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<p>MOORE, Okla. (CBS Houston/AP) – A woman who thought she had lost it all found one of the things most precious to her while being interviewed on live television – her pet dog, buried alive under the rubble of her former home.</p>

Rush is talking about this May 10th USA today article that says the # of tornadoes the last 12 months is the lowest since 1950. Google it.

The Gulf of Mexico's warm air is part of the ingredient for tornado alley in the US. The other ingredient in this mix is cool/cold Canadian air. The United States was blessed with very few tornadoes in March and April of 2013. But the United States was going through an extendeded cold spell this Spring. How cold? Living in Louisiana, the mosquitoes seemed to be blown into the Gulf of Mexico [by a frigid Northernly wind] as fish food most of this Spring. There have been very few mosquitoes bugging us this Spring [so far]. But now the bad news:...

Newsweak April 28th, 1975 Tornado Outbreaks Blamed On Global Cooling.

Kenai couple wins Nenana Ice Classic ANCHORAGE, ALASKA — A retired peace officer and his paramedic-firefighter wife are the sole winners of Alaska's biggest guessing game. Warren and Yvonne Snow, of Kenai, had the closest guess of when the ice would go out on the Tanana River in Nenana, which happened at 3:41 p.m. Monday. The game officially uses standard time, not daylight time, so the winning time is listed as 2:41 p.m. Monday. No one guessed that exact time, but the Snows were only a minute off. Their guess of 2:40 p.m. will net them $318,500 before taxes as...

Anyone in Waco see the mean looking storm heading right for Waco?

May 20, 2013 Video shot along 134th at Toby Keith and Sooner Rd

AF1 is getting fired up. Add another devastating, crushing event to the list that saves Obama. Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, Jodi Arias verdict during Benghazi hearing, etc....now the Oklahoma devastation.

Why hasn't a tornado buster missile or bomb been developed or at least tried? I realize that tornadoes are large and quick moving, but if there's enough time to prepare for one there should be enough time to attempt to stop one. Could a shock wave or some sort of electrical pulse wave from a strategically placed missile/bomb launched from a fighter jet stop a tornado, or perhaps disrupt its balance successfully enough to stop it's devastation on the ground?

Tornados hitting OK....near OK City. Midwest getting hit hard.

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2013/05/15/130515-Tornado-Granbury-Texas-TORNADO_GRANBURY_620x350.jpg

Star Wars fans and Doctor Who fans had to be separated by police after a brawl threatened to break out at a special sci-fi convention. More than a dozen fans from the rival groups – including several in fancy dress – were involved in bitter exchanges outside the venue.

Earth's global thaw has reached Mount Everest, the world's tallest peak, researchers said today (May 14) at the Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico. Glaciers in the Mount Everest region have shrunk by 13 percent in the last 50 years and the snowline has shifted upward by 590 feet (180 meters), Sudeep Thakuri, a graduate student at the University of Milan in Italy, said in a statement. Located in the Himalaya Mountains on the border between China and Nepal, Everest's summit is 29,029 feet (8,848 m) above sea level. Thakuri and his colleagues tracked changes to glaciers, temperatures and...

.. Record low temperatures set at Toledo OH... A record low temperature was set at the Toledo Express Airport on Sunday may 12 2013. The temperature dropped to 30 degrees at 1140 PM EST breaking the old record of 34 degrees last recorded on may 12 1969.The temperature at the Toledo Express Airport remained seasonably cold overnight and registered 30 degrees at 145 am EST this morning. This equals and sets a new record low of 30 degrees which was last recorded on may 13 1946.... Frost advisory in effect from midnight tonight to 9 am EDT Tuesday...The National Weather...

The Prince of Wales has criticised "corporate lobbyists" and climate change sceptics for turning the earth into a "dying patient", in his most outspoken attack yet on the world's failure to tackle global warming, made shortly before he is to take over from the Queen at the forthcoming meeting of the Commonwealth.

EPECUEN, Argentina A strange ghost town that spent a quarter century under water is coming up for air again in the Argentine farmlands southwest of Buenos Aires. Epecuen was once a bustling little lakeside resort, where 1,500 people served 20,000 tourists a season. During Argentina's golden age, the same trains that carried grain to the outside world brought visitors from the capital to relax in Epecuen's saltwater baths and spas. ... Then a particularly heavy rainstorm followed a series of wet winters, and the lake overflowed its banks on Nov. 10, 1985. Water burst through a retaining wall and spilled...

Wondering if any FReepers know of good alternatives to the NEW USGS earthquake map website. What a POS! (Heavily reliant on Java, it was Beta but they didn't give a rats rear if you didn't like it...) Basically worthless. Who the heck do we have in charge of IT these days? A bunch of purple-haired freaks who code C++++++++++++-+++----? Jeesh already!

How do you top making national news for bigotry? Trying getting people to “Give Up (Eating) Hamburgers to Stop Climate Change.” For loony lefty syndicated columnist David Sirota, it’s all just another day at the office. Sirota made national news for his bizarre and bigoted hope that the Boston bomber would turn out to be “a white American.” Fresh off that fiasco, Sirota has turned his sights to changing the climate by changing America’s diet. According to Sirota’s May 2 column, “the fastest way to reduce climate change” simply “requires us all to eat fewer animal products.” In case that...

Updated 2 May 2013 to correct typo on date of previous low tornado countThe 12-month period from May 2012 to April 2013 was remarkable for the absence of tornado activity and tornado impacts in the United States.We can start by looking at the number of EF1 and stronger tornadoes during that period. A final count is available through January 2013 and we have a pretty good estimate of how many occurred in February through April, although final numbers won’t be available until July. Although the 12 month total may change a little bit with the final data, it’s unlikely to...

Explanation: Is that a spaceship or a cloud? Although it may seem like an alien mothership, it's actually a impressive thunderstorm cloud called a supercell. Such colossal storm systems center on mesocyclones -- rotating updrafts that can span several kilometers and deliver torrential rain and high winds including tornadoes. Jagged sculptured clouds adorn the supercell's edge, while wind swept dust and rain dominate the center. A tree waits patiently in the foreground. The above supercell cloud was photographed in July west of Glasgow, Montana, USA, caused minor damage, and lasted several hours before moving on.

It will collect radar data for the purpose of understanding changes in the ice NASA will begin testing a new rover tomorrow, which is expected to measure changes in Greenland's ice sheet.  The rover is called GROVER, which is short for Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research. It's a 6-foot-tall, 800 pound, autonomous vehicle complete with solar panels and two repurposed snowmobile tracks.  The solar-powered GROVER will travel Greenland's surface layer collecting measurements in order to help scientists understand changes in the ice sheet. A ground-penetrating radar -- which is powered by two rechargeable batteries -- is placed at the...

As informed citizens, we need to be careful about conflating weather, climate change and natural disasters. Weather (i.e. the extreme cold we’re having in Texas this spring) is weather. Climate is the measurement of long-term weather data over broad areas (i.e. global temperatures over a 50 year period). For most people, these are pretty easy distinctions to make.

reader “agimarc” writes: As with the Lower 48 states, spring is late and cold here in central Alaska. Fairbanks reported a record low of 2 degrees F above zero Sunday, breaking the previous record of 8 from 1924.Here in Anchorage, looks like we are around 3 – 4 weeks late with ice of local lakes and snow off the ground. Winter was not particularly hard, but it all changed with a very cold April. And at this point it does not appear things will be warming up soon. So much for manmade global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions.Story...

by stevengoddard At the two-thirds mark for meteorological spring, 2013 was the second coldest spring on record – slightly warmer than 1975. Data is from here : Index of /pub/data/ghcn/daily/hcn/ But 1975 had an unusually warm May at 17C. The two warmest months of May were in 1934 and 1896. Both graphs above show the average of all daily temperatures at all US HCN stations, calculated per year.The forecast for the first two weeks of May is well below normal, so odds are that the spring of 2013 will be the coldest on record in the US.  This is what Fort...

In the ‘tip of the day’ on its Earth Day website, the Environmental Protection Agency tells visitors that topping off one’s gas tank hurts the environment. “During hot weather, don't top off your gas tank,” the tip on the home page says. “Even a small gas spill adds to air pollution and wastes fuel.” …

Earth's internal engine is running about 1,000 degrees Celsius (about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than previously measured, providing a better explanation for how the planet generates a magnetic field, a new study has found. A team of scientists has measured the melting point of iron at high precision in a laboratory, and then drew from that result to calculate the temperature at the boundary of Earth's inner and outer core — now estimated at 6,000 C (about 10,800 F). That's as hot as the surface of the sun. The difference in temperature matters, because this explains how the Earth generates...

What the government giveth, the government can take away. So it came to pass that the glory of green investments fell over its peak and started to slide — a slide we hope will continue forthwith with speed until such day that Renewables Actually Work. Weakest quarter for clean energy investment since 2009  [Bloomberg] 15 April 2013 Investment worldwide in the first quarter of 2013 was $40.6bn, down 22% on a year earlier, due to a downturn in large wind and solar project financings London and New York, 15 April 2013 – Global investment in clean energy in the...

Paging Seth Borenstein! 9787 new cold and snow records since March 13thIf this were a month of a heatwave across thus USA, like last July, you can bet it would be MSM headlines all over the place and breathless stories from AP’s Seth Borenstein and pronouncements from the Mannian climate cartel about how all this is connected to global warming, er climate change, er climate disruption.Source hereBut nary a peep so far about this cold wave lasting over a month that has generated 9787 records posted by NOAA/NWS.Conversely, here is the list of high temperatures, and high minimum temperatures.Source hereThe...

Uh oh, somebody in Germany in a position to influence others in the Green movement has started thinking for himself, shrugging off suggestions from a climate scientist that “its all in his head”.Pierre Gosselin reports about a story by lefty journalist Harald Martenstein of Die Zeit: “I was ready to open my home to the Schröders as soon as they would no longer be able to take the 60°C heat in the shade. But instead it got colder and colder. At Uckermark in the wintertime it was -20°C for weeks.” Martenstein also noticed that Britain had endured its coldest winter in...

The National Weather Service has posted a winter storm warning for far eastern South Dakota, and winter weather advisories in other parts of that region and also southeastern North Dakota. ... Snowstorms have been crossing the Dakotas for the past week, dumping record amounts of snow

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.…“The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of “The...

It’s difficult to say anything for sure about Antarctica because the weather is so variable. Bumper snow one year, not so much the next. (Noise and uncertainty is large). But 800 years of ice cores spread across Antarctica shows the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) is more likely to have been increasing over the last century. (Which fits with what Zwally et al found in 2012 with ICESAT satellite data). Note the correlation of the smoothed average of the SMB (orange line) with Total Solar Irradiance (green line).Antarctic Ice has been increasing for the last half century, and over 800 years...

The Sunday storm dropped as much as a foot and a half of snow in western and central North Dakota, and lesser amounts in the east. I-94 remains closed from the Minnesota border to Jamestown, and from the Montana border to Bismarck. No travel is advised in much of the state.

In the post Trenberth Still Searching for Missing Heat, we discussed the recent Balmaseda et al (2013) paper “Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content”, of which Kevin Trenberth was a coauthor.Dr. Roy Spencer also has a recent post on that paper. I’ve cross posted Roy’s post following this introduction. Roy Spencer argues that it is possible for the oceans to warm to depth, while the surface temperatures remain flat, but… (No spoiler from me. You’ll have to read Roy’s post.)Roy does note that arguments about continued ocean warming to depth “…depend upon global deep ocean temperature...

Evidence for a Global Medieval Warm Period Posted on April 11, 2013 by Anthony Watts Note the IPCC disappeared the MWP in AR3From CO2Science:Medieval Warm Period (Antarctica) — Summary Was there a Medieval Warm Period somewhere in the world in addition to the area surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean, where its occurrence is uncontested? This question is of utmost importance to the ongoing global warming debate, for if the Medieval Warm Period is found to have been a global climatic phenomenon, and if the locations where it occurred were as warm in medieval times as they are currently, there is no...

Opinion How The Economist got it wrong Dana Nuccitelli and Michael E MannABC Environment 12 Apr 2013 The expected range of climate change is around 3 degrees. This is based on several lines of evidence and other factors. Comments (23) A recent news article suggested that climate change may not be as bad as feared. But the report was based on one flawed study and missed a lot of important points. THE ECONOMIST recently published a lengthy article about Earth's climate sensitivity — how much the planet's surface will warm in response to the increased greenhouse effect if the amount of carbon...

John E. Beckman, and Terence J. Mahoney Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, E-38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain  Abstract:We discuss how, in the 1970's, Eddy took clues from the historical researches of Spörer and Maunder in the 19th century to draw attention to the virtual absence of sunspot activity between 1645 and 1715. This ``Maunder Minimum'' is not only of interest to solar physicists in the context of the theory of solar magnetic activity, and to stellar astrophysicists working on the properties of cool stars, but may also be a vital clue to the influence of the variability of the Sun's...

Winters getting colder because of melting Arctic ice, says Government’s chief forecaster.Climate change is “loading the dice” towards freezing, drier weather, says Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo, who called publicly for the first time for an urgent investigation.Prof Slingo said: “If you look at the way our weather patterns have behaved over the past four or five years, we’re beginning to think that there is something happening. Yeah, Julia, there is something happening. It’s getting colder!COLDER! “Our climate is being disrupted by the warming of the Arctic that we have observed very dramatically since 2007.The UK saw the...

Just when Swedes were getting their hopes up for some spring sunshine, Sweden's weather agency SMHI issued a warning that twenty centimetres of fresh snow may fall over the weekend. SMHI issued a class 1 weather warning - meaning weather conditions may involve some risks and disruptions - for the west-central regions of Värmland and Dalarna. Twenty centimetres of wet snow is expected to fall in the region between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning and the rest of the country will see stormy weather over the weekend, too. "It is mainly the northern parts of Värmland and Dalarna that may...

Ice core data shows CO2 levels changed less than 10 parts per million from 1600-1800 during the MWP. From the Hockey Schtick:  A new paper from Schurer et al (with Mann as co-author) finds that climate “models cannot explain the warm conditions around 1000 [years before the present, during the Medieval Warming Period] seen in some [temperature] reconstructions.”According to Schurer et al, “We find variations in solar output and explosive volcanism to be the main drivers of climate change from 1400-1900.” They also claim, “but for the first time we are also able to detect a significant contribution from greenhouse gas...

This is a familar set of issues in one article. – AnthonyBy INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:20 PM PTEnvironment: The solar wind is slowing, but Al Gore is still spewing hot air. The Oscar winner is promoting civil disobedience to stop energy and economic growth as the first U.S. emissions cap-and-trade program begins.Speaking before Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative, junk science advocate Gore called on young people to take the law into their own hands because the climate, he claims, is a-changin’. He told the gathering in New York City that “the world has lost ground...

I received a number of emails about the newly published Guemas et al (2013) paper titled “Retrospective prediction of the global warming slowdown in the past decade”. It’s paywalled. The abstract is here. It reads: Despite a sustained production of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Earth’s mean near-surface temperature paused its rise during the 2000–2010 period1. To explain such a pause, an increase in ocean heat uptake below the superficial ocean layer2, 3 has been proposed to overcompensate for the Earth’s heat storage. Contributions have also been suggested from the deep prolonged solar minimum4, the stratospheric water vapour5, the stratospheric6...

From Jules Verne Mysterious Island, 1961, American Films Inc.CO2, is there anything it can’t do? Add it to the list.Over at WaPo, they call them “supersized”. From Counsel and Heal News (h/t to Gene Doebley):Carbon To Blame for Oversized Blue Crabs The use of genetic engineering or steroid enhancements to enlarge certain food products has been popular but highly controversial in the history of the food industry. Based on new research, it seems like certain animals, such as the blue crabs, have found another way of growing that does not require a lab setting. According to research, the side...

Tic, tic, tic. The sleeping MSM is stirring. Headlines no one could imagine seeing a few years ago are popping up on a regular basis. The backdown is beginning.For those who have not gone-over-the-falls and chained their reputation to a big-Green-rock, there is time to backtrack. This is a good moment to start mentioning that “things have changed.” It’s five years too late, but that’s better than being ten-years-too-late, and it still has a tiny bit of kudos for being ahead of stampede that is coming.The term du jour is “new evidence”. It’s the ticket back to reality, even though...

Back in 1998, when we had the super El Niño, some of the warm water pooled east and west of Australia (seen in the 1998 image below) and damaged coral reefs there, setting off a cottage industry for noisy alarmy/worry types like Ove Hoegh-Guldberg that have turned the “save the coral reefs” issue into a career.1998 Super El ñino – Image: NOAA/NESDIS – click to enlarge Now it seems that mother nature has simply ignored his concerns and does what she does best – adapt and fill the void, and saved the reefs on her own. This must be...

OSLO (Reuters) - Climate change could get worse quickly if huge amounts of extra heat absorbed by the oceans are released back into the air, scientists said after unveiling new research showing that oceans have helped mitigate the effects of warming since 2000.Heat-trapping gases are being emitted into the atmosphere faster than ever, and the 10 hottest years since records began have all taken place since 1998. But the rate at which the earth's surface is heating up has slowed somewhat since 2000, causing scientists to search for an explanation for the pause.Experts in France and Spain said on Sunday...

Rising sea levels, droughts, torrential downpours, "superstorms" – climate change has been blamed for a flood [Ahem...—Ed.] of calamities, but new research shows that an even worse global warming–induced fate might soon befall us all: an inflight glass of wine spilling onto our lap when our airliner encounters increased turbulence. "Our results suggest that climate change will lead to bumpier transatlantic flights by the middle of this century," write Paul Williams and Manoj Joshi in a paper entitled "Intensification of winter transatlantic aviation turbulence in response to climate change", published in the most recent edition of Nature Climate Change. While...

A wild storm will bring plunging temperatures and heavy snow from Colorado to Minnesota during the middle of the week.Areas from Denver to Rapid City, S.D., Casper, Wyo., and Scottsbluff, Neb., will have blizzard conditions in store spanning Monday night and Tuesday.Several hours of whiteout conditions, combined with temperatures plunging into the teens and wind gusts between 40 and 50 mph will make for dangerous travel conditions.

"Since record keeping began in the sixties, we've never encountered anything like this before," ice breaker Ulf Gulldne told the local newspaper Örnsköldsviks Allehanda. On March 29th, 176,000 square kilometers of the Baltic Sea was covered in ice, a record for the time of year. On a map, it means about half of the central and northern parts are frozen over. Far north, the ice is both thick and difficult to break through. The date on which the ice reaches its maximum spread usually falls much earlier in the year. The previously latest date record was March 25th, 2008. That...

Heh. I liked how Rich Lowry put this on Fox News this morning, following up on his column earlier this week — how often have people who, calmly and rationally, dare to question the notion that humanity is hurtling toward a man-made, imminent, and irreversible warming catastrophe been written off as heretical “climate-deniers” who “ignore/hate science”? As The Economist‘s recent reappraisal of the climate-change issue illustrated, however, there’s now more and more data piling up that the earth’s temperature has actually been pretty much stable over the past decade or so, despite the gobs of greenhouse gases we’ve been continuously...