Temperatures in China have plunged to their lowest in almost three decades, cold enough to freeze coastal waters and trap 1,000 ships in ice, official media said at the weekend.
Since late November the country has shivered at an average of minus 3.8 degrees Celsius, 1.3 degrees colder than the previous average, and the chilliest in 28 years, state news agency Xinhua said on Saturday, citing the China Meteorological Administration. The cold in Eurasia and elsewhere offset warmth in the US and created global temperatures below the NCEP model normal for December.
Bitter cold has even frozen the sea in Laizhou Bay on the coast of Shandong province in the east, stranding nearly 1,000 ships, the China Daily newspaper reported.
Zheng Dong, chief meteorologist at the Yantai Marine Environment Monitoring Center under the State Oceanic Administration, told the paper that the area under ice in Laizhou Bay was 291 square km this week.
Transport around the country has been severely disrupted.
Over 140 flights from the state capital airport in central Hunan province were delayed, while heavy snowfall forced the closure of some sections of the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway, the China Daily said.
Temperatures in the northeast fell even further, reaching a 43-year low of minus 15.3 degrees Celsius, about 3.7 degrees below the previous recorded average.
One truck driver in southeastern Jiangxi province, caught in a 5 km (3.1 miles) queue caused by a pileup that happened after heavy snowfall, told China Daily the snow and extreme cold had caught him unawares.
“I did’’t expect such a situation, so I’ve brought no warm coats or food. All I can do now is wait,” trucker Yao Xuefeng told the paper.
Weatherbell had advised clients there of a brutal winter. here is the 5-day forecast from Weatherbell.com model pages.
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1Vodka saves elephants from death in Siberian brutal cold
Moscow: Vodka saved two circus elephants in Russia from the deadly Siberian cold.
Emergency ministry spokesman Alexander Davydov said on Friday that the elephants were in a trailer that caught fire on Thursday outside the city of Novosibirsk, forcing trainers to take them out into the bitter cold before another truck arrived to deliver them to a warm gym at a local community college.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported that trainer Leonid Labo had the animals, aged 45 and 48, drink 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of vodka diluted in warm water - and a veterinarian said later that only the tips of their ears were frostbitten.
Novosibisk zoo director Rostislav Shilo told the daily that the vodka saved the animals from frostbite and pneumonia, without harming or even intoxicating them.
A vicious cold snap across Russia and eastern Europe has claimed nearly 200 lives.
In Russia, the cold has killed two people in the past 24 hours, the Ria-Novosti agency reported, citing medical sources, bringing the total number of deaths to 56 by December 21st.
The freeze had also left 371 people in hospital.
Thermometers have been stuck below minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) in Moscow—and below minus 50 degrees (minus 58 F) in some parts of Siberia—
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Note from India
A brief update on weather here in India, esp in Northern India, which is in the grip of a severe cold spell for the past two weeks!
This morning news papers ( I am in Solapur, a city ~700,000 pop:, southeast of Pune, about 250km) where the front page coves shows ‘Frozen Dal Lake in Kashmir, a popular tourist place’ and headlines “Frozen India”
Low temp in North , at New Delhi ( popu: ~16M) was at close to zero, high just at 10C most people have NO house-heating!
Over 400 M people of North India are being impacted by long cold spell and it may continue for a week or two more, as I see it! No one is able to explain why North India is witnessing colder winters, since New Millennium!. Since 2008/09, every winter several hundred people are dying due to cold weather! So far over 200 people have died of long exposure to cold weather this winter!
If UK Met Office still wants to talk of Global warming, they are OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY OF CLIMATE CHNAGE! If the UK Met Office has worldwide data, it can provide what world-wide temp are since New Year 2013! IIn newspapers here, there were also stories about “loads of ice in and around Shanghai with over 1000 ships stranded!
I think UK Met Office will do a great service by stating “There is NO Global Warming scare anywhere in the world! “
Trying to predict 2013 as ‘possibly warmest year’ is a meaningless exercise!
In my view, UK Met Office is losing its credibility!
Best Regards
Madhav Khandekar, IPCC reviewer from Solapur/Pune India, January 7th 10AM
Zeenews on india.com adds this from the India Meteorological Department:
The cold weather conditions are likely to continue in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Meanwhile, the temperature has also dropped to a record low in Poonch district in Jammu & Kashmir with mercury dipping well below the minus and water freezing at various places in the district. It was the coldest day of Poonch in the last 35 years.
On Sunday, life across the North India region was hit by bone-numbing cold and the toll climbed to well over 100 with at least 16 more people dying in Uttar Pradesh.
The mercury fell to minus 18 degrees in Leh town of Jammu and Kashmir, while several places, both in the hills and plains, experienced zero or lower temperatures as both maximum and minimum temperatures plummeted across the region and icy winds made things worse.
Posted on January 3, 2013 by Anthony Watts
No, really, they must have been on crack when they came up with this one. I have no other explanation that works.
First a primer. What is “Space Weather”? Wikipedia (agreed not the best source but humor me, at least they understand the basics) says that it is:
Space weather is the concept of changing environmental conditions in near-Earth spaceor the space from the Sun’s atmosphere to the Earth’s atmosphere. It is distinct from the concept of weather within the Earth’s planetary atmosphere (troposphere and stratosphere).
You can see what that’s all about at NASA’s spaceweather.com
Note the “distinct from the concept of weather”.
Now, try to wrap your mind around that and this image below and figure out how they managed to get space weather to burn down the Empire State Building.
Yes that’s right, Space Weather. They ask the question “Ever thought about what would happen if Earth’s temperature reached 900 degrees like on Venus? Chances are it won’t be a good day! Buildings are reduced to dust in moments! Watch Deadliest Space Weather only on The Weather Channel, Thursdays at 9”
When I first saw this, I thought to myself “this has to be some sort of spoof”. Sadly, no. Here it is on TWC’s website:
But wait, there’s more! Space Weather causes acid rain and two-eyed cyclones too!
The descriptions:
- A bad day on Earth is nothing compared to a day on Venus! Winds create a massive cyclone with two eyes and rain that turns life forms into a pillar of carbon! Find out more on Deadliest Space Weather, only on The Weather Channel, Thursdays at 9pm!
- Imagine acid rain that can eat through solid steel! This isn’t the plot of a Hollywood disaster movie, it’s weather happening now in our solar system! See more extreme weather on Deadliest Space Weather, Thursdays at 9 on The Weather Channel!
Do they even hire science or meteorology majors at TWC anymore?
I’m just stunned. This has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.
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Among the many comments, one from my friend and TWC founder, John Coleman who I worked with as his first Director of Meteorology in 1982:
John Coleman says:
January 3, 2013 at 4:19 pm
As founder of The Weather Channel I am deeply saddened by what has become of my life’s work. I poured everything I had at the prime of my life into creating a basic channel that was focused on a mission to provide accurate and complete weather information for their location and the rest of our nation within a few minutes to everyone who tuned in. As televsion whiz kids have replaced adults and dedicated meteorologists the channel has been reduced to a hodge podge of silliness. Nothing against the many fine people who work there. But, a curse upon their leaders.
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Nothing surprises me when you run by the mental midgets from NBC (nothing but crap).
If it seemed like retiring EPA Chief Lisa Jackson carried out her job with a religious zeal, you’d be right.
Barack Obama’s pick as his first EPA administrator told a 2010 National Council of Churches conference in New Orleans that government and religious leaders must unite in their “moral obligation” to heal the planet and “build on the religious and moral reasons for being good stewards of our environment.”
“The question now is, ‘What we can do?’” the green-church devotee concluded, adding that her efforts were blessed by the White House’s Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership.
Her legion of Washington media disciples - who would have condemned such moral bravado by the Religious Right - ignored her rhetoric. But in punishing those she deems carbon sinners, Lisa Jackson has done enormous harm to American workers.
Today, thousands of coal miners are without work as her power plant regulations (backed by a president who embraced Jackson’s crusade, calling global warming “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation") have bankrupted mining companies such as Patriot Coal and forced others such as OhioAmerica and Alpha Natural Resources to downsize. An oil opponent, Jackson successfully lobbied the president to reject the transcontinental Keystone Pipeline, costing the U.S. some 20,000 jobs. Her global warming zeal extended to autos when she took the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE) away from the Transportation Department - mandating that auto companies meet a pie-in-the-sky standard of 54.5 mpg by 2025 in an attempt to eliminate the internal combustion engine (the industry is spending millions on lobbying to water down the rules).
Jackson’s holy war created a rogue agency unanswerable to Congress. Her coal and CAFE edicts were done without the input of America’s elected representatives, creating a backlash that has led to endless hearings before Congressional Republicans. Despite the House revolt, Jackson’s agency churned on with its wave of rules. The resulting job consequences were illustrated in a dramatic photo-op with coal miners and Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign at a Murray Energy facility in Ohio - an event met with a near blackout by national media.
Rumors abound that Jackson’s resignation is the result of controversy over secret e-mails that Jackson authored exposing her War on Coal. But her public actions are scandalous enough. Having forced the shutdown of dozens of coal plants, the EPA chief dropped one final bomb before Election Day - announcing carbon caps that effectively end new coal plant construction in the U.S.
“This agency (knows) no bounds,” said Chris Hamilton, senior V.P. of the West Virginia Coal Association after the new rules were announced. “Their actions don’t take into consideration people’s livelihoods, jobs, or the existing liability of energy companies.”
With more regulations in the pipeline covering everything from “environmental justice” (Jackson subscribes to the radical theory that the location of industrial plants discriminates against poor minorities) to natural gas fracking, the reign of Jackson cannot end soon enough.