Londoners today woke up to the earliest snow cover for more than 70 years as a freezing blast of wind from the Arctic hit the capital. Some areas of north London saw two inches of snow fall in two hours when temperatures hit zero. Snow fell across much of the city from around 10pm, despite Met Office predictions that the city would escape the wintry showers that have swept across the north of England and Scotland leaving a thick covering.

In Brent, a heavy snow flurry caught residents by surprise as streets and cars were quickly covered in a white blanket. Graduate Charlotte Hussey, 21, said: “I was really excited and surprised, it was like Christmas had come early. I am going to go to the park today to build a snowman and go sledding.” Amid the snowfall, a man was taken to hospital after his car skidded off the M25 near Enfield. The Renault rolled over before landing in a ditch.

The cold snap with its widespread frost and crisp air is being caused by air from the Arctic replacing the normal south-westerly Atlantic breezes. “What we saw was the back edge of a weather system being blown down from the Arctic catching London,” said Byron Chalcraft, a Met Office forecaster. “The Arctic has been experiencing very cold temperatures this year, so it was an unusually cold front. Some unusual wind patterns meant it was blown over Britain very quickly, meaning the temperatures stayed very low. It is certainly very, very unusual to see snow in London this early,” said Mr Chalcraft. “The last time there was October snow [in the South-East] was in 1974, but the last time we actually had snow cover in October [in London], which we did late last night, was in 1934.” Read more here. See how this occurred on the same day the stubborn old fools in parliament passed the binding UK Climate Bill with 80% effect on emissions but zero effects on climate. See more on that ironic twist here.

It seems the louder the alarmists scream the colder the climate gets. If they keep it up, a new ice age is almost certain.

Here in the United States an arctic blast brought rare pre-Halloween heavy snows to parts of the east as far south as New Jersey and suburbs of Philadelphia.  Up to 27” inches was reported in the Catskills. Here is a picture from Brunswick, New Jersey from a reader:

The snow extended down to North Carolina. See this video here.

The eastern cold reaches all the way down to southern Florida where Ft. Myers is expecting the coldest October temperatures in history (mid 40s). Read more here.

See the long list of record low temperatures set the last few days Oct_29_record_cold.pdf” title="here">here.

Scientists Challenge UK Govt Climate Committee to ‘Drop flawed science and the Climate Change millstone - Save the economy’. CO2 is the Gas Of Life (’GOL’), it is not a problem.

The recommendation that the UK cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 per cent is “total madness based on false science” said Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction long range forecasters. “There is no evidence that Carbon dioxide has ever controlled, is controlling or will ever control world temperatures or climate and I challenge the promoters of this nonsense to produce evidence to justify their policies - or drop them, just as 13 world scientists have similarly challenged the UN.” Climate Change policy is a millstone around the UK and world economies. The beneficiaries are oil companies who ram up prices with abandon (taking advantage of limits placed on expansion of coal), bio-fuel producers who are increasing food prices and starvation, and the booming industry of climate change parasites such as carbon traders and nuclear power-mongers.

“Taxpayers and the developing world are the losers. There is a world recession now upon us which is being made deeper by Climate Change policies and the perpetrators must be called to account. Banks and industry are going bust yet the green fundamentalists want to impose more of this madness on the world. They actually want to increase their burden on the UK economy and deepen the world recession. “Genuine green policies to defend bio-diversity and reduce waste should be supported but the deceitful manipulation of the goodwill of many people in order to promote policies of mass taxation, expensive and dangerous energy like nuclear power and cuts in world living standards must be stopped. The UK and the world now need cheap energy solutions like coal to diesel technology which can be made smoke free. The danger for honest green campaigners - unless they break from the stranglehold of the Climate Change lobby - is that when the Global Warming swindle is exposed their spirited defence of nature will be forgotten too.

CO2 is no problem - it is the Gas of Life (GOL). The problem is Climate Change Policy - not Climate Change which is beyond man’s control. Global warming is over. World temperatures have fallen from their peak ten years ago while GOL (CO2) has been rising rapidly. The world was much warmer than now in the Bronze age 4,000 years ago and there was much less GOL (CO2) then. The bounteousness of world vegetation goes up with GOL. We need more GOL not less!”

See larger image here

Read more here. See Piers Corbyn follow up letter to congress here. 

Manitoba Conservation does an annual aerial survey from the Churchill area to the Manitoba/Ontario border, roughly the inland range of the polar bears of western Hudson Bay. In late July (the 22nd I believe), they flew the range and counted around 34 bears. Most were still out on the bay feasting on seals. In fact, there were still two little bits of ice floe in southwestern Hudson Bay on August 22nd...! This means that many of the bears stayed out on the ice until mid-August, almost a month later than usual (or at least, earlier than usual for the last decade, but simply similar to the ‘glory days’ of the early eighties).

So, almost all of the bears visiting Churchill are in really good shape (around ten to twelve in buggyland right now). This seems to have translated through the larger population with 266 polar bears being counted on the fall aerial survey in September. This is the largest number of bears recorded in the history of this survey. Isn’t that crazy?!? Life is good for the bears!

Of course, this also leads to the cut in quota for Nunavut’s Inuit. Arviat, an economically challenged traditional Inuit town just north of Churchill (and when I say just north, I mean 250 miles) has had their quota wiped out. From 23 polar bears harvested last year, political pressure (not research) has led the government of Nunavut to cut it to three bears. All three bear ‘tags’ have now been used in self-defence kills (partially because we relocate bears north from Churchill… but that’s another story). So, no commercial hunt, no income, no community pride for Arviat… hmmm…

Polar bear family in Churchill
COMMENT
ksnooker said…
I used to do upper atmosphere solar wind research at Ft Churchill, you wouldn’t dare go outside in winter without an armed guard with a very big rifle. This was years back, and it has gotten worse since.`Polar bears are everywhere in the north country, everyone knows it. But how many have actually been there.

Polar bears are nothing but brown bears who turned white about 250,000 years ago when the Boreal Forest grew up to the Arctic sea in many places. Where do people think the “tundra” comes from? The bears just walked north and evolution changed them to white, so the seals couldn’t see them as well. Simple history will get you the facts.See Tom Nelson’s blog here.

See larger image here.

This graph shows average global temperature records for the last five years from two of the world’s most respected meteorological institutes, the UK’s Hadley Centre, and the University of Alabama in the US.  Both show a clear downward trend, and the graph contrasts that trend explicitly with the rising trend of atmospheric CO2.  So we have two conclusions: first of all, Al Gore’s alarmist predictions of rapidly accelerating temperatures, run-away warming and imminent Armageddon are just plain wrong, with each year that passes adding more nails to the coffin of his disaster movie.  Second, the supposed correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature just does not exist.  For years, temperatures have been falling while CO2 levels have risen.

The alarmists will try to explain this by calling on short-term effects which temporarily disrupt a long-term cooling trend.  But some scientists who accept the alarmist position are now suggesting that these “short-term effects” could continue for another ten years.  How many decades have to pass before they recognise that they got it wrong, and that our climate mitigation policies represent a worse economic disaster than the current financial crisis?

Roger Helmer is a Conservative Member of the European parliament, and is also Honorary Chairman of The Freedom Association. He was first elected to the European parliament in 1999, and has been kept very busy ever since representing the interests of his 4.1 million constituents from in the East Midlands.In June 2004 he was re-elected for a second term, and currently sits on three committees: Environment, Unemployment and Petitions.

See Roger’s web site here.

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement. Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures—they’re going down, not up.

On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to “a negative PDO” or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs—El Ninos—produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones—La Ninas—produce below average ones.

Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as “solar minimums” magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded—none—and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. “This is no coincidence,” he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate.

Also in September, American Craig Loehle, a scientist who conducts computer modelling on global climate change, confirmed his earlier findings that the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago did in fact exist and was even warmer than 20th-century temperatures. Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather—even harvest totals and censuses --confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.

But in order to prove the climate scaremongers’ claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented—a result of human, not natural factors—the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann’s “hockey stick,” in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies. Dr. Loehle’s work helps end this deception.

Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, “It’s practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling,” as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an “almost exact correlation” between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost “no correlation at all with CO2.” Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a “hoax,” a “fraud” and simply “not credible.”

While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month. For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 ... cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.” Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years—the period corresponding to reduced solar activity—all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared. It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn’t any global warming. Read more here.