PeteG

I doubt it, but parts of the Antarctic may have felt it.

Perhaps you should read these articles and check the facts before posting links to them. 269 million sq km of extra ice would cover half the planet.

Nor was there ice flowing over him for centuries, if it had his body would have been ground to pieces.

I wouldn't have thought one years snowfall is going to make any difference. If any survives the summer melt it will take some time to become ice and that will be at the higher elevations. It will take years for it to get down to the lower part of the glacier and have an effect, and that assumes that (a) that sufficient snow lasts until next winter and (b)subsequent years have snow that survives the summer melt to increase the ice mass to make a noticeable difference.

Had three Reed Buntings in my garden for the Bird Watch which was a surprise. Had to take a photo and look them up to confirm their identity as I had never seen one before. Also a Fieldfare which was around most of last week Otherwise just the normal garden birds, less the blue tits which didn't bother to turn up!

Look at it this way - some energy from the Sun has gone into the melting of the ice and now, in your words, that energy is "free". It has taken some time for the ice to melt, so the incident energy has come into the system, performed a "task" (the task of melting sea ice) and then been "freed up". That means that energy has been trapped in the system, which means that there has been a lag between the energy coming in and its being freed up into the atmospheric system. Is this not just one of many ways in which there is a lag in the climate system? It's been a long time since I did science at school but hasn't that energy been used to melt the ice to water and therefore it cannot be "freed up" into the atmospheric system unless the water refreezes.

Presumably the rate of sea-level rise along the northern half of the eastern seaboard is a result of melting ice on Greenland. It obviously takes time for the water released to spread out round the planet. It would be interesting to know if there was a seasonal variation in sea-level as melting slows/stops during the winter.

Yes there was. It was 5 to 10 minutes from the end of the programme.

Don't remember the 1952 smog but do remember sometime in the 1950s looking out of the front window and being unable to see to houses on the other side of the road which were about 20 yards away because of the thick yellow/brown fog.

I think you'll find that putting a load of snow onto the ice won't help thicken it. If anything it will insulate the ice from the cold air and slow down the rate at which it increases in thickness.

I was in the NE United States a couple of weeks ago and there acres and acres of maize that had not been harvested because the hot and dry summer means there is nothing to harvest. The fact that highest temperature records weren't broken is totally irrelevant, it doesn't mean it wasn't a long hot summer over a large part of the US.

Maybe it's something to do with the huge losses this year leaving large areas of open water at high latitude to refreeze that were actually ice covered this time last year.

Its seasonal ice and its floating on the sea so whether it is more or less extensive makes no difference to sea level. By next April or May most of it will all have melted and then by this time next year it'll be back again somewhere near the same area + or - a bit. It won't make the headlines here because (a) its a long way away and not in our backyard and (http://forum.nwstatic.co.uk//public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.png being seasonal a small annual variation is of little importance. If the increase led to the ice approaching the southern tip of S America I'm sure it would make the headlines.

I was 16 in 1963 and I have no great desire to live through another winter lasting over 2 months, especially as I now pay the heating bills! I remember the relief on looking out the bedroom window one day in March and, apart from the fact I didn't have to scrape the ice off to see, I could see patches of green and brown. Made a nice change from weeks of everything being black and white. And if you think 8 weeks of icy weather guarantees lots of snow think again, during the whole period the snow in our back garden was less than 4 inches deep, and much of the time less than that.

That sea ice extent graph has been plunging at about 45 degrees since early June and shows very little sign of the rate slowing at the moment.

Torrential rain here and the pond is taking over the garden! And now the sun's out, all within a few minutes.

I would think its mainly down to geography. With Alaska and Siberia to the east, west and most of the north, and with the Aleutian Island chain to the south it's virtually an enclosed sea. Any wind from other than Sw to Se is going to be coming off a very cold land surface which will help the preservation of the ice, and the southerly winds won't be able to push much "warm" water into the Bering Sea because the Aleutians will tend to break up the flow. Also southerly winds will push the ice northwards against the coast and the the Bering Strait, consolidating the pack rather than breaking it up.

Its just happened to me. I was looking at the 48hr detailed forecast and clicked on the next time period, Wednesday afternoon, and was logged out and taken to the log in page.

Have you got any evidence to support this statement?

I find it difficult to believe that the weather this winter has shortened the gestation period for sheep by 4 months. Farmers have obviously been missing out by not factory farming sheep to produce lambs more quickly.

Actually I think you'll find the millions of herbivores in Africa are the result of the climate changing and large areas of grassland replacing forests and allowing the herbivore population to increase.

Have to say I agree with John Holmes about this. Anyone who thinks the forecasts 30 or 40 years ago were better than the current ones is definitely wearing rose tinted glasses. Perhaps before having a go at the Met Office about its forecast for the last 24 hours or so you should click on the Alert bar on the Netweather home page and read what it says.

One rumble of thunder and a spattering of rain was all it gave here..

Malin Head, 82mph