As Britain told to expect snow for 'next 10 days', how is the rest of the world is coping with this Arctic weather?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

The large text proves it must be true.

Those facts are there, Bill, for you or anyone to disprove. Still waiting.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Just read where oil prices surged ahead to $82 per barrel yesterday due to "worldwide" cold weather. More proof Al gaore has saved us! I sleep so much better now that GW has been fixed. The other day, in a snowstorm, I was doing OK with my AWD van but a guy in a Hummer H2 just went right by me on the interstate. Now that global warming is fixed, I think I will buy one of those.

[Mark&Steph 0]

Tell it to Mr. Global Warming Doomsayer, Al Gore!

Of course the current cold front in FL was also preceded by record and near record high temps so far this winter. So maybe don't tell him.

Edited January 5, 2010 by Mark&Steph

[Saddle Bronc 124]

Also, unusual cold-wave in Northern India (Amritsar getting 0^oC (32 ^oF, snow-showers reported in Rajasthan and northern Gujarat, ...)

[LiszyandKenny 5]

Freezing tatas off in FL !

[Ban Hammer 13,349]

and coming our way..the worst winter storm i've ever experienced here

Issued by The National Weather Service

Kansas City/Pleasant Hill, MO

2:36 pm CST, Tue., Jan. 5, 2010

... WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM NOON WEDNESDAY TO 6 PM CST THURSDAY...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN KANSAS CITY/PLEASANT HILL HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM NOON WEDNESDAY TO 6 PM CST THURSDAY. THE WINTER STORM WATCH IS NO LONGER IN EFFECT.

* SNOW WILL OVERSPREAD THE AREA BETWEEN 9 AM AND NOON WEDNESDAY... BEFORE TAPERING TO FLURRIES AFTER MIDNIGHT WEDNESDAY NIGHT. TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS WILL RANGE FROM 3 TO 5 INCHES BEFORE TAPERING OFF TO FLURRIES AFTER MIDNIGHT.

* AN ARCTIC COLD FRONT WILL SWEEP THROUGH THE REGION WEDNESDAY NIGHT... WITH WINDS INCREASING TO BETWEEN 20 AND 25 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 40 MPH POSSIBLE BY THURSDAY MORNING. THIS WILL CREATE SIGNIFICANT BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF SNOW WITH NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS POSSIBLE AT TIMES. VISIBILITIES WILL BE REDUCED TO BELOW ONE HALF MILE WITH ROADS BECOMING NEAR IMPASSIBLE... ESPECIALLY OVER RURAL AND OPEN AREAS.

* DANGEROUSLY COLD WIND CHILLS WILL OVERSPREAD THE REGION THURSDAY AS TEMPERATURES FALL THROUGH THE SINGLE DIGITS. WIND CHILL VALUES OF 15 TO 25 BELOW ZERO WILL BECOME WIDESPREAD... CREATING A POTENTIALLY LIFE THREATENING SITUATION FOR ANYONE CAUGHT OUTDOORS AND UNPROTECTED FOR MORE THAN A FEW MINUTES.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW AND BLOWING SNOW ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS. ONLY TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL... KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT... FOOD... AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.

&&

More Information

A SIGNIFICANT WIND STORM WILL THEN AFFECT THE REGION WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY... WITH MODERATE SNOW ACCUMULATIONS FOLLOWED BY STRONG NORTHWEST WINDS THAT WILL PRODUCE SIGNIFICANT BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF SNOW. WIND CHILL VALUES WILL THEN FALL TO BETWEEN 20 AND 30 BELOW ZERO AS A BITTERLY COLD ARCTIC AIR MASS SPILLS SOUTHWARD... PRODUCING A DEADLY COMBINATION WITH THE STRONG WINDS.

[SpiritAlight 1]

Wow.

[ScottThuy 140]

Of course the current cold front in FL was also preceded by record and near record high temps so far this winter. So maybe don't tell him.

Just reported that there is a good chance of snow in the Florida panhandle for Thursday..

[Mark&Steph 0]

Just reported that there is a good chance of snow in the Florida panhandle for Thursday..

Damn, it won't reach down here. I'm near Ft. Lauderdale. It has snowed once in the fifteen years I've lived here. It melted as soon as it hit the ground, of course. It was kind of cool though.

[Pooky 3,787]

Freezing tatas off in FL !

You're only freezing your tatas off in FL 'cos the temperature dipped below 70°F!

[NickD 203]

It's very difficult to dispute this article: From http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/dayearthdied.shtml, but this day took 80,000 years. Can dispute the computer models used to some degree, but cannot dispute the fossils and other evidence. And a ten degree Celsius change in average temperature is all that it takes.

In one sense, we are sitting on top of a virtual time bomb with the huge amount of methane hydride sitting under our ocean floors that can be triggered by even a slight increase in global warming. In another sense, we have at least a known 4,000 year supply of the stuff that is a very low carbon fuel. So why are we screwing around in the middle east since we got plenty of that stuff right here? Also burns a lot cleaner so our vehicles could be made that much simpler.

"The Day The Earth Nearly Died - programme summary

250 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the land and oceans teemed with life. This was the Permian, a golden era of biodiversity that was about to come to a crashing end. Within just a few thousand years, 95% of the lifeforms on the planet would be wiped out, in the biggest mass extinction Earth has ever known. What natural disaster could kill on such a massive scale? It is only in recent years that evidence has begun to emerge from rocks in Antarctica, Siberia and Greenland.

"At the end of the Permian you'd see virtually nothing alive"

Professor Peter Ward, University of Washington The demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago (at the so-called K/T boundary), was as nothing compared to the Permian mass extinction. The K/T event killed off 60% of life on Earth; the Permian event 95%. Geological data to explain the destruction have been hard to find, simply because the rocks are so old and therefore subject to all kinds of erosion processes. It seems plausible that some kind of catastrophic environmental change must have made life untenable across vast swathes of the planet.

"A volcanic eruption ten thousand times larger than man has ever seen"

Professor Vincent Courtillon, University of Paris The world's biggest volcanoes

In the early 1990s, the hunt for evidence headed for a region of Siberia known as the Traps. Today it's a sub-Arctic wilderness but 250 million years ago, over 200,000km² of it was a blazing torrent of lava. The Siberian Traps were experiencing a 'flood basalt eruption', the biggest volcanic effect on Earth. Instead of isolated volcanoes spewing out lava, the crust split and curtains of lava were released. And the Siberian flood eruption lasted for millions of years. Could volcanic activity over such a long time alter the climate enough to kill off 95% of life on Earth?

Vincent Courtillon used a much smaller flood basalt eruption, in Iceland in 1783, as the basis for some calculations. Writing in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin (then American Ambassador in Paris) described 1784 as a year without a summer. Ash from the eruption blacked out the sky and crops failed across Europe. Courtillon extrapolated the climatic impact of the Siberian Trap eruption from the records of the Icelandic event. He deduced that a 'nuclear winter' lasting decades would be followed by rapid global warming due to the increased level of greenhouse gases in the post-eruption atmosphere.

"It's the equivalent of a billion atomic bombs going off at the same place"

Dr Michael Rampino, New York University Vincent believes the disruption of cooling followed by warming could cause the Permian extinction but other geologists disagree. Peter Ward returned to the Siberian Trap data to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide - and global warming - that could result. His worst case scenario is a temperature rise of 5°C, enough to kill off many species but not the 95% wipeout that ended the Permian.

If the Siberian eruptions were not deadly enough, what other effects might be at work? To try to answer that, Michael Rampino set out to establish an even more fundamental piece of data: how long did the extinction take? He studied rock sedimentation rates in the Alps and concluded that the Permian killer had stalked the planet for just 8,000-10,000 years, far less than had been thought. His mind turned to ways of causing such catastrophic destruction in - on geological timescales - the blink of an eye. He wanted to explore the possibility of a meteorite strike.

The hunt for meteor evidence

Meteor strikes that wipe out life may sound like sci-fi but it's generally accepted that an impact sparked the K/T extinction and the end of the dinosaurs. That meteorite was 10km wide and left a crater in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. The dust raised by such an impact could make global temperatures plummet overnight. How big would any Permian meteorite have to be? Rampino suggests one just 50% bigger could cause sufficient environmental change. There is one huge flaw in this argument: where is the crater?

"The original crater is completely drowned by lava"

Adrian Jones, University College London Adrian Jones models the effects of impact on the Earth's geological crust. He has a hunch that meteorite crater hunters are looking for the wrong thing. After an impact, the crust rebounds to form a large shallow crater. If the meteorite if truly massive though, an extra process occurs. The combined heat of the impact and rebound is enough to melt the crust. Lava floods through and the crater disappears beneath new crust. If he's right, the Permian meteorite crater can't be found because it doesn't exist.

"When a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs it left ample evidence in its wake"

Greg Rettaleck, University of Oregon All of which serves to help proponents of the meteorite impact theory. Its detractors, though, point out that meteors leave several trails in their wake - fragments of minerals that have come from space. Greg Rettaleck mounted an expedition in the mid-1990s looking at Permian rock beds in the Antarctic. Some of the quartz grains looked like they had been fractured by a very energetic process - a meteorite?

Although this was evidence for a strike of some sort, there were unanswered questions as well. The K/T meteorite left a trail of iridium - characteristic of space materials - around the world. Yet there is no evidence the Permian strike did the same.

"No need to guess any more... the whole extinction from beginning to end"

Paul Wignall, University of Leeds Paul Wignall is a British geologist who doubts a meteorite caused the mass extinction 250 million years ago. In the late 1990s he had a hunch of a way to prove his beliefs, a good idea of where to look for new evidence: Greenland. Permian rocks are hard to find because they are usually just thin layers, yet his trip yielded rock beds metres thick. This was more than just new evidence; it was the best he could have hoped to find.

Carbon copious

The Greenland rock told a very different story to that Michael Rampino had found in the Alps. Instead of a rapid event of under 10,000 years, the extinction beds Wignall examined lasted 80,000 years and showed three distinctive phases in the plant and animal fossils they contained. The extinction appeared to kill land and marine life selectively at different times. Such a long process contradicted the catastrophic meteorite theory but Wignall couldn't explain what had come close to killing all life on Earth. His best clue was the carbon isotope balance in the rock, which showed an increase in carbon-12 over time. The standard explanation - rotting vegetation - could not have caused such a marked effect. Wignall was curious what this could mean.

An answer came from geologist Gerry Dickens, who knew just how to get large amounts of carbon-12 rapidly, thanks to his work with offshore drilling companies in the USA. He had spent time helping them try to tap reserves of frozen methane hydrate from the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico. He knew methane hydrate is found around many of the world's coasts. Dickens wondered how large a rise in sea temperature was necessary to cause the solid chemical to gasify and ascend to the atmosphere. Experiments suggested a rise of 5°C would be sufficient. And he was amazed to see how much gas came from pieces of solid methane hydrate that were placed in water.

"The south of England would turn into the Sahara Desert"

Michael Benton, University of Bristol When Paul Wignall learned of Dickens' findings, he used his carbon-12 data to estimate how much methane hydrate would have to be released to affect the isotope balance. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases and he deduced that unlocking frozen methane hydrate would have caused a temperature rise of 4-5°C over time. Not enough to kill off 95% of life on Earth but he realised this was a compounded effect. A rise of about 5°C must already have occurred to prompt the frozen methane to melt. The combined temperature rise of 10°C is generally accepted as a figure able to cause truly mass extinction.

So it seems likely there were two Permian killers. The Siberian Traps did erupt, contributing first to a nuclear winter cooling effect (caused by dust) and and then to global warming (due to greenhouse gases). Over 40,000 years, some land animals gradually died out while life in the seas lived relatively calmly on, as the water temperature gently rose. Then the seas gave up their frozen methane. In just 5,000 years, there was massive loss of species from the world's oceans. In a third and final phase of the extinction, the Permian killer returned to stalk the land for another 35,000 years. By the end of that process, 95% of the Earth's species were extinct."