Free Republic

The official start to fall is still seven weeks away, but as of late it feels like it has arrived early. Temperatures for the most part have been in the lower 80s across Mid-Missouri, following a brutal heat wave that impacted Mid-Missouri in July. The cool weather has been welcoming and there are signs that we'll see even cooler weather track into the region.p Thanks to a series of rare cold fronts this summer, temperatures have struggled to climb back to average in Mid-Missouri. That changes as we head into Wednesday, as temperatures will moderate back towards seasonable averages. Average...

During the last ice age, too little atmospheric carbon dioxide almost eradicated mankindGuest Essay by Dennis T. AveryAside from protests by Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio and friends, the public didn’t seem to raise its CO2 anguish much above the Russians-election frenzy when Trump exited the Paris Climate Accords.Statistician Bjorn Lomborg had already pointed out that the Paris CO2 emission promises would cost $100 trillion dollars that no one has, and make only a 0.05 degree difference in Earth’s 2100 AD temperature. Others say perhaps a 0.2 degree C (0.3 degrees F) difference, and even that would hold only...

RUSH: This from the U.K. Independent. “World Has Three Years to Prevent Dangerous Climate Change, Warn Experts — Since the 1880s, the world’s temperature has risen by about 1C because of greenhouse gases resulting from human activity.” Do you know what happened off the coast of North Carolina this week? Well, I don’t know if it actually happened this week. It was discovered this week. You know what happened? A new island. A new sandbar just popped up out of nowhere. It’s next to a known island, but out of nowhere they noticed there’s a brand-new — and it’s not...

The sun is heading into a period known as solar minimum, during which activity at the surface will ‘change form.’In this time, certain types of activity, such as sunspots and solar flares will drop – but, it’s also expected to bring the development of long-lived phenomena including coronal holes. According to NASA, solar minimum could also enhance the effects of space weather, potentially disrupting communications and navigation systems, and even causing space junk to ‘hang around.’

Chain controls are in effect on the 15-mile stretch of Interstate 80 between Kingvale and Donner Lake. Scattered snow and rain is expected to continue Monday morning in the Truckee area.. The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory until 10 a.m. Monday for the Sierra from Shasta to Calaveras counties. In Yosemite National Park, the slow work of clearing Tioga Road continues. The park reported on Tuesday that the two crews plowing Highway 120 — one going west from Lee Vining, the other east from Crane Flat — had met at Tioga Pass. But “road opening is...

Al Gore thinks the weather has been out of the Book of Revelation, while Time and ABC News have reported that Antarctica is melting very quickly. Now, itÂ’s not (via NASA):The melt rate of West Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier is an important concern, because this glacier alone is currently responsible for about 1 percent of global sea level rise. A new NASA study finds that Thwaites' ice loss will continue, but not quite as rapidly as previous studies have estimated.The new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, finds that numerical models used in previous studies have overestimated how rapidly...

A strong rain fell overnight in downtown Los Angeles. It also fell in the Grapevine, which winds through the San Gabriel and Tehachapi mountains, where temperatures flirted with freezing and conditions were slick along Interstate 5. However, the freeway remained open and there were no major accidents. Meanwhile, several inches of snow fell in the San Bernardino Mountain area of Lake Arrowhead. Caltrans was requiring chains for drivers on State Route 18 from Heaps Peak Dump to Big Bear Dam.

The Quaternary glaciation, also known as the Pleistocene glaciation or the current ice age, is a series of glacial events separated by interglacial events during the Quaternary period from 2.58 Ma (million years ago) to present. In popular culture, there is often reference to "the next ice age".[24] Technically, because Earth is already in an ice age at present, this usually refers to the next glacial period (because the Earth is currently in an interglacial period).

As only CBS4 told you last night, Denver would see a beautiful start to Friday – and we were greeted to a cloudless blue sky as temperatures warmed to a high of 54 degrees. Then the weather began to change as a storm system tracking across the Four Corners region and then over New Mexico began producing a strong upslope flow along the Front Range changing rain over to snow. As a result, the Denver and Boulder areas are under a Winter Storm Warning from 6 p.m. Friday until 6 p.m. Saturday for 4-12 inches of slushy snow. The higher...

As of April 1, when it was last measured by NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory, the snowpack in the Sierra’s Tuolumne River Basin came in at 1.2 million acre-feet, according to the latest data. To put the amount in perspective, the figure is enough to fill the 92,000-seat Rose Bowl in Pasadena almost 1,600 times. “The 2017 California snowpack is close to the largest on the record, which consists of decades’ worth of snow measurements made at ground level,” according to a NASA news release. The snowpack, which is made up of layers of snow that accumulate in the winter and...

Easter Sunday got off to an unusually cold start across Sweden — with three weather records broken as some towns experienced their chilliest April night in decades. Southern Sweden saw unseasonably cold temperatures, with up to 10 cm of snow in northern Skåne, Blekinge, Kronoberg, Halland and Kalmar. In Örebro, the mercury dropped to –14°C, making it the coldest April night since 1944, according to P4 Örebro. In Karlstad, Sweden’s meteorological institute SMHI said temperatures reached –9°C, meaning it was the coldest night of April since 1985. …

The alpine region of southern New South Wales has received a big blast of snow — months ahead of the official start to the ski season. Visitors and staff at ski resorts in the Snowy Mountains fell asleep last night in Autumn and woke up in what looked like the dead of winter. ...

From ​the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)Sun’s impact on climate change quantified for first timeA solar flare captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory – click for much larger image For the first time, model calculations show a plausible way that fluctuations in solar activity could have a tangible impact on the climate. Studies funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation expect human-induced global warming to tail off slightly over the next few decades. A weaker sun could reduce temperatures by half a degree. There is human-induced climate change, and there are natural climate fluctuations. One important factor in the unchanging rise...

From the “California is in a permanent drought due to climate change – because we said so” department comes this good news from NASA, CA DWR, and NOAA From NASA:Abundant Snowpack Blankets the Sierra NevadaMarch 3, 2017 Snowpack on the Sierra Nevada provides one-third of the water consumed by California citizens, farmers, and businesses each year. For the first time in at least five years, there should be more than enough of it.According to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), the water stored as snow in the Sierra Nevada range was 185 percent of the long-term average for the...

The UAE was one of a number of Middle Eastern countries to bare the brunt of a freak weather phenomenon yesterday. A shock snowstorm blasted through the Arab country, usually known for its blistering heat, scorched deserts and year-round sunshine. The blizzard covered parts of the country with up to 10 centimetres of snow, according to the local Met Office. Other Gulf States also experienced rare lightning strikes, sandstorms, rough seas and high winds of up to 90km an hour.

After a month of huge blizzards and “atmospheric river” storms, the Sierra Nevada snowpack — source of a third of California’s drinking water — is 177 percent of the historic average, the biggest in more than two decades. The last time there was this much snow on Feb. 1 in the Sierra was in 1995. Pete Wilson was California’s governor, “Seinfeld” was the top-rated show on television and Steve Young had just led the 49ers to a blowout win in Super Bowl XXIX. In a breathtaking shift for a state that had been mired in five years of punishing drought,...

A 4-mile section of Highway 89 on either side of Emerald Bay remains closed, with some sections buried in up to 30 feet of snow, according to the California Department of Transportation. Caltrans maintenance crews are working to clear the highway, but with more storms expected this week, the highway won’t reopen until an extended period of dry weather allows workers to safely clear the area of snow and debris, according to a Caltrans news release. Motorists traveling between the south shore of Lake Tahoe and the north or west shore will have to use Highway 50 and Highway 28....

From broken levees south of Sacramento to snowbound streets in the mountains, Northern Californians tried to mop up from this week’s storms on Friday – while bracing for another “atmospheric river” set to hit Tuesday. As the sun came out in Sacramento, the National Weather Service said the region should have four days to dry out before the next big storm system moves in. The dry weather will give swollen rivers and streams a chance to recede, and allow work crews to inspect and shore up levees strained by increased water flows. Still, the weather service said the next storm...

The country experienced its coldest winter night on Thursday as the mercury dropped to –26°C in some places — the coldest it has been in the 2016-17 season. Thursday night was the coldest so far this winter, with temperatures in parts of Thuringia and atop Germany’s highest mountain dropping to below –26°C. The German Weather Service (DWD) reported that southern Germany between Franconian Switzerland and Upper Palatinate in Bavaria were particularly affected by below-freezing temperatures. In Schorndorf-Knöbling, the thermometers were still reading around –22.6°C by 9am on Friday morning. …

Even the New York Times, one of the biggest sources of fake news on anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW, occasionally gets facts straight and the story right. Or, at least, partially straight and mostly right. Such is the case with the Times’ recent stories by Jane E. Brody on December 19 and December 26 regarding the death toll risks from cold weather versus hot weather. In her December 19 column, titled, “Beware: Winter Is Coming,” Ms. Brody cited an important study from The Lancet, the British medical journal, that found “Cold kills”  as she put it — and at a...