Some parts of the UK are having a white Easter. The last time I remember significant snow at Easter was in 1981, which was followed by the hardest winter of my lifetime in 1981/82.
See more pictures sent in by members of the public to the BBC website here.
The picture above is of Mr Alan Clark’s son Murray and friend, in Alford, Aberdeenshire.
More Easter snow stories from the BBC:
Motorists warned as snow arrives
Weather shuts Easter attractions
Scientists have found that Antarctic waters harbour sea-creatures of startling proportions, with giant-sized specimens surprising researchers during a major survey of New Zealand’s Antarctic seas that ended this week.
Huge sea snails, jellyfish with tentacles up to 4 metres long and starfish the size of large dinner plates were some of the species found during research vessel Tangaroa’s 50-day, 2,000-mile voyage in the Ross Sea, New Zealand marine scientist Don Robertson said.
“I would say there will be hundreds” of previously unknown organisms and “a lot of new species” among the 30,000 specimens collected, Robertson said.
Excerpt from the Telegraph article: ‘Giant sea creatures found in Antarctic’
A healthy fish population could be the key to ensuring coral reefs survive the impacts of climate change, pollution, overfishing and other threats.
Australian scientists found that some fish act as “lawnmowers”, keeping coral free of kelp and unwanted algae.
The Great Barrier Reef is worth about six billion Australian dollars (US$5.5bn; £2.8bn) to the national economy, primarily through tourism and fishing.
BBC Website: ‘Fish key to reef climate survival ‘
Water has always been a volatile topic in Australia, the world’s driest inhabited continent, but the political row that broke out last week was perhaps surprising. Protesters are complaining that a planned desalination facility outside Melbourne, Victoria, will generate too much freshwater.
As Neil Rankine ( a spokesman for protest group Your Water Your Say) and his supporters gear up for a new round of protests, Melbourne could do worse than look west to the city of Perth. Its US$329-million desalination plant, which opened in 2006, has won grudging approval. In fact, a second, US$811-million plant is now planned. The secret: renewable energy — the power comes mainly from a wind farm, and up to 90% of it can be recycled by energy-recovery devices.
From Nature News, 19th March: ‘Water: Purification with a pinch of salt’
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
NPR: The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat
Roger Pielke Sr: Comments On The NPR Story By Richard Harris Entitled “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat”
There is a news story by Richard Harris of NPR entitled“The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat“. The media have finally recognized that the upper oceans have not been warming for the last 4 years which indicates that if global warming is still continuing, the heat is being transferred deeper into the ocean that is being measured (or it could be radiated out into space). If so, it is not readily available to heat the atmosphere, and thus have a major effect on our weather patterns.
The importance of the oceans as a diagnostic for global warming and cooling is reported in the paper
Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335.
The NPR article, however, concludes with the odd claim that
”Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.”
This is denial of the obvious. The observed absence of heat accumulation (of Joules) in the upper ocean (and in the troposphere) for the last four years means that there has been NO global warming in these climate metrics during this time period. It is unknown whether this is a short term aberration but, regardless, it is clear that the IPCC models have failed to skillfully predict this absence of warming. That should have been the conclusion stated at the end of the NPR story.
James A. Peden – better known as Jim or “Dad” – Webmaster of Middlebury Networks and Editor of the Middlebury Community Network, spent some of his earlier years as an Atmospheric Physicist at the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and Extranuclear Laboratories in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, studying ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere. As a student, he was elected to both the National Physics Honor Society and the National Mathematics Honor Fraternity, and was President of the Student Section of the American Institute of Physics. He was a founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His thesis on charge transfer reactions in the upper atmosphere was co-published in part in the prestigious Journal of Chemical Physics. The results obtained by himself and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh remain today as the gold standard in the AstroChemistry Database. He was a co-developer of the Modulated Beam Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, declared one of the “100 Most Significant Technical Developments of the Year” and displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Read his Editorial: ‘The Great Global Warming Hoax?’
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
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