Do things seem normal to You around here?

Nope, not normal here. Here in New Jersey, USA we're in winter time. We have gone through several cycles of VERY cold weather and then un-usually warm weather. For example one sunday it will be 0 degrees F, and the following sunday in the 50's.

I live in the desert, so winters are usually pretty tame. Usually February would be our coldest month with low 60s to high 50s. Right now it's Sunny and 75 F. That's pretty warm for the middle of winter, even for us.

For example one sunday it will be 0 degrees F, and the following sunday in the 50's.

One day everything was fine, the next day everything was flooded, then a couple days latter everything was fine again. Freaky. I've pointed this oddness out to people but no-one else seems to agree.

Hopefully it's a temporary aberation. Hopefully.

I have noted several times here that it has been unseasonably warm.

I qualify by saying that every time I felt it merited worry, I checked and found that we had only broken a record temperature one time this year. I think in order to really build an arguement that things are out of whack you need to be able to show an unprecendented chain of events.

I'd be curious to see if statistically there have been more storms, earthquakes, record temperatures, etc. Generally when I see that the record temperature for the day was set back in 1940 or so, it argues against the idea that things are more extreme now.

Ok Here are some statistics and articles found, I think you have to be living in a shoe box not to notice things are happening all over the globe right now and at an increasingly alarming rate.


Number of Earthquakes Worldwide for 2000 - 2005
Located by the US Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center

Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Total 22256 23534 27454 31419 30639 1151

Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Estimated Deaths 231 21357 1685 33819 276856 3


Extreme weather evidence of global warming
NZ Herald Thursday July 03, 2003 [Abridged]
- By MICHAEL McCARTHY
LONDON - In an astonishing announcement on global warming and extreme weather, the World Meteorological Organisation has signalled that the world's weather is going haywire.
In a startling report, the WMO, which normally produces detailed scientific reports and staid statistics at the year's end, highlighted record extremes in weather and climate occurring all over the world in recent weeks, from Switzerland's hottest-ever June to a record month for tornadoes in the United States - and linked them to climate change.
The unprecedented warning takes its force and significance from the fact that it is coming from an impeccably respected UN organisation that is not given to hyperbole (though environmentalists will seize on it to claim that the direst warnings of climate change are being borne out). The Geneva-based body, to which the weather services of 185 countries contribute, takes the view that events this year in Europe, America and Asia are so remarkable that the world needs to be made aware of it immediately.
The extreme weather it documents, such as record high and low temperatures, record rainfall and record storms in different parts of the world, is consistent with predictions of global warming. Supercomputer models show that, as the atmosphere warms, the climate not only becomes hotter but much more unstable.
"Recent scientific assessments indicate that, as the global temperatures continue to warm due to climate change, the number and intensity of extreme events might increase," the WMO said, giving a striking series of examples: [...]
The WMO said: "These record extreme events (high temperatures, low temperatures and high rainfall amounts and droughts) all go into calculating the monthly and annual averages, which, for temperatures, have been gradually increasing over the past 100 years.
"New record extreme events occur every year somewhere in the globe, but in recent years the number of such extremes have been increasing." [...]
Considering land temperatures only, last May was the warmest on record. It is possible that 2003 will be the hottest year ever recorded. The 10 hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have now all been since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2002 and 2001.
The unstable world of climate change has long been a prediction. Now, the WMO says, it is a reality.

That report was made in 2003...

New study finds Europe's severe heatwave during the summer of 2003 was a 1-in-46,000 event, leading scientists to warn that global warming is increasing climate variability and the potential for more extreme heatwaves, floods, droughts and storms.
Extreme summers and scorching heatwaves similar to the one that that broke all records in France, Germany and central Europe, killed an estimated 20,000 people and triggered losses of an estimated £7 billion across Europe during the summer of 2003 could become much more frequent in the future, climate scientists say. During June and July 2003, temperatures across much of the continent topped 40°C. There were massive forest fires in several countries, destroying about three to four times more woodland in France than usual, severe droughts and water shortages. At the time, many people, including climatologists who predict wilder extremes in floods, droughts and storms thanks to global warming-driven climate change, worried the heatwave was a sign of what the future will bring.

Now results from a climate model, published in the journal Nature, have added more evidence to the idea that extreme temperature events will rise due to global warming, Nature Science Update reports. Christoph Schaer, a professor of climate sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and his colleagues calculate that, based on average temperatures since 1990, a European summer such as that of 2003 should come along only once every 46,000 years - even after taking global warming into account. "Statistically, this event should not have happened," Schaer says.

According to AFP/Yahoo News, the research found that such extreme heatwaves are likely to be "the rule rather than the exception" in 70 years, the institute said in a statement. "Our models show that, in Europe, by then about one summer in two should be at least as hot as the one in 2003," said Schaer.

"By the end of the century we will still see some normal summers, looking from today's perspective, but the mean would be more like 2003 and the maximum would be even warmer," Schaer said, according to Reuters.

The researchers believe that greenhouse gases such as CO2 could be increasing weather variability as well as the overall temperature, with increasingly unstable weather patterns leading to more forest fires, crop losses, water shortages and heat-related deaths.

Global warming could lead to a broader range of climatic conditions rather than a constant rise in temperatures, and sharper variations in the weather during a season, according to the researchers. That pattern would make it harder for farmers to adapt to the new conditions by bringing in new crops more adapted to a hotter climate, they warn.

According to the U.K. Guardian, the researchers ran a regional computer climate simulation using predicted greenhouse-gas levels for the end of this century to determine whether climate variability - the already large difference between weather extremes - was likely to increase in Europe. The simulation showed that extreme temperatures will indeed be more common in the future. In one simulation they found that, towards the end of the century, every second summer could be as hot and as dry as 2003.

"The European summer climate might experience a profound increase in year-to-year variability in response to greenhouse forcing," they wrote. "Such an increase in variability might be able to explain the unusual European summer of 2003, and would strongly affect the incidence of heatwaves and droughts in the future. It would represent a serious challenge to adaptive response strategies designed to cope with climate change."

"I wouldn't bet on how much the variation will increase," says Schär, "but I'm confident that it will."

Changes in variability are more difficult to predict than average temperature trends, says Gabriele Hegerl, who studies climate change at Duke University in North Carolina. But she believes that Schär's idea may well be correct. "The summer of 2003 would be very hard to explain without increased variability," she says.

Jens Christensen, a climate expert at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen, agrees that "we will see more summers like last year".

Others say that killer heatwaves may simply be mere freaks and Schär acknowledges that the summer of 2003 is the only evidence of increased variability he has seen so far. But he remains convinced that Europe has more wild weather in store. "The summer of 2003 is proof that this kind of thing can happen not too far from the current climate," he says.

Schär thinks that a similar fate could befall any area in which a semi-arid climate borders a wetter region. During the European heatwave, much of temperate central Europe took on a drier, 'Mediterranean' pattern as plants and soil lost their moisture. That worsened the heatwave, Schär explains. With less water in the plants, less of the Sun's energy went towards evaporation, and more towards heating the air. Effects such as this are difficult to represent in climate predictions, he adds.

The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1991, and the Zurich report is the third in less than a week to underline the climate threat. On November 7, scientists warned that global warming could drive millions of plants and animals extinct by 2050. The next day, the British government's chief scientist, Sir David King, said climate change is a more serious threat than global terrorism.

A survey of storms, droughts, heatwaves and other natural disasters in 2003 supports Sir David's argument. According to the insurance giant Munich Re, 700 natural disasters last year claimed 50,000 lives, almost five times as many as in in 2002, and cost $60bn (£33bn). The temperatures in Germany alone between July and August were of the kind that might be expected to happen only once in Europe in 450 years. Heatwaves in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan took temperatures up to 50C (122F). By 2020, the insurance chiefs said, such heatwaves might be happening every 20 years.

"We will have to get used to the fact that hot summers like the one we had in Europe must be expected more frequently in the future," said Gerhard Berz, the head of the company's risks research team. "It is possible that they will have become more or less the norm by the middle of the century. The summer of 2003 was a summer of the future, so to speak."


Call this summer? The weather turns feralBy Deborah Smith, Stephen Gibbs and AAPFebruary 4, 2005

Visitors in February to Charlotte Pass ski resort could normally expect to go hiking on the grassy mountain slopes and enjoy a drink afterwards on their chalet balcony in the sun.

But yesterday, people had to huddle inside to avoid the blizzards and freezing temperatures.

Manager of the Stillwell Lodge, Stephen Young, said visibility was low, driving was hazardous and the village roads were covered in 15 centimetres of snow. "You wouldn't want to go out there now for a cocktail," he said.

The unusual weather that turned summer into winter in eastern Australia also had meteorologists gasping, with some describing it as among the most extraordinary they had witnessed.

Melbourne was under water after experiencing the heaviest rainfall in 24 hours since records began in 1856. Huge waves in Bass Strait smashed windows on a ferry on its way to Tasmania. And the cold snap across NSW saw February records for minimum overnight temperatures broken in many country towns.

In Sydney, almost all the damage to property was caused by heavy rain and wind, which felled trees and lifted roofs. Around Gosford the damage was caused by hail, smashing skylights and tiles.

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Advertisement"Same day, same weather, and yet we've got something quite dramatically different not that far apart," a State Emergency Service spokesman said.

A senior forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, Elly Spark, said the cause of the havoc, a low-pressure system that developed late on Wednesday to the east of Bass Strait, was extremely intense, equivalent to a tropical cyclone.

"It intensified very rapidly and has been bringing horrendous winds and snow. You have a winter-type situation in the middle of February."

Winds in excess of 100kmh buffeted the Snowy Mountains with gusts more than 120kmh.

While February snowfalls in the Victorian ski resorts were not unheard of, dumps of 12centimetres were unusual, Ms Spark said. "It's an amazing situation."

The bureau's climate technical officer, Mike De Salis, said the low was also unusual in that it moved westward, rather than out to sea, so it ended up right on top of Melbourne. "It deepened as it went, picking up moisture from Bass Strait and sucking it in."

Cold air from the low pressure system caused light snow to fall yesterday on the ranges near Canberra and sleet was reported in the capital as temperatures plummeted. Snow also fell at Thredbo and Perisher ski resorts where the temperature was below minus 1.

There have only been five February snowfalls in Perisher Valley in 29 years of records, with the last in 1998, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

A forecaster with the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, Ward Rooney, said he had never seen a storm like the one that hit Melbourne.

It dumped 120 millimetres of rain in the 24 hours to 9am yesterday, causing flooding, chaos and the diversion of some flights. Melbourne's average February rainfall is 45.8 mm.

Huge seas battered the Spirit of Tasmania I ferry which had to return to Melbourne.

Judy Archer, from Melbourne, said the voyage had been terrifying. "The waves were just enormous, just enormous. I was on the bunk and I could feel my body sort of lifting up in the air and crash down again," she told reporters.

In NSW, the SES received 2750 calls for assistance in the 24 hours to 4pm yesterday, most from the Ryde, Baulkham Hills and Gosford areas and the Southern Highlands.

On the South Coast, seven children and a teacher from Ulladulla Primary School were taken to hospital with minor injuries after a tree fell on their demountable classroom.

In NSW, Hay had its coldest February day ever on Wednesday, with a maximum of 13 degrees, rather than the average of 33 degrees for this time of year. Records for minimum overnight temperatures in February were broken in many country towns such as Coonabarabran, where the mercury fell to 3.6 degrees (previous record minimum: 5.6 degrees in 1993) and Condobolin, where it was a chilly 5 degrees (previous record: 6.6 degrees in 1985).

There was also good news: dam levels in the Sydney catchment have risen 0.6 percentage points this week to 42.7 per cent. The Warragamba catchment received 70 millimetres of rain this week.

More than 500 aftershocks have been felt in the area of the Nicobar Islands and Indonesia since the Dec 26th Tsunami.

Even the major Insurance companies are taking notice...

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From the BBC..

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From the Bureau of Meterology Australia:Link