Element92

Hi BornFromTheVoid and many thanks for your excellent reply. It's actually my son who is doing his A level exams, and he says he'll visits the sites you mention tomorrow. He loves anything to do with the weather, would like to work in some climate/weather field and thanks you very much. Kind regards Andy

I'm doing an AS level in Geography. Can anybody help please with a simplified version of what El Nino and La Nina are, how they are important, and how they affect short term climate change. Many thanks.

I personally think that we've seen the back end of the really cold weather, despite the high over Scandinavia etc... the Met Office have the NE down for increasingly comparatively mild temperatures over the next few days.... 3'C by late Sunday, 4'C throughout by Wednesday. My link

Moderate powder snow just started here within the past 5 minutes. Looks as though it will be here for a while as it is virtually dead calm.

Nice write up on the astronomy site Universe Today about the UK Big Freeze, plus a photograph of the whole country covered in snow, taken by the NASA Terra satellite. NASA speculates that the persistent snow and cold across the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere could be due to the fact that the Arctic Osciallation (AO) is in an extreme negative phase (lowest monthly value for the AO for the past 60 years). My link

Spent 2.5 hrs this evening on the A19(S) at Dalton Park amongst the jack-knifed lorries etc. 4-5" of snow... have never seen the A19 in such a state. Snowflakes the size of dinner plates!

Anyone who denies that global warming is occurring should take a peek at the atmospheric CO2 v global temperature data for the last 100k years. One can only draw the conclusion that man is a significant factor in this correlation that really commences with mass-industrialisation. Take a look at a pollution-infested city such as London, with its gridlock. Road transport and power stations pumping out CO2 day and night, then multiply it thousands of times around the globe from New York to Calcutta and Shanghai. Throw in the mass destruction and logging of the earth's green lungs, the rain forests. One of the main things that would normally remove CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis being shamefully destroyed- the reason unique among the planets we have free oxygen to breathe. And it all fits nicely with the global CO2/temperature graphs. CO2 is an extremely effective greenhouse gas. You don't need much increase in its "parts per million". At what point would the anti global warmers believe - when central London or New York are finally under water, or when a war starts due to ravaged global agriculture and dwindling economic resources? Isn't it just a good job that people like this did not gain the upper hand when chloroflurocarbons (themselves fantastic greenhouse agents) were determined to destroy ozone. Perhaps they would have rather waited until major portions of our global ecosystem had been destroyed with ensuing economic chaos, and the threat of war over dwindling resources. Do not under-estimate our capacity to self destruct either through environmental vandalism and ignorance or through war.

One swallow does not a summer make. One very mild winter does not prove that global warming is right. But all the mild winters (many of which are the mildest ever recorded, plus the warmest summers, and warmest global temperatures) we have had since 1987, are starting to make it look a whole lot righter. And the weight of some of the best physicists and astronomers are on-side. I remember listening to Dr Michio Kaku (one of the USA's top physicists, and a proponent of Super String Theory), who was asked whether he thought global warming was occurring, and if so when did he change his mind. He answered that he changed his mind when he first saw the strong positive correlation since 1740 (the real start of the industrial revolution) between a rise in our economic activity, atmospheric CO2 and global temperature. The credit for the forecast of Global warming and the greenhouse effect should go to the late Dr Carl Sagan, a prominent NASA/JPL astronomer. In the 1970s, after studying the data sent back to earth by the NASA Mariner 2 unmanned spacecraft, it became apparent that Venus, the earth's evil twin, was not a cloud-shrouded tropical paradise, but an horrendous runaway planet. Later, Sagan used the data from the NASA Viking landers on Mars in 1976 to show what would happen if there was not enough CO2 in the atmosphere. The result was a freeze-dried world we know as Mars today. Proof indeed about the importance of unmanned space research, and the fact that by studying other worlds me may understand our own a little better. Does a technological civilisation inevitably self-destruct because it cannot devise a method to mitigate the devastating global climatic effects of its own industrial processes on its home planet? The need is urgent, but so far no such method that would work in a short timescale has been devised, and our political leaders are paralysed and do nothing, because they realise that nothing less than a complete overhauling of the world's economy can avoid global catastrophe. The odd solar panel here/wind turbine there although commendable, are a drop in the ocean when one witnesses the industrialisation in the Far East.

There was about 1cm of snow this morning in Teesside, Hartlepool and Peterlee. Less in Sunderland and further inland. Stopped snowing in Teesside at 9am. The covering exposed to the sun has now melted, although it has clouded over (stratus) from the NNW. No telescope again tonight!!! Considering emigrating to central Australia!