips and hyacinths.

      Kayaks/canoes have became a non-optional summer extra since the now infamous Barbecue Summer. 🙂
      Egg-on-face doesn’t seem to change anything. Learning from mistakes seems to be no longer allowed. One has to wonder how much longer this divorce from reality will continue.

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    Off topic, What Ever Happened to the first Midweek Unthreaded that starts:
    el gordo
    February 27, 2018 at 8:24 am · Reply

    It has been calculated that the Holocene Interglacial should have come to an end by the time of Christ.

    What went wrong?

    Graeme No.3
    February 27, 2018 at 8:51 am · Reply

    Was that calculation done by the IPCC?

    Dennis
    February 27, 2018 at 9:52 am · Reply

    It was passed on to the BoM and CSIRO

    Environment Skeptic
    February 27, 2018 at 8:55 am · Reply

    Apart from the 10,000 Italian tourists trapped in snow, Grey Seal hunters catastrophic losses due to too much ice, The north pole at minus 31.3C……..other cold weather and so on…… what went wrong with the latest piece by Jo “Bourke: How 1km of land clearing can warm a million square miles”?

    toorightmate
    February 27, 2018 at 1:40 pm · Reply

    No, no, no.
    MSM and Fairfax are reporting a heatwave at the North Pole.

    tom0mason
    February 27, 2018 at 10:27 pm · Reply

    Yes they are confused as to what SSW means.
    Oh no…. it’s a natural event!

    Graeme No.3
    February 28, 2018 at 3:08 am · Reply

    It apparenty got to 1℃ for an unspecified time.

    Sceptical Sam
    February 27, 2018 at 8:25 pm · Reply

    And, it’ll snow in Brighton (UK) today (Tuesday) apparently.

    David Viner, eat your heart out.

    https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/following-up-on-david-viners-expert-forecast/

    Ceetee February 27, 2018 at 10:01 pm · Reply

    How do I explain the circular reasoning and confirmation bias to my youngest daughter who has just become a uni student. She won’t know it or recognise it. She will be confused because she’s not a sheep. She’s heard me bleat about it often enough. Many of those charged with the duty of educating her hide behind the the real academic history of years of academic probity on which their institutions base their reputations. They hide behind politics which neatly disguise the abrogation of their solemn purpose. The rest keep their heads below the sandbags. I don’t actually give a rats what the UN says or does, it was never more than a pantomime anyway but when it comes to the education of our children I get damn angry. If you want to judge a politician just look at their attitude to the education of YOUR children.

    Ceetee
    February 27, 2018 at 10:02 pm · Reply

    I fear this post is misplaced. Apologies.

    Ted O’Brien.
    February 27, 2018 at 10:38 pm · Reply

    Unthreaded!

    I have the rest if any are interested!

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      Peter C

      Somehow we seemed to get 2 midweek Unthreadeds this week!

      We had to start again so that Gee Aye could get the No 1. comment.

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        OOps! news to me. I see you are correct. I preschedule those midweek posts a month in advance so I don’t forget. I wasn’t expecting one to come up Tuesday, nor to post a second this week. .

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          OOps! news to me. I see you are correct. I preschedule those midweek posts a month in advance so I don’t forget. I wasn’t expecting one to come up Tuesday, nor to post a second this week.

          Joanne, Do you have both the threads? I had 9 posts in the Tuesday one. The subject of quaternions will come up again!
          All the best!-will-

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          Joanne,
          2018 is not a leap (2018/4)=504.5! US presidential erections are because of leaps mostly! 🙂

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            Geoff Sherrington

            WJ,
            To avoid future maths,remember that the 20 is divisible by 4 so you simply need to see if the last 2 digits of a date in the 20th century are divisible by 4 when seeking leap years. E.g. for 2016, forget the 20, 4 into 16 goes 4, no remainder, so leap year. Geoff

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          sophocles

          Maybe the blog hosting service provider did some “maintenance?”
          (-aka Routine Disruption and Destruction) 🙂

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      Environment Skeptic

      Nice work..
      That failed seal hunt….
      Thick ice ‘catastrophic’ for Magdalen Islands grey seal hunters – CBC.ca
      From: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bad-season-seal-hunt-magdalen-islands-1.4526262
      “Feb 8, 2018 – Sealers in the Magdalen Islands have not caught a single grey seal in the Gulf of St. Lawrence this hunting season. Thick ice has made it impossible to reach herds off the coast of Nova Scotia

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    Hot under the collar

    “Q: Snow in winter. That feels reassuringly normal. Does this mean the climate has fixed itself?”

    Asked no-one!

    Dear Guardian hacks, it’s called ‘Winter Weather’ same as warm weather in Summer is ‘Summer Weather’ and unusual weather is just called ‘Weather’! If the climate changes and gets warmer or cooler over a period of time then its called ‘natural variability of the climate’. Yes, you can then call it ‘climate change’ if you wish but it is unlikely to be human caused because the climate has always changed in similar patterns.

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      NB

      Oh, don’t you know, the change in temperatures between December and July in the Northern Hemisphere is called climate change. The change between August and November is called weather.

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        The change between August and November is called weather.

        And weather is not Climate. “Climate” is but the term Realtors use to ‘sell this desirable property’! OTOH Can anyone define the word “temperature”? Not the measurement numbers associated with ‘temperature’; but instead the meaning of the word “temperature”? What is it besides a fictitious piecewise linearization of mass accumulation of power in the form of nonsense sensible heat? These ignorant academics claim that power storage (Joules) is the same as work (Joules). Does that mean that temperature is identical with plowing a field? (action- Joule-seconds) What sort of Communistic crap are these Academics trying to teach innocent children?
        All the best!-will-

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      WXcycles

      In other words, this climate change ‘trend’, keeps changing like the weather.

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    DaveR

    Back at the peak of the Green Hysteria in Australia in 2009 we were persuaded that our English garden in suburban Melbourne would not survive the imminent climate change to much dryer conditions…a la fool Flannery predictions.

    So the local gardener eagerly replaced all our shrubs and flowers with desert grasses and hardy emphemerals.

    Three years later the whole garden is dead from the cold.

    So we went back and saw the gardener: “Not my fault” he says, “we were all told the move to much hotter and dryer conditions would be permanent”.

    “Would you like us to put an English garden back in?”

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      NB

      Down near Phillip Island, Vic, we have had frosts three years running, within a couple of hundred metres from the sea. After the first frost long term residents of my town said they hadn’t seen frost like that for 30 years.

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        Wayne Job

        I am in Wonthaggi about one K inland we had a minus six frost this year that killed mature trees.

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          Environment Skeptic

          I have bees. Last year and the year before were a bit on the cool side in summer 2016-2017 and the honey harvest was very, very poor. Local bee keepers also had similar anecdotes.. NZ bee keepers complained too. I am in Gippsland victoria.
          This year a few hot days and the honey harvest is a lot better.
          “Why I’m Not A Commercial Beekeeper Anymore” (please watch)
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZYWucqTyWU

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          Annie

          Our citrus trees were knocked about badly in the long cold winter. We also had -5/-6C and it killed branches on those trees. The long cold winter suited the apples and pears though, with good crops. I picked a lot of Ribston Pippin and James Grieve apples today and a couple of bags of pears. We also had a lot of nectarines, surprisingly, which enjoyed the warmth in the new year…maybe leaving more wood on them helped although they were a nuisance leaning over the driveway.
          We have still not quite made 40C this summer, 3rd year running, whereas we previously had a few each year.

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            Environment Skeptic

            Brown rot and curly leaf got the nectarines and peaches big time this year. Don’t want to use fungicides and will try to figure it out by next season.

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              Annie

              Trace elements, including copper, helped mine a lot. Almost no leaf curl or brown rot even though we had warmish muggy weather as the fruit ripened. The winter was long and cold and then we had enough rain…I still can’t believe what an amazing crop we had this year, even after the chooks and cockatoos got at some of them.

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              Annie

              I didn’t use any fungicides but if you do, a copper-based one will help the tree generally.

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              Bobl

              Spray them with Copper and white oil twice during winter well before bud break. That should woke OT the fungi will before the fruit forms, no contaminants on your nectarines that way

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      RickWill

      Come in sucker!

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      GD

      “we were all told the move to much hotter and dryer conditions would be permanent”.
      “Would you like us to put an English garden back in?”

      I hope you asked the gardener to send the invoice to Tim Flannery.

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        Annie

        There was a similar push in England a few years ago, with Beth-whatever-her-name advocating a lot of ugly boring plants and gravel. Then we had the floods of 2007! A lot of floods around the country were due to a lack of proper river and drain maintenance, thanks to the EPA (some protection 🙁 ) , usually excused by the wish to preserve some salamander or other as happened around Cockermouth in 2009 and more recently. The confluence of rivers there means regular dredging is essential. Someone we know has been flooded three times despite building higher flood barriers after the 2009 flood. Our niece and her family also were flooded out of their home and it was months and months before they could move back in. Obviously salamanders are more important than human beings although they are quite capable of surviving without the ‘help’ of the EPA. A local farmer had a huge quantity of river rock deposited over a valuable field by the flood and wasn’t permitted to move it back from whence it came…high impertinance of the ‘authorities’ in my opinion…they are really out of control and need heavy reining in.

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    RAH

    Ruairi
    March 2, 2018 at 7:58 am · Reply
    “The warmists some decades ago,
    Said Britain would see no more snow,
    As the warming at hand,
    Would warm up the land,
    Which by now would let oranges grow.”

    And so goes the song of the climate ho’s
    As the people shiver as the Arctic winds blow
    And wonder when there will be an end to the snow
    or if their gas and electricity will flow.

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    British Solar Panel generators must work for a good ten days in July.

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      Annie

      Our warmist friends were relying on summers like 2003 and 2006. We were living in England during both of those. My husband told me to quit moaning about the heat in July when I said that one reason for leaving Australia was to get away from overheated summers!

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    Tony Heller reminds us that 10-15 years ago scientists were predicting that Drought may be the new norm, and that Climate Change may turn UK Mediterranean.

    The article Heller was referencing said:
    “Huge swathes of England could take on a Mediterranean look within 50 years…..
    ….By 2050 Summer temperatures in the South-East of Engliand are expected to be 1.5-3 degrees warmer than they are now”

    So either one of these options must apply:

    1/ Tony Heller travelled forward in time to observe what the weather is like in Summer 2050″
    or
    2/ Tony Heller is such a cretin he thinks that a winter snowstorm in 2018 somehow debunks speculation about Summer 2050.

    Personally, having had the misfortune of reading some of the rubbish Heller spouts, I am fairly confident that 2/ applies.

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    • #
      RAH

      Tony doesn’t just base his beliefs on a “snow storm” but on the whole picture of what is happening and what is not. And what is NOT happening is what the likes of Viner and others said would happen.
      The real cretin is one that believes there is a single shred of real evidence that supports the claim that 32 years from now there will date trees and coconut palms growing in a Mediterranean like climate anywhere on those islands. Look in the mirror.

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        RAH

        BTW Craig. I rarely do the thumbs thing and when I have it has always been a green up thumb but you just earned the very first red down thumb I have ever clicked here.

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          RickWill

          That is a bit harsh. I have given Craig a green thumb for regularly showing up here and reminding us how easily some people are taken in by group think rather than having the reasoning ability to achieve a level of understanding based on actual data rather then garbage from low skill, simplistic models of a complex system.

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            Environment Skeptic

            I came back to Jo’s blog to say something similar Rick. Thank you for anticipating this RickWill.
            It is important to have standards and personal pokes at Craig or even Mr Heller is not a civil or advancing human evolution/science or the like in any way whatsoever and never has…ever.
            Debate/different views should not resemble a mud slinging sport or all views are defiled including those that might more closely reflect objective truth.

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              Environment Skeptic

              IN saying that, i am no angel and will try to curb my ways in the future or risk losing all.

              20

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        Graeme No.3

        RAH:

        Craig is today’s Duty Troll. If you don’t like his opinions there will be another one shortly with the same opinions.

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        Except Heller is cherry-picking some details of weather in some places in order to fabricate a narrative, making no mention, for example, the 20-degree above normal temperatures in Northern Greenland.

        Viner did an interview where he highlighted that current trends in england show snow is becoming less frequent:
        http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/511200/1/N511200CR.pdf

        Maybe you should spend less time counting thumbs and more time considering how sensible it is to draw conclusions about climate change based on the witterings of a crank blogger.

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          PeterS

          You should stop trolling and open your eyes to view the vast amounts of hard observational evidence to show there is no runaway global warming event proving all those climate models that were predicting high temperature rises by now as completely false, and not worth a cracker.

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            Peter C

            Craig said that he did look at the Tony Heller website. He either did not understand it or did not believe any of it.

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          Craig

          You are aware of the frequent high winter temperatures in the arctic during the 1920’s and 1930’s? it was during that time that the northern sea route above russia opened up and the secretariat set up to develop the route.

          Snow is not the norm in England at all. People think it is because of dickens and his depictions of snow that occurred during his formative years during one of the bitter cold periods of the little ice age.

          Tonyb

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            Since the Arctic temp plunge of the 1960s and ice build-up of the ’70s Russians have shown a lot more interest in warm water ports. Maybe they’re not as impressed by recent ice reductions as the rest of us. Seen it all before, maybe?

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            NB

            Those communists sure know about warming then. Thank goodness they have spread across the world to impart their experience.

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            Mark D.

            Craig is a toggle switch of “Climate” or “Weather” and to boot he is also a toggle switch of “Local Regional Global” (yes a three way switch).

            Craig’s propaganda ALWAYS leverages the toggle switch position to make his incorrect point.

            Just remember if Craig puts it in print it is propaganda. If Craig says it it is propaganda.

            That is all Craig knows.

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            sophocles

            Charles Dickens was born in 1812, just before “The Year Without a Summer” and grew up during the cold years of the Dalton Minimum [1790-1830] and its aftermath. His first novel The Pickwick Papers was published in 1843.

            His writings portray his first hand experience of the weather conditions of his times when men’s clothing was several layers of wool with the outer layers made of felted wool—all cold climate materials. Women’s clothing was also long and heavy with waist to ankle pantaloons for warmth. It wasn’t until the 1880s for things to start warming up—just in time to go cold again over the 1890s.

            Dickens is often credited with the “white Christmas” concept. If it is what he grew up, then it’s understandable.

            Clothing is a pretty good measure of the ambient “climate” conditions.

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          Rud Istvan

          CT, I stongly urge you to read essay Northwest Passage in ebook Blowing Smoke. Is Heller perfect? No, as no one is. Is he mostly correct? Yes, based on the preponderance of historical evidence he has presented WHICH IS NOT cherrypicked. Problem is, he challenges with historical facts warmunist beliefs for which you have nomobservational evidence. Get over it.

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            Mark D.

            He won’t.

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              PeterS

              He probably can’t because he’s not allowed to according to his cult religion. Alarmists are forbidden to read factual material and only material that is fabricated to meet the CAGW agenda. Truth hurts for those that hate it so they steer away from it as much as possible.

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          RAH

          OK Craig, maybe you should spend more time paying attention to the real tragedy that could unfold here due to the stupidity of people that believe as you do or at least pretend to in order to make themselves rich or to put themselves in a position to have more power. The UK is in a very marginal energy situation that could quickly see it dangerously short on fuel for electrical generation during THIS cold spell.
          http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
          The reason why is because their politicos believe the same garbage that you and likes of Viner and so many others believe and have been acting on the bad advise they’ve been getting or at least using it as an excuse to line their own pockets with their energy policies. Just keep it up and you delusional suckers are going to end up with blood on your hands. Blood of the citizens right in a developed nation that should have no problem keeping the lights and the heat on if not for wackos like you that support this nonsense and the expansion of “renewables” at the expense of reliable fossil fuel sources. The UK is going to end up buying it’s gas from the Russia and the US for NO GOOD REASON!

          BTW I filled my tank on my Toyota FJ Cruiser today. Paid $2.04 per gallon. We heat our home with natural Gas and are averaging less than $250.00 a month to heat our 1,450 sq. ft home built in 1943 (with new windows and good insulation added) this winter despite 3 weeks of near record cold in that time. And I can thank President Trump for those facts. Drill baby drill! I see the new drill rigs lighted up at night when driving through SE Oho and parts of PA where they allow fracking unlike the the UK.
          https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-oil-production/u-s-crude-oil-production-hit-record-high-in-november-eia-idUSKCN1GC2PB

          And I have YET to see you state that you believe that any part of those islands will have a Mediterranean like climate 32 years from now. Do you or do not believe that projection to be correct? You must based on the stuff your spouting.

          And BTW N. hemisphere snow cover has been climbing.
          https://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1

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          Craig, you think Heller doesn’t comment on the warm spell, but check his site, he laughs at the warm spell in the Arctic with a big diagram labeling the warm part as “climate” and all the colder areas around as “weather”. Don’t believe your lying eyes.

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          Environment Skeptic

          Cherry picking a transient temperature data Craig… how sinful of you lol.

          Where you say…………” for example, the 20-degree above normal temperatures in Northern Greenland.”

          above normal/zero temperatures in Greenland that lasted not longer than 24 hours, … caused by warm air from the south. In truth, that strong warm air stream of above zero warmer air from the south made it all the way into the Arctic and cleared in the same time scale of a day or so..

          The current areas in the northern hemisphere that are below zero temperatures are roughly three times the size of the Antarctic in the south presently. Subjectively the way it looks to me…

          Which raises the question i am not qualified to answer which is…did the polar tropospheric jet stream split due to the increasing size of the arctic sub zero region?? We know the sudden warming of the troposphere above the arctic did not warm up by itself because that region of the world was still in 24 hour dark and does not receive any sun as yet.

          the twin vortices’s..
          https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/10hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=0.63,88.07,274/loc=-126.424,89.738

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          John F. Hultquist

          The DMI charts show warm temperature spikes in the Arctic region during many past years.
          So this one is nothing new, and says nothing about climate change.

          You, Craig, should learn the evidence and spend less time reporting on “climate scientists” that have proved they do not know what they are talking about.

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          sophocles

          You accuse Heller of Cherry-picking. Pot, Kettle, Black, also known has hypocrisy. Those high temperatures you have cherry-picked, Craig, were caused by a warm air intrusion and lasted no more than two weeks. It is a weather phenomenon which happens not uncommonly. To point to it and demand “What about that?”

          Well? What about it? It happens. But it is NOT Climate. It doesn’t last for 30 years, in fact not even for 30 days. It’s like snow in Tasmania and New Zealand in the middle of summer. That’s happened two years in a row, but we can’t call it climate. Not yet.

          Berk.

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      Craig

      I live on the so called English riviera. The narrative was that businesses should prepare for the coming Mediterranean climate. Well, all my succulents in the garden are frozen solid

      Unfortunately the temperature has been declining here since the turn of the century. Mind you it is still at a historically high temperature but that could be because with 65 million people in an area smaller than new York state, we are a giant urban heat island

      Tonyb

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        Richard S Courtney

        TonyB:

        I live in Falmouth, Cornwall, where palm trees and tree ferns grow wild. I wait with interest to see if old tree ferns have survived when the snow melts from them.

        Richard

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          Annie

          We have tree ferns not too far from us at Lake Mountain. They are well snowed most winters. Lake Mountain is a cross-country skiing area.

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      toorightmate

      Craig,
      When you have a similar understanding of past and present trends using unadulterated data as does Tony Heller you may then be in a position to offer a comment about his work.
      Until that time, you would be well advised to shut your big mouth.

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    mmxx

    It’s absolutely essential that we keep reminding people about the widely acclaimed (by the MSM) prediction in 2000 by David Viner, University of East Anglia that within a few years from then “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” due to global warming.

    That was before climatastrophists had to find more wriggle room by adopting the terms “climate change” and later “climate disruption”.

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      NB

      “children just aren’t going to know what snow is”
      Silly, what he meant was that because of AGW they will only know ice. (There is not enough evaporation in a below freezing environment to produce precipitation.) Global warming is far too complicated for you to understand.

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  • #

    I posted this on wuwt in response to your article but it also seems relevant here

    We live some 15 miles away from the met office in Exeter which ironically was right in the eye of their own red weather warning.

    It’s just before 10 and I am watching the new series of civilisation on tv. We are toasty warm in our gas fuelled house

    It has just started raining a little , actually freezing rain, with a nasty coating of ice on the roads the temperature is hovering around freezing after being at around minus three all day. One of the coldest march days ever.

    Ironically this is a favourite place to live for some of the met office staff but the local news tells us we are cut off. The coast road has cars stranded on it whilst the main road is up the notorious high and steep haldon hill and is impassable.

    Mind yOu it’s only a few inches of snow, but the gale force winds have blown it into three foot deep drifts opposite our house. It’s the strong cold east wind that is the main problem and with high tides and this easterly, expect flooding tomorrow and perhaps the closure of the main railway line through dawlish.

    As for the succulents in my garden, I am afraid they are frozen solid and will be dead when the thaw comes despite being protected with fleece. The idea that we are heading towards a Mediterranean climate was ludicrous 15 years ago but is even more so when it is realised that our temperature here in the uk has been declining since the turn of the century

    Tonyb

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      OriginalSteve

      Never mind…at least getting to the bird shredders in the North Sea for maintenance will be easier when its frozen over….

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      Environment Skeptic

      OOps …I thought you meant “scientist’s in my garden were frozen solid”

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        I shall be crowd funding for new succulents for the garden once we thaw out. Around 50,000 dollars should buy me a nice selection.

        New development this morning. The rain has frozen on the ground and it is a complete skating rink right outside my door. Daren’t go out for an hour or two as I don’t think getting to the hospital with a broken leg will be easy.

        I have never seen this effect before in such an extreme fashion in what is just about the warmest place in the country (which admittedly is not saying much)
        tonyb

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          Annie

          I think conditions were like that in north Hampshire back in the winter of ’65/’66, can’t remember the month now. It was freezing cold and then rain fell, coating everything in rime. I had a 1953 Morris Minor which went skating down a side road after I stupidly turned off to give someone a lift! The scenery was very pretty, if lethal.

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    Griffo

    Beware the ides of March,Wm Shakespeare,Julius Caesar.

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    The real howler in these “by 2050” etc predictions is the implication that wide-scale warming and lethal drought are strongly associated when the opposite is more often the case. While there are no simple equivalencies, the principal hazard of any global cooling is drought. Cooling and drought helped end the Old Kingdom, a thousand years after that cooling and drought hastened the collapse of the Bronze Age cultures. Cooling has been a critical factor in drought in more places than not.

    Sure you get major heat and drought coming together in unlikely places, as with the Big Sun in Western Europe around 1540 and 1976 in mid-cooling-scare England. Australians and Californians cop that on a regular basis. But you feel more heat where there is less cloud and less water about, and daily maxima will be higher if cloud cover is absent every afternoon. But the tying of general warming to general drought is yet another stunt, and no doubt a deliberate one. It’s an outrageous howler.

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      Dave in the States

      During the last 175 years California has been wetter than its historic norm. If California flips flops from its current long term wetter period or even if it goes “normal”, then it will discover what drought really is. During the last 2 millennia there have been droughts lasting hundreds of years in California. That was before the industrial revolution, though.

      Right now the Sierras are being hit with several feet, yes feet, of new snow.

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      • #

        Some years back I was checking out the freaky mid-1960s drought in New York when I found some rather disturbing old rainfall figures for the area dating way back. They indicated that worse and longer droughts have occurred there within the historical period. And since I was doing that reading there have been signs of drought for NY and more than signs in the western part of the state in 2016. Seems that what we’ve taken to be the permanent regime for NY is just a lucky pluvial.

        Dave, I’ve also read that it was a generous pluvial, beginning in the late 1820s after extended drought in the Western US, which enabled much of the settlement and progress there. The 1905-17 pluvial was even better for California, though lousy conditions were to follow very soon in the North of the state then later in the South. As to how anyone can imagine that rain in California was ever a given or that climate there was ever stable…I guess they make it up even if they can’t imagine.

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      • #
        Kinky Keith

        Somebody put a picture of two feet of snow on this blog recently.

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        • #
          Annie

          That made me hoot with laughter! Most of the snow pictures I’ve seen online didn’t look much different from the times I’ve seen it before. I daresay it’s been pretty nasty in some areas though; maybe people will learn to carry enough warm clothing, food and drinks, snow shovels and blankets after this. An awful lot of people seem to think that flimsy jackets, no head-covering and stiletto heels are up to the job when their cars are held up kn the snow and ice!

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        Rah

        Joe Bastardi has been warning that Texas will be in for a dry spell this Spring. Been forecasting it for months! I await the ambulance chasers and their be declaration that there is a new “permanent drought” in the US South West sometime in April or May.

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      yarpos

      Once again “by 2050” over the horizon and half a lifetime away, just out of tracking range during their career, just long enough to collect the pension and be gone. The predictions thus far have come to nought so why would this be any different? just hoping of you make enough of them eventually some will be correct? The good news is that these days we have the Internet and some memory recall capability for past stupidity.

      Still the faithfull still kneel at the feet of the likes of Gore, Mann and Flim Flam and wait for their next Oracle like utterance, never thinking for a second mmmmmm didnt he say that a while ago, didnt he say something completly different a while ago, wasnt that already supposed to have happened.

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        The good news is that these days we have the Internet and some memory recall capability for past stupidity.

        Please consider perhaps ‘cleverness’, is masked as ‘stupidity’ used by self appointed elite; to further drain wealth\effort\work from poor usuns\cattle\slaves! 🙁

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      • #

        Yes, I think there is a type of climate bloviator who craftily times predictions for average retirement age. Then you get the types like Viner who try to hit it out of the park with predictions that fall flat before they can get out of Dodge.

        Of course, in the case of Flannery, nobody cares, no matter what he claims or predicts. Attacking Timmy would be like shooting Skippy. Even if you got caught with a huge portfolio of Geodynamics. Even if someone told you how unused desals cost between five and seven hundred thou a day.

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          Kinky Keith

          I was hoping to forget the desals as a bad dream.

          The money LEFT the treasury and was last seen heading for UNION territory.

          Why don’t we sell them to somewhere like Saudi Arabia and use the money to build dams?

          I know, I know.

          You can’t move the bl$$dy things.

          Every time I think about them I envision a giant thumb extended upwards with a sign attached saying;

          Thank you voters and taxpayers for being so dumb.

          Signed

          Yoonyun Boss.

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            sophocles

            You might not be able to move the desal plants but that shouldn’t stop them being sold to Saudi Arabia :-).

            “I know a fresh water plant for sale—it’s cheap!”

            Gives a new twist to the age old con.

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          Rah

          Viner went into deep cover in academia or private concerns. Even the guardian pulling his interview from their archives couldn’t help mitigate the damage done.

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    pat

    google result won’t take you to the Popular Science article, but this is available at the cached version. you can go there to see their “evidence”:

    Cyclones in the Pacific made it snow in Rome, and soon that weather will hit the U.S.
    Your regular reminder that weather is a wild system of tiny causes and huge effects.
    Popular Science · 2 days ago
    By Sara Chodosh
    PIC: Snow on the Roman Forum in 2012, because this is obviously not the first time it’s ever snowed in Rome.
    A butterfly in the form of two tropical cyclones flapped its wings in the Pacific, and now Rome is covered in a dusting of snow.
    First, some pictures of that (since that’s partly why you’re all here):

    But wait! There’s more to this story than a few pretty pictures of snowy Roman roofs. There’s this sweet gif:

    That’s the polar vortex splitting into two vortices earlier this month. Normally the vortex swirls around the North Pole, only occasionally dipping down into lower latitudes. But in mid-February, two tropical cyclones formed and started pumping heat into the atmosphere. That warming destabilized the polar vortex and forced it to split, which hasn’t happened in five years.

    One of those sister vortices headed down toward eastern Europe and caused record-breaking cold snaps there, along with the snow in Rome. Normally, Europe gets most of its weather patterns off the Atlantic Ocean—winds generally travel around the world from west to east—and that makes most of the continent warmer than equivalent latitudes in North America. But when that vortex descended, it interrupted the normal weather pattern.

    Similarly, most of the U.S. has had unusually high temperatures in the last week because we’re in a La Niña year, when we tend to have warmer winters. But the other half of that polar vortex is coming for us. Kind of.

    If you live in the Western U.S., meteorologists predict you’ll see snow by mid-week. The Rockies will definitely get hit, and the Southern California mountains could see a foot of snow. Most lower-lying areas will only get a few inches.
    Then the vortex is going to spread across the rest of the country. The northern Midwest looks like it’ll get some flakes, though if you’re south of Minnesota you’ll probably just get rain.

    As for the Northeast, there will either be lots of snow or lots of rain. It’s too early to tell. Warmer air over the Atlantic could shift westward and make the temperature too high to produce any significant snowfall, but if the moving vortex is strong enough to push that out to sea there could be some flakes. The National Weather Service is cautioning that this could be a major storm (with lots of flooding) either way.

    That won’t be until the end of this week, though, and the forecast will firm up in the meantime. Until then, remember that weather is an insanely complex system of moving parts, and it’s honestly amazing that meteorologists can forecast it at all. So don’t blame your local weatherperson if you get several inches of rain this week instead of a snow day. Blame the chaos of the universe, as always.

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    • #
      John of Cloverdale, WA, Australia

      Sorry that link was Northern Hemisphere winter snow cover (1967 to 2017). Eurasian winter snow cover is found at this link.
      Link to North American winter snow cover (also increasing) is also found on that web page.
      Cheers.

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        OriginalSteve

        Presumably the comms gear running the link have frozen over and died…. 🙂

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        John F. Hultquist

        Those links show facts.

        climate alarmists don’t need no stinking facts.
        Opinions and feelings are easier — just make them up.

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    pat

    1 Mar: TheLocalItaly: 15 incredible pictures of snow in Italy
    As the ‘Beast from the East’ continues to sweep across Italy, parts of the country that rarely see snow are covered in a blanket of the white stuff. The result? These incredible photographs.
    PHOTO CAPTION: The Roman Forum, which has only seen snow a handful of times in its millennia-long history.
    https://www.thelocal.it/20180301/snow-italy-february-weather-photography-rome-venice-florence-milan

    VIDEO: 11mins39sec: 28 Feb: Daily Caller: Tim Pearce: Rome’s Mayor Announces Diesel Car Ban Amidst Worst Winter Storm In Years
    “As a huge city, Rome is on the front line tackling climate change,” Raggi said, addressing the Women4Climate conference (in Mexico City) Tuesday. “The risk of careless politics is before our very eyes, I would say: snow storms, fire, floods, abnormally heavy rainfall, heatwaves and … polluted air.”…
    http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/28/rome-bans-diesel-car/

    28 Feb: WantedInRome: Diesel car ban in central Rome from 2024
    (Rome mayor Virginia) Raggi announced the move at the C40 Women for Climate meeting in Mexico which she left early to return to deal with Rome’s snow crisis.
    Addressing the summit in fluent English, Raggi said “energetic” measures were required to protect the environment and that “we must have courage to take vigorous action.”…

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    Allen Ford

    many scientists are concerned this is a prelude to more extreme and less predictable weather.

    Perhaps its their ability to predict accurately that’s shonky, not the weather acting unco-operatively!

    Just a thought.

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    pat

    while watching cricket last nite, I checked all news channels on cable during breaks and NEVER found a news segment or even a news ticker at the bottom of the screen about Europe’s weather. if it had been a single Penrith temp or an alleged 69C recorded on a courtside thermometer at the Australian tennis, it would have been (was) top news 24/7 worldwide:

    2 Mar: UK Express: Storm Emma Travel CHAOS: Major incident in Avon & Somerset as ‘essential NHS staff’ stuck
    STORM EMMA has plagued parts of Avon and Somerset causing a “major incident” to be declared by police due to “severe weather across the region” following a request by the NHS, it has been revealed.
    By Joseph Carey
    “At the moment, we’re co-ordinating a rescue operation to help people stranded in their vehicles in multiple locations across Somerset, including around 100 vehicles stuck in snow on the A303 at Ilminster…
    Meanwhile, a major incident was also declared on the A31 eastbound and westbound by police as Storm Emma continued its rampage across the country…

    The A31 has been closed on both the eastbound and westbound carriageways between the A338 and the M27.
    The Army was called in to help authorities help stranded drivers that attempted to take on the perilous conditions…
    Hampshire police added: “For the incident on the A31 we have requested military assistance.
    “We are on scene with our partners and are working to get people out as soon as possible…
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/926066/UK-snow-Storm-Emma-major-incident-Avon-Somerset-traffic-chaos-delays-NHS-staff-stuck

    1 Mar: UK Express: BBC Weather Forecast: ‘Take ACTION’ warning as ‘the Beast’ CLASHES with Storm Emma TONIGHT
    BRITAIN is facing increasingly treacherous conditions as the Beast from the East clashes with the recently arrived Storm Emma, leading to more snow and plunging temperatures in the next few hours.
    By Aurora Bosotti
    BBC Weather forecaster Louise Lear said: “We are actually being attacked from two ends because we got these snow showers from the east – the “Beast from the East” we’ve been talking about – that’s been causing problems.
    “But look at this just in the last few hours starting to push up – this is Storm Emma that arrived through Portugal. That is the reason for the red warning, the top alert, the ‘take action” warning.”…

    Storm Emma will bring almost 12 straight hours of blizzards, torrential snowfall and violent 70mph gales across England through tonight.
    Two masses of air will meet bringing a rare and potentially deadly union which could see parts of England suffer the worst winter whiteout in recent history.
    The Met Office said up to two feet of snow could fall across parts of southern England before Emma departs late tomorrow morning.
    It is likely to be the most severe whiteout to affect parts of the country since the mammoth snowstorm of 1991.
    ***The storm will hit on the first day of the meteorological spring with today shaping up to be the coldest start to spring ever…

    Ms Lear continued: “In the last few hours the snow has really gathered in intensity across the south-west. Just in the last few minutes, the Met Office extended the amber weather warning – be prepared for some disruption – towards the west of London. But it’s the red warning that is the real issue.
    “This one means take action. The weather is so bad there is potential there for the loss of life. We can’t stress enough that we are looking at blizzard-like conditions across the south-west and also into south Wales overnight tonight.”

    Weather forecaster Simon King warned the UK was yet to see the “main event” of snow which was expected to hit Britain today and cause more disruption…
    Strong winds will whip up snowdrifts several feet deep which threaten to leave swathes of the country buried until mid-March…
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/925964/BBC-weather-UK-snow-forecast-Met-Office-Storm-Emma-warning-latest-update-video

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    pat

    examples of BBC’s headlines in the past 24 hours:

    UK weather: Snowy scenes as Storm Emma arrives
    Storm Emma: UK snow could reach 50cm as conditions worsen
    UK weather: Storm Emma to bring snow, gales and rain
    UK weather: Snow continues to hit the UK
    UK snow: Stranded groom makes big day after act of kindness
    Snow baby: Mother gives birth by the side of busy A66
    A real white wedding and other snow stories
    UK snow: The Lincolnshire villages cut off
    In pictures: Snow persists in UK
    Storm Emma: Travel disruption in Wales after red alert

    an hour ago, they went tabloid! but not without taking advantage of another opportunity to ATTACK RUSSIA. video “tips” are ludicrous – make a hot chocolate and the like:

    1 Mar: BBC: Snow in Europe: Deadly winter storm brings chaos
    VIDEO: How to keep warm? Tips from cold countries
    Large parts of Europe are enduring another night of freezing conditions as a Siberian weather system continues to bring chaos.
    Blizzards and heavy snowfall have closed roads, rail services and schools and forced the cancellations of hundreds of flights.
    The unusually cold spell is being felt as far south as the Mediterranean.
    The number of weather-related deaths rose to as many as 55 with 21 victims in Poland, most of them rough sleepers.

    It triggered a warning from the World Health Organization that the poor, the homeless and migrants would be hardest hit by the big freeze.
    “Those most at risk of cold-related illness include elderly people, children, and people who have chronic diseases or physical or mental limitations,” it said as a statement.

    The weather system has been given various nicknames – in the UK it is “the Beast from the East” while the Dutch call it the “Siberian bear” and Swedes the “snow cannon”.
    Snow has even appeared on the normally balmy beaches of the French Riviera.

    Ireland remains braced for what is predicted to be its heaviest snowfall in decades as Storm Emma moves in from the south…

    In France, about 2,000 drivers were stranded on a motorway near the city of Montpellier, with some complaining of being stuck for as long as 24 hours.
    Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport was also hit by freezing winds with KLM airlines cancelling or delaying dozens of flights…
    Some rail services operated by Eurostar between London, Paris and Brussels were axed…

    What else is going on?
    Ukraine, which has further snowstorms forecast in the days to come, has found itself in a fresh row with Russia over gas supplies.
    The Russian state-run gas giant Gazprom said it would not restart gas shipments – expected on Thursday – because agreements had not been finalised. The shipments would have been the first from Russia since 2015.
    Ukrainian energy agency Naftogaz accused Gazprom of violating contractual obligations and the European Commission later stepped in to act as a broker between the two.
    Moscow and Kiev have been at loggerheads since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43251315

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    • #

      an hour ago, they went tabloid! but not without taking advantage of another opportunity to ATTACK RUSSIA.

      Can you imagine a game AKA Chess, Billiards, between the world class spooks; Ru Vladimir Putin v.s. US Michael Flynn? Can you even imagine who might be acceptable referees?
      All the best!-will-

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    pat

    ***Beeb’s Amos goes along with Popular Science’s Pacific theory:

    1 Mar: BBC: What’s behind the UK’s freezing weather?
    By Jonathan Amos
    As the the UK and the wider European continent shivers, the Arctic has witnessed some spectacularly high temperatures in recent days, some 30 degrees above average in places.
    Such a topsy-turvy picture inevitably has people wondering if this isn’t some kind of fallout from global warming.

    But, as ever, meteorologists will not conflate single events with more longer-term trends.
    The UK Met Office, for example, is adamant that what is occurring now should be regarded as part of the natural ups and downs we get in our weather.

    ***The current cold snap is likely to have had its origins in the tropical Pacific, believe it or not, and something called the Madden-Julian Oscillation…

    All that said, the Arctic generally is warming faster than the rest of the globe, and the temperature anomalies in recent days have been extreme.
    And once again, Arctic sea-ice – that oft-quoted canary of climate change – is very low this winter.

    There is an interesting and growing body of research which suggests that a reduced differential between polar and mid-latitude temperatures (where summer temperatures rarely go above 40C, and winters are usually fairly mild) could eventually make for more bumpy weather like we’re having now.

    It is widely debated but is sure to continue to be a very active line of study.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43245136

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    • #
      Richard S Courtney

      pat,

      You quote the BBC explaining

      The current cold snap is likely to have had its origins in the tropical Pacific, believe it or not, and something called the Madden-Julian Oscillation…

      All that said, the Arctic generally is warming faster than the rest of the globe, and the temperature anomalies in recent days have been extreme.
      And once again, Arctic sea-ice – that oft-quoted canary of climate change – is very low this winter.

      This explanation is a perfect example of the post modern scientific technique known as ‘bull sh^t baffles brains’.

      Richard

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      • #
        WXcycles

        It’s the same BS that occurs every time the market rises or falls. There any number of professional twits with a trite soothing Xplanachun for it.

        Ten seconds of reflection on the logic reveals they’re addicted to explaining things, things that they have no clue about how it works, or why it moved.

        Only the obsession with the appearance of providing explanations matters.

        That creates ‘cred’, and cred is attractive, the faker the better.

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        tom0mason

        The modern ‘science’ of teleconnection process.

        Climate science is one of the first area of science to use the ‘science’ of teleconnections — see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleconnection .

        All this settled science, eh?

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    RicDre

    Talk about global warming…Here in Northern Ohio in the US at 9PM EST on March 1st, it is snowing (3 to 5 inches expected) and gusts of wind up to 40 MPH (65 KPH). That storm in the UK is so global that it is happening here also.

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    pat

    Friday 2 March, 2.30pm – it took 10 pages, about 25 results per page, before ABC has a mention of Europe’s freeze on their “Just In” pages.

    Two killed as ‘Beast from the East’ paralyses Europe
    Posted Wed at 10:28am | Updated Wed at 3:03pm
    A Siberian weather system forecasters are calling the “Beast from the East” kills two people in Romania as it hits Europe, bringing the coldest temperatures for years to many regions…

    nothing else comes up in a general “ABC online” search.

    no results for “storm emma” in a search of ABC’s main homepage, yet there are the following if you search long enough:

    AUDIO: 1 Mar: ABC Breakfast: How warm arctic weather caused the ‘Beast from the East’ – RN Breakfast – ABC Radio National
    Record temperatures in the Arctic have pushed cold air further south.
    While it may seem counter-intuitive, climate change researchers say the unseasonably cold weather is linked to rising temperatures in the Arctic circle.
    Guest: Kim Holmen, International Director of the Norwegian Polar Institute
    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/how-warm-arctic-weather-caused-the-beast-from-the-east/9496018

    1 Mar: ABC News Radio: ‘Highly unusual’ red alert issued in Scotland as heavy snow and high winds put lives in danger
    A red warning has been issued in Scotland because of heavy snow, meaning there is a risk to life and that people should “take action now” to keep safe.
    Hundreds of flights have been cancelled across the UK as the storm front nicknamed ‘The Beast from the East’ takes hold … while thousands of schools have closed.
    Transport networks have been hit hard while a defacto driving ban is in place across much of Scotland’s Central belt – which has been hardest hit.
    Radio Station Forth 1’s Senior Reporter Hope Webb has been covering events from the ground in Edinburgh.
    She says arctic air from Siberia is whipping up powdery snow like a snowy tornado.
    She speaks to ABC’s Sandy Aloisi. AUDIO: Duration: 04:05
    http://www.abc.net.au/newsradio/content/s4810167.htm

    theirABC should be shut down.

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    • #
      mmxx

      But the ABC reckons it is smarter than us sceptics. The ABC is sure that the short period of less than normal freezing temperatures in parts of the Arctic is the true indicator of climate change, whereas the lengthy widespread blizzard conditions in Europe, UK and parts of North America are just “weather”.

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    OriginalSteve

    O/T:

    Its baaaaackkk…..public funded, too….

    Art…the excuse for all “interesting” things…..so is it art, or as Bolt says….?

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-01/kill-climate-deniers-playwright-takes-on-bolt-breitbart/9478748

    “In 2014, Finnigan was commissioned by Canberra’s Aspen Island Theatre Company to write a play that explored climate change and Australian politics. He called the play Kill Climate Deniers, and was given a $19,000 grant from the ACT Government to develop it.

    “The Herald Sun columnist was not impressed:

    “What sane government donates to a project urging others to kill fellow citizens, even as a “joke”?”

    “Finnigan said that despite the name, his play is not a violent call to arms but rather “a pretty joyful comedy”.

    “It’s a high-octane action adventure thriller set in Parliament House,” he said.

    The Parliament House of Finnigan’s play, however, has been invaded by eco-terrorists. They’ve taken everyone hostage while demanding that the government stop climate change.”

    This is the funniest but by far:

    “Finnigan, who based his 2012 Churchill Fellowship on studying the intersection between science and the performing arts, creates theatre in collaboration with climate and systems scientists.

    Scientists were informally involved in the development of this play ensuring that “all the science was double and triple fact-checked,” he said.”

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    pat

    poorly written:

    2 Mar: Bloomberg: Gas Market Responds to National Grid’s Plea for Supply in U.K.
    By Mathew Carr and Anna Shiryaevskaya
    Grid manager says demand has surged with this week’s cold snap
    Russia’s Gazprom ended February with record shipments
    Natural gas markets have responded to a plea for fresh supplies in the U.K. after a blast of Arctic air lifted demand for heating and electricity.
    The nation’s pipeline manager National Grid Plc and the government moved to reassure consumers followed a surge in U.K. gas prices for prompt delivery to the highest in at least a decade…

    Pinched supplies prompted the chemical maker Ineos Group Ltd. to reduce its consumption by 20 percent at its Runcorn plant in the U.K. Russia’s state-controlled gas supplier Gazprom PJSC said it made record deliveries into its key markets last month, including the European Union…
    For Britain, the incident highlighted the nation’s vulnerability to shortages since it lost the use of a giant gas field for storage purposes…

    At the moment when the U.K. most needed a supply cushion to smooth out demand for gas, Centrica Plc announced a 12-hour outage at its Rough gas storage facility under the North Sea. National Grid issued a statement early in the day warning the pipeline system was facing a deficit. By Thursday evening, it said it never asked any industrial customers to cut back and that while tight, supplies were sufficient…

    Britain is Europe’s biggest gas consumer after Germany. Once a major gas producer, the U.K. increasingly relies on imports during winter months as output from the North Sea falls. It’s a risky dependency when it’s cold across Europe, like this week when a mass of Siberian air pushed in.
    “It certainly shows the vulnerability of extreme events,” Nick Campbell, energy risk manager at Inspired Energy Plc, said by email. “Our only other form, LNG, is not flexible in the short term. It takes time to arrive from its destination, therefore the one thing you can guarantee is volatility.”…
    Without Rough, the U.K. is more reliant on costly liquefied natural gas — or supplies from continental Europe where the government is renegotiating its trade links…

    U.K. Energy Minister Claire Perry said domestic gas supplies won’t be affected.
    “I have spoken to National Grid this morning, and we are in constant contact to monitor the gas supply throughout this extreme weather,” Perry said in a statement. “So do carrying on using your gas heating and cooking meals as normal.”
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-01/gas-market-responding-to-national-grid-s-plea-for-supply-in-u-k

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    pat

    1 Mar: Sputnik News: #BeastFromTheEast: Gazprom Comes to Aid of Freezing EU Members Again – Analyst
    As the “Beast from the East” brings snow and severe cold to Europe, EU member states turn to their longstanding partner Gazprom to tackle the challenge, Andrzej Szczesniak, an energy security analyst, told Sputnik, explaining why Poland would rather freeze than embrace the Russia-led Nord Stream 2 project.

    Gazprom will remain the main player in the gas market in Europe for the foreseeable future, Andrzej Szczesniak, an energy security analyst, told Sputnik Poland, adding that Nord Stream 2 helps Germany become the major hub for Russia’s cheap pipeline gas in Europe…
    Under these circumstances, Gazprom’s energy supplies to the EU have soared dramatically…

    “The European Union, including Poland, is facing a very difficult situation, having turned away from coal to renewable sources of energy, such as windmills and solar panels,” Szczesniak said. “However, they cannot solve the current problem. Therefore, Gazprom has come to the aid of the people of European countries with its huge reserves of natural gas.”

    According to the analyst, “the more connections are established between the structures of the EU and Gazprom — let’s keep in mind the Yamal and ‘Brotherhood’ gas pipelines — the more confident Europe will feel in terms of energy security.”
    “As for other gas producers, for instance, Norway or Algeria, they are obviously losing to Gazprom,” the energy security specialist opined. “If some country in Europe decided to buy liquefied [natural] gas (LNG) for its civilians, then, it would have to wait at least two weeks for the delivery after making the order! And Gazprom is the important player that is reacting quickly; it has its own trump cards, like Saudi Arabia has in the oil market.”

    Given all of the above, it’s quite logical that the EU flagship, Germany, has signaled its support to Nord Stream 2 project. However, some Central and Eastern European states (CEE), namely, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states vehemently oppose the joint project run by Russia’s Gazprom with France’s Engie, Austria’s OMV AG, Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, and Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall…

    The project aims to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of Russian gas annually to the European Union, through a pipeline across the Baltic Sea to Germany…
    https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201803011062130203-gazprom-eu-gas/

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    Bruce Imrie

    I go with Richard Courtney for a clear and factual summary of the climate question. Climate “scientists” ignore the rules of scientific investigation but they have fooled ignorant politicians worldwide to our detriment.

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    • #
      PeterS

      Not just politicians but also a significant proportion of the populace in general. I’m afraid there are too many gullible people out there – so much so it actually is a detriment to our democracy society. In the long run though truth prevails and those who are gullible will change their mind. Unfortunately, by the time they do a lot of damage to our economy will have occurred.

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    Bruce Imrie

    I go with Richard Courtney for a clear and factual summary of the climate question. Climate “scientists” ignore the rules of scientific investigation but they have fooled ignorant politicians worldwide to our detriment.

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    pat

    too silly…

    1 Mar: BBC: Reality Check: Where in the world is snow getting rarer?
    By Chris Fawkes
    Cities across Europe have been hit by a Siberian snow blast this week – also known as “the Beast from the East”.
    Even Mediterranean islands such as Corsica and Capri haven’t escaped; parts of Spain and Italy have seen their first snowfall in years; and in the UK, there has been widespread disruption to transport and schools.
    But despite this wintry weather, in some places snow is actually getting rarer…

    The UK picture
    According to a report by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), there is evidence that the number of times snow is observed in a year has reduced – a sense of this change can be gained by looking at the animation below of data from the Met Office.
    If you look at Merseyside, for example, between 1961 and 1990, the area would normally have about 20 to 30 days of snow falling each year. By 1981-2010, that had reduced to about 10 to 20 days per year.
    Of course, there’s variation across the country…

    Will snow become rarer in other parts of the world?
    Not necessarily – it’s a mixed picture…
    http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43158532

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    Another Ian


    Hey UK! Dr. Viner! The Kids DO Know What Snow Is Now.”

    https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2018/03/02/hey-uk-dr-viner-the-kids-do-know-what-snow-is-now/

    And getting serious in Ireland

    “Ireland Taking A Snow Wallop”

    https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2018/03/02/ireland-taking-a-snow-wallop/

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    Mark M

    It’s official: 4-5m thick sea ice in Weddell Sea has thwarted RRS James Clark Ross mission to Larsen C Ice Shelf, 400km short.
    Scientists will now research sea bed below ex-Larsen A Ice Shelf which collapsed in 1995
    https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/research-mission-to-larsen-c-ice-shelf-thwarted-by-sea-ice/

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    RickWill

    Just a tad off topic – Roy Spencer has the UAH lower troposphere temperature for February:
    http://www.drroyspencer.com
    As you can see it is now a whopping 0.2C above the 1981-2010 average.

    With March off to a cold start over most of the NH land mass there is some prospect the month will wipe out all global warming over the past 40 years of the satellite record.

    The Antarctic iris is as wide open as it can just about get right now so there should be a little more heat loss relative to the average from the southern ocean as well during March:
    https://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/uploads/images_db/CSIC_figure4.png

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      Rah

      Lots of energy going out into space through the thinner atmosphere over the pole. I look for March and April to be cold relatively for N America and Europe. But summer to come in gangbusters once Old Man Winter belatedly retreats. IOW Spring conditions will be attenuated. The tornado season about average in storm count but with an increase in EF 3 and higher storms compared to the last few years. This is my own take and not anyone else’s as far as the tornado season goes.

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    pat

    never a straight report from Alister/Reuters:

    2 Mar: EuroNews: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Antarctic sea ice forces research ship to turn back
    OSLO (Reuters) – Thick sea ice has forced a scientific research ship to abandon a trip to an Antarctic ice shelf from which a massive iceberg snapped off last year, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said on Friday.
    Sea ice up to 5 metres (16 ft) thick blocked the RRS James Clark Ross vessel from reaching the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula, near South America, it said.
    “Our progress became too slow, with just 8 kms (5 miles) travelled in 24 hours and we still had over 400 kms to travel. Mother Nature has not been kind to us on our mission!” Katrin Linse, leading the team for BAS, said in a statement.

    The thick sea ice contrasts with a warm spell around the North Pole at the other end of the globe, even as temperatures in Europe have plunged below freezing…
    The Antarctic scientists, from nine research institutions, would instead focus on collecting animals, microbes, plankton, sediments and water on the seabed to the north, where another ice shelf collapsed in 1995…

    Despite the thick ice off part of Antarctica, the extent of sea ice around the entire continent is the second smallest on record for the time of year, behind 2017 levels, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.
    At the other pole, Arctic sea ice extent is at a record low, it says.
    http://www.euronews.com/2018/03/02/antarctic-sea-ice-forces-research-ship-to-turn-back

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    pat

    comment in moderation re: Reuters: Alister Doyle: Antarctic sea ice forces research ship to turn back

    28 Feb: Platts: NW European natural gas demand hits six-year high, prices surge again
    European hub gas is currently the highest-priced hub gas in the world, with the hubs trading well above the most prompt Asian spot JKM price for the second half of March, which was assessed by S&P Global Platts at $9.95/MMBtu on Tuesday…
    Gas storage facilities across Europe are withdrawing at higher rates this week, with stocks at dangerously low levels.

    Total stocks in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany combined stood at 11.15 Bcm as of the start of Tuesday’s gas day.
    Taking out the UK, the northwest European Continental storage situation looked increasingly bleak at 10.3 Bcm, and is almost certain to dip below 10 Bcm in the coming days at current withdrawal rates for the first time since 2013…

    The last LNG tanker into the UK arrived on February 22 from Qatar, but there are currently no cargoes heading to the UK, according to Platts Analytics.
    There are also no cargoes on the horizon for Belgium’s Zeebrugge LNG import facility despite Belgian gas storage stocks being almost depleted…
    https://www.platts.com/latest-news/natural-gas/london/nw-european-natural-gas-demand-hits-six-year-26899995

    27 Feb: UK Telegraph: Jillian Ambrose: Gas market shock forces ministers to review UK’s supply policies
    Government ministers will undertake a fresh review of the UK’s gas supplies after major disruptions late last year ripped through the market, driving prices to multi-year highs…
    In a letter, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, energy minister Richard Harrington assured a group of concerned energy companies and trade unions that the Government would turn its ­attention to concerns over the recent gas market shocks…

    The fresh approach to gas security is a major step-change for the Government, which in the past has focused on the country’s ability to import gas when needed, but has ignored the crippling cost of relying on foreign sources when market prices spike.
    The regulator has also doggedly countered concerns over the UK’s gas supply security by focusing on physical gas flows into the British gas grid rather than the price shouldered by ­consumers…
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2018/01/27/gas-market-shock-forces-ministers-review-uks-supply-policies/#comments

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    pat

    2 Mar: UK Telegraph: UK weather: Army help drivers stuck in ‘apocalyptic’ snow as warnings issued over treacherous freezing rain: latest news, travel updates and forecast
    By Chris Graham; Danny Boyle and Helena Horton
    This comes as snow continues to effect a large part of the country, after hundreds of people were trapped on freezing trains overnight as railways froze. Some resorted to sleeping on luggage racks, and many complained they were not given water for hours…
    People were also stuck in their cars overnight due to the ‘apocalyptic’ snow which hit the motorways and railways across the country…
    Parts of England and the whole of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, have been advised not to travel unless it is absolutely urgent because of risks to life caused by the weather…

    ***The Met Office has announced that the UK has officially broken its record for the lowest maximum temperature for March in a 24 hour period. Tredegar in Wales didn’t get above -4.7 °C all day.
    This beats the previous record, set in 2001 when Cassley in Sunderland was -4.6 degrees celcius all day…

    Thousands of homes are without electricity in the north west of England as temperatures remain sub-zero with bitter gales blowing.
    Power company Electricity North West said power outages had affected parts of Stockport, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Bolton, Manchester, Carlisle and other parts of Cumbria and parts of Derbyshire, where 5,000 households are without power in Buxton alone…

    ‘Cars littered everywhere… it’s kind of apocalyptic’
    Thomas Hamilton, a driver stranded on the A31 in Hampshire, described scenes as “apocalyptic”.
    “It’s quite hard to describe really, there is a kind of apocalyptic scenes,” he said.
    “There are no emergency services, no grit is on the road and actually the kind of weather has not been too bad, but just a lack of gritting just means that… I mean there are hundreds of trucks, cars littered everywhere, been past burning cars, it’s quite extraordinary.”…
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/02/uk-weather-military-helps-stranded-motorists-storm-emma-collides/

    2 Mar: UK Express: Storm Emma in pictures: Worst snow storm to hit the UK in 50 years
    By Andrea Tonks
    The big freeze is reminiscent of Britain’s coldest winter in 1962-63…
    https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/925618/weather-snow-uk-storm-emma-latest-pictures-worst-storm-pictures

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    toorightmate

    Remember the old Mad magazine?
    Well, these days we have Craig Thomas.

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    neil

    And ABC774 Melbourne’s take on this is “Man made warming in the Artic is causing freezing conditions in Europe” seriously! The flat earth science deniers at the ABC believe they can convince the unwashed masses that warmth in frozen parts of the world causes freezing in temperate places.
    Can they get any more desperate and delusional.

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      Rah

      Yep. All the CO2 in the atmosphere migrated to the N. Pole and is wreaking havoc on the poor defenseless Pooly bears. CocaCola is thinking about sueing.

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    Roy Hogue

    Having prepared so well for shorter winters, the National Grid in the UK warns that they may be running out of gas.

    Never being one to pass up an opportunity to point out the obvious to those who can’t see it — isn’t it obvious that the whole climate change charade is running out of gas?

    And yet they persist. Thys sit way out on a limb and insist on sawing it off behind them. This is the very definition of insanity…or should be.

    Who, when faced with a severely injured arm or leg would not seek medical advice?

    Who, when faced with a theory that crumbles under its own dead weight would not reexamine the theory?

    To the first question, everyone.

    To the second question, apparently no one.

    The degree of intelligence required is the same in both cases. 🙁

    Go figure.

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      Roy Hogue

      If there are any readers interested in the big bang I’ll take advantage of Jo’s leniency late in a thread to post this. It’s off topic so I went back one thread rather than put it in the latest one.

      It’s Hawking’s thinking about the big bamg and the origin of time. To me it makes the whole concept more and more slippery and harder to get ahold of. Any way you look at it, the question about the origin of the universe seems to be unanswerable in any way that has sufficient evidence to support it — all math and nothing in hand to show as evidence except the by now famous red shift.

      I’m not a physicist so those of you who are, please correct me or add whatever your opinion is.

      Hawking makes time go back infinitely if I’m not misreading what he says. But from Einstein I get one thing, dimensionality, including time, is a function of mass-energy. And we all seem to accept that mass-energy is a permanent thing. It may move toward its lowest energy state but something is still around when it gets there. It doesn’t disappear. So where did all that stuff that came out of the big bang come from? I still have that question.

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        But from Einstein I get one thing, dimensionality, including time, is a function of mass-energy. And we all seem to accept that mass-energy is a permanent thing. It may move toward its lowest energy state but something is still around when it gets there. It doesn’t disappear. So where did all that stuff that came out of the big bang come from? I still have that question.

        Could you explain what you may mean by the word “dimensionality”? How many ‘dimensions’ have you? Einstein’s mass-energy relation theorem E=mc² relates energy,time, and distance; non of which need be dimensional; but each need be orthogonal to the others! In addition; each must have (exists) a conjugate (negative-inverse) or (something per something else). For distance the conjugate is minus-interval; say negative diameter. For linear time the conjugate is minus frequency. For mass just what is the conjugate? The mass conjugate is on the other side of da big bang dat wraps around all ‘your dimensions’ leading to da big cwunch! 🙂
        All the best!-will-

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        BTW your red-shift is true fantasy! There is absolutely no reason that μ°, ε°, be the same over yonder! 🙂

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          Locally using kinder math!; rewriting E=mc² with M as mass in kg leaving m as distance,(meters), results in:
          M =E·μ°·ε° Perhaps:
          M(kg)·m²=Joules·Farads·Henrys or:
          M(kg)=Joules·Farads·Henrys/m²
          I have now worn out all padding on two locked doors of my cell! 🙂

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            Roy Hogue

            I have now worn out all padding on two locked doors of my cell!

            The line between genius and loss of sanity does tend to become blurred. 🙂

            All the best to you.

            RH

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              I used to have only only two beliefs;’I believe I will sleep in today’, and ‘I believe I will have another beer’! I have added a third belief after carefully observing ‘actions’ of kitten ‘Shadow’. “I believe she is much smarter than I”. 🙂

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        Octonion matrix algebra! sounds complex but is simple but rigorous. Easy for any computer program and much easier to learn by the young than any alphabet or symbol sequence (Chinese). This algebra is taught (drilled) into all 8 year olds in Russia, China, as it is so very mathematically efficient! Hamilton’s quaternions,the first noncommutative algebra, used only a 4 x 4 matrix, barely sufficient to describe all known modern 4 space (including time)!
        Octonion algebra! uses a 8 x 8 matrix 64 places to put values, mostly (-1, 0, 1) to include an additional 4 pseudo dimensions to rapidly calculate the effects of such concepts as “dark energy” or “dark mass”!
        The three; distance,time, mass, plus three orthogonal angles from any inertial reference; leaves two extra ‘dimensions’ to allow potential crap like ‘temperature’ or ‘radiance’ to be easily\exactly examined. The three angles allow the chirality about the distance vector to be trivially examined.
        All the best!-will-

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        RAH

        Well, we shall see about the big bang. One of the coolest things about all this to me is that a telescope is the closest thing we have to a time machine. One that allows you to see back into time in a medium we can all understand. When you view an object in space your seeing it at the time it radiated or reflected the light/energy your looking at. Thus the further you can see in distance, the further back in time your looking. NASA is set to launch the James Webb telescope in the spring of next year. The primary mission for the Webb is to look further back in time than any optical telescope ever has to just after the Big Bang. Basically what they hope to get are detailed views of the earliest protogalaxies. The first to form. The oldest energy ever viewed in the visible spectrum. Ya think Hubble was the bomb? Well wait till you see what’s coming if they get this thing up and functioning.
        https://jwst.nasa.gov/index.html

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          el gordo

          What was there before the big bang?

          Have you heard the yarn about universes colliding?

          It has a name but I dare not speak its name, the Pope told Hawking to keep it under his hat.

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            It has a name but I dare not speak its name, the Pope told Hawking to keep it under his hat.

            Dats da big Cwunch; when all local asymptotes, like ‘speed of light’, ‘absolute zero temperature’; poles and zeros, are reveled not crappy linear BS but instead as true logarithmic and non-commutative space-time!! Please consider logarithmic angles!! One Kelvin at the top of the circle; both Zero and infinite Kelvin at the bottom! Where is the center\centre? STOP THE SCAM; WHAT IS TEMPERATURE??
            All the best!-will-

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              With logarithmic angles!! The ‘interval’ of temperature difference, say 2°C depends on angular orientation about the centre. All possible spontaneous thermally conductive or electromagnetic power transfer depends only on angular difference, whether ΔT or (absT1^4-absT2^4)! You have been grossly “lied to” and scammed enough by all corrupt Global BanKSTERS; greedy academics and boughten MSM! WHAT is temperature?
              All the best!-will-

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    Richard Baguley

    Correction.

    There are c.70 million people in the UK however best estimates to include illegal immigrants is c. 73m+.

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    dennisambler

    The Met Office have had this problem before. They were so worried about the credibility of global warming theory in the face of the coldest winter for many years in 2005/6, that they felt it necessary to draw the attention of the public to the question. This was the original forecast in September 2005:

    “Our latest predictions indicate a colder-than-average winter for much of Europe. If this holds true, parts of the UK – especially southern regions – are expected to have temperatures below normal. The last eight winters have been relatively mild and perhaps have given the impression that these are ‘normal’. The balance of probability is for a winter colder than those experienced since 1995/6.”

    A subsequent web page made the point: “why are we predicting a colder than average winter when we are at the same time talking about climate change”. They even produced an FAQ on the subject, including this pertinent “belief-related” question and answer:

    Q) So, does it mean that global warming is on hold?

    A) No. The forecast of a colder-than-average winter is based on the prediction of atmospheric circulation patterns that change from year to year. Increased frequencies of easterly and northerly winds are expected this year. Basically, it is the direction of the wind that brings the lower-than-average temperatures.

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