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A report from the Overheated Planet (Daily Caller) This past winter broke tons of low temperature records across the eastern seaboard, but would you have guessed the Northeast just had the snowiest winter since the “Little Ice Age”? “Looking back through accounts of big snows in New England by the late weather historian David Ludlum, it appears for the eastern areas, this winters snowblitz may have delivered the most snow since perhaps 1717,” wrote seasoned meteorologist Joe D’Aleo with Weatherbell Analytics.

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. (AP) - Crews are working to clear a path through ice on eastern Lake Superior that's left freighters unable to move, including one that had a hole punched in its hull.......The cargo shipping season started last month on the upper Great Lakes.

I really hate to think of what it is going to be like five or ten years on down the road when solar activity flat lines. Canada and upper regions of America saw snow at the end of August of 2014, abruptly cutting short last year’s growing season. Hard winter started in November, and though the news said it was the warmest winter in memory, it was the coldest for hundreds of millions of peoples across the northern hemisphere. Today, April 6 Maine is experiencing record-breaking cold where in Black River it is -20F. It is spring and it is...

Sen. Ted Cruz, who recently announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential ticket, thinks, like many conservatives, global warming isn’t happening. As he said on Seth Meyers’ talk show on March 16, “Satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever.” It’s no surprise that Cruz picked that figure: 17 years ago was 1998, an “El Nino” year, when global temperatures were artificially elevated after which they returned to their normal gradually increasing rate. When you look at all the data published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (not just the cherry-picked data that...

Sen. Ted Cruz cited a 1975 Newsweek article on “global cooling” to question the evidence of global warming, and in the process made several incorrect and unsubstantiated claims. The Newsweek story, which did warn of a “cooling world,” has been criticized and largely debunked — by its own author. Cruz’s claim that “advocates of global cooling suddenly shifted to global warming” ignores the fact that there was no scientific consensus in the 1970s about global cooling. Cruz said that “satellite data demonstrate that there has been no significant warming whatsoever for 17 years.” This is misleading. Though the trend line...

OSLO/WASHINGTON - The United States will submit plans for slowing global warming to the United Nations early this week but most governments will miss an informal March 31 deadline, complicating work on a global climate deal due in December. The U.S. submission, on Monday or Tuesday according to a White House official, adds to national strategies beyond 2020 already presented by the 28-nation European Union, Mexico, Switzerland and Norway. Together, they account for about a third of world greenhouse emissions. But other emitters such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Canada and Australia say they are waiting until closer to a...

BOSTON (CBS) -Enough is enough. For the past eight weeks or so (starting around Jan. 23) we have experienced the harshest New England winter stretch ever recorded in our long and weathered history. This is not an exaggeration. Records haven’t just been challenged, they have been smashed, obliterated. We all deserve and NEED a break. After the snowiest and coldest February ever recorded, March came in like a polar bear and looks to be going out the same way. In fact, as of this writing, our average temperature this March is 31.8 degrees. This ties us with 1984 as the...

Forty passengers are still stuck aboard the MV Blue Puttees in the ice off Cape Breton. The Marine Atlantic ferry, which connects Nova Scotia to Newfoundland, has been there since Wednesday afternoon. The Louis S. St-Laurent — the largest icebreaker in the Canadian Coast Guard’s fleet — has been trying to remove the vessel but so far hasn’t had any luck. “The ice is so pressurized and thick right now in that area they are unable to get through the ice as well. ...” Marine Atlantic spokesperson Darrell Mercer said. “This year, [ice] moved in early to mid-February, and it...

One of the many tragic consequences of human-caused climate change is the nearly unprecedented lack of tornadoes during the first half of March. According to Greg Forbes, severe weather weenie at The Weather Channel, the only other year when this happened was 1969. Clearly, this is just one more example of how we are destroying the climate system.

Is Climate Change/global warming/global cooling real? Our government says it is all settled science. But if that is the case, why did Patrick Moore, an environmentalist from Canada and one of the founders of Greenpeace, decide to leave the organization nearly 30 years ago, in response to “extreme, anti-scientific anti-capitalistic processes within the climate change community?" “It fails the most basic principles of the scientific method,” said Moore, claiming that the “science” of climate change has been derived from climate models based on unsound theory and computer models based on subjectively assigned values. Naturally there are points that the climate...

The U.S. government on Thursday suspended its operations due to a blizzard that forced schools and offices in the Washington metropolitan area to close and expectations are for up to 20 cm (8 in.) of snow to blanket the region. The U.S. government, which employs some 300,000 people in Washington and its vicinity, closed its doors although it is expected that some employees will be able to work from their homes. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will hold a private meeting but do not have any other activities on their agendas for today and the daily White...

The “brutal” winter is on the attack again, bringing sleet and heavy snow to the mid-Atlantic region. Previous storms targeted the deep south including Dallas, Texas, and several hammered New England. By March 4, Boston was just 2 inches away from hitting an all-time record for snow, Boston.com reported. It’s a reality more in keeping with media warnings from the 1970s than today’s arguments about global warming. NBC Nightly News reported Feb. 23, that Dallas was paralyzed “after an entire season’s worth of sleet and freezing rain, up to two inches, fell in a single day” causing massive traffic problems....

A winter storm warning is in effect for the Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa summits through 6 a.m. Thursday. National Weather Service forecasters in Honolulu say up to 10 to 15 inches of snow could fall above the 12,000-foot elevation of both Big Island mountains. The service also expects southwest winds around 15 to 25 mph. Temperatures are expected to be in the upper 20s.

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. Like the Dalton Minimum and Spörer Minimum, the Maunder Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000-50,000 spots. (Source) Climatologist John Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, thinks that last year’s winter, described by USA Today as “one of...

Ice coverage on the Great Lakes is nearing 90 percent, reveals high resolution satellites images from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

For more than 2 million years our earth has cycled in and out of Ice Ages, accompanied by massive ice sheets accumulating over polar landmasses and a cold, desert-like global climate. Although the tropics during the Ice Age were still tropical, the temperate regions and sub-tropical regions were markedly different than they are today. There is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations during this time. Historically, glacial cycles of about 100,000 years are interupted by brief warm interglacial periods-- like the one we enjoy today. Changes in both temperatures and CO2 are considerable and generally synchronized, according to...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – An excruciatingly cold and unseasonably snowy February is coming to an end, and when western New York leaves it behind, it will be leaving behind the shattered remains of some century old or more records. February of 2015 wasn’t just cold, it was arctic cold. Zero days have been above freezing. That has led to an incredibly high amount of damage from water main breaks to accidents from slippery cold, and it’s also created a risk of future damage. Without reaching temperatures which would allow a temporary thaw, snow has piled up in some places to incredible...

The unseasonable cold is expected to continue over much of the U.S., with some interruptions, and the latest GFS model forecast shows some snow for portions of all 50 states in the next seven days. (Graphic courtesy of Weatherbell.com, click for full-size):

The winter of 2014-2015 may be a very warm one, but it is not part of a significant trend during the past several decades. It is hard to link a single warm winter to climate change when the recent trends are toward cooling.

Two more very cold arctic blasts are going to hit Michigan this week. Conditions may be right late in the week for rapid ice making on the Great Lakes. This makes me think we could make a run at record ice cover on the Great Lakes by this coming weekend. As of Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015, the total Great Lakes ice cover was 84.4 percent. Record total ice cover on the Great Lakes is 94.7 percent, set in 1979.