March 29, 2013 - EARTH - March was the coldest in Sheffield for more than a century, new statistics have revealed. City residents are still shivering, gritting their paths and de-icing the car each morning despite the supposed start of spring.
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| Spring snow hits Sheffield. |
Coldest March In Sheffield, UK For Over A Century.
Now data compiled by the Museums Sheffield Weather Station at Weston Park shows we've had a right to grumble. This month has in fact had the lowest monthly average March temperature since 1883 - and the second coldest average March temperature ever recorded. The average temperature was a chilly 2.4C. On the coldest day this month a minimum temperature of -4C was recorded. This means 2013 has had the 31st coldest March minimum on record. The maximum temperature recorded was only 9.3C, giving 2013 the lowest March maximum temperature since March 1996 and the second lowest monthly March maximum on record. Piles of the white stuff also meant the city has also had the deepest March snow - with 21 centimetres falling - in over 30 years and the fourth deepest ever since regular recordings for this statistic began in the 1940s. According to the weather station's records, over the last 50 years it has also snowed in March more often than it hasn't, about 60 per cent of the time. The weather station has agreed to share its monthly data reports with Star readers each month. Watch out for the next report in April. -
The Star.
Germany Faces Coldest March Since 1883.
Complaining about the weather has reached epidemic proportions in northern Germany this "spring." And with good reason.
With Easter just around the corner, meteorologists are telling us this
could end up being the coldest March in Berlin and its surroundings
since records began in the 1880s. The poor Easter Bunny deserves our
sympathy. Whereas in recent years he has grown used to dodging
daffodils, lilies and tulips as he carries his cargo of eggs and
chocolate to homes across northern Europe, this year the rabbit will
find himself confronted with ice slicks, snow drifts and bundled up
humans in foul moods.
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| © DPA. |
Easter, after all, may be upon us. But spring weather most definitely is
not. Biologists are warning that the Easter Bunny's wild brethren,
European hares, are having trouble keeping their broods warm and healthy
in the unseasonable chill. Meteorologists are keeping close tabs on
thermometers to determine whether this March will go down as the coldest
ever -- since records began in the 1880s. And wiseacres on the streets
of Berlin have not yet tired of noting that Easter promises to be colder
than last Christmas.
And it's not just the northern regions of Continental Europe where the
Easter Bunny will encounter problems. Great Britain and Ireland are
likewise suffering through unseasonable weather, with power outages
threatening the roast lamb and snow drifts making hopping difficult.
Russia and Ukraine are also suffering.
In northern Germany, the weather has been
particularly notable for its persistent putrescence. Following a winter
that broke all records for its lack of sunshine -- with just 91.2 hours
of sunshine, total, from the beginning of December to the end of
February -- the sun has in recent days emerged from behind the haze.
No Improvement in Sight
But it has not brought even a bit of warmth. High pressure system Jill
and low pressure system Dieter have joined forces to torpedo an Easter
full of the flowers and pastels we have come to expect. The average
temperature in the northern German states of Berlin, Brandenburg and
Saxony-Anhalt has been minus 2 degrees Celsius (28.4 degrees Fahrenheit)
this month. If Jack Frost doesn't head back to Siberia soon, this March
could break the record established in 1883, two years after records
began. For Germany as a whole, the month will likely end up as the
coldest March in 25 years.
Surely, one might think, spring is just around the corner? Not so, say
meteorologists. The Easter Bunny will find himself confronted with snow
and sleet in northern Germany on Sunday. And there is no improvement in
sight. -
Spiegel.
March Set To Be Coldest In UK Since 1962.
Mean temperature for the month so far is 2.5C (36.5F) - three degrees below long-term average
This March is set to be the coldest in the UK since 1962,
weather
experts have said. Statistics from the Met Office showed that from 1
March to 26 March the UK mean temperature was 2.5C (36.5F), which is
three degrees below the long-term average. This made it the joint fourth
coldest in the UK, in records going back to 1910.
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| Piles of snow line a road near Colne, Lancashire: March 2013 is set to be joint fourth coldest in the UK, in records going back to 1910. © Jon Super/AP |
The Met Office said this March was likely to be the fourth coldest on
record for England, joint third coldest for Wales, joint eighth coldest
for Scotland and sixth coldest for Northern Ireland. This March joined
2006, 2001, 1995, 1987, 1979, 1970 and 1962 as years when the month saw
significant snowfall.
The coldest March in the UK was in 1962, at 1.9C (35.4F), followed by
1947, 2.2C (35.9F), 1937, 2.4C (36.3F), and 1916 and 1917, 2.5C (36.5F).
The cold weather is expected to continue through the Easter weekend and
into April, a spokesman said.
Full figures for the month will be available next week.
-
Guardian.
Thousands Of Sheep Remain Buried In Snow In Northern Ireland.
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| Tractors clear snow in Country Antrim. |
Farmers in Northern Ireland are still unable to assess their losses a week after the big freeze hit. Thousands of sheep are thought to have died after being buried in the snow in Counties Antrim and Down. Snow drifts of up to 12 feet were reported in some areas with roads, hedges and gates completely submerged. On Campbell Tweed's family farm in the Glens of Antrim, sheep remain buried in the snow across the 1,600-acre site. Mr Tweed says he has no idea how many animals he has lost from his 4,000-strong flock. He says he won't get a full picture until there is a complete thaw, and that could take until late next week.
Lambing season has not started on the Tweed farm, so any sheep that were saved are heavily pregnant and the focus is now on keeping them comfortable and well fed. On Tuesday an RAF Chinook helicopter was deployed from England to drop fodder in Northern Ireland where farmers were not able to get to their animals. Irish military helicopters joined that rescue mission yesterday. Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Executive has set up a relief package for farmers who have sustained heavy losses due to the adverse weather. The Agriculture Minister Michelle O'Neill has announced a fund which will help farmers pay for the collection and disposal of animals killed in the snow.
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| Farmers managed to save some animals. |
Ms O'Neill said: "There is potential for environmental impact, disease risks and reputational damage associated with dead animals not being collected and disposed of without delay which is why funding for the collection and disposal of fallen animals is an urgent need." She has also said she plans to bring further proposals to the Northern Ireland Executive on a hardship payment scheme. The scheme will help with the financial burden on affected farmers. It's thought the entire relief fund amounts to £5m. The fund has been welcomed by the Ulster Farmers' Union. Its president Harry Sinclair has also praised the community spirit in the worst-affected areas. He said: "The farming families directly affected by the crisis are working together to overcome the enormous problems created by the drifting snow. "Their resilience is being tested to the limit and with no thaw in sight, the hardship they are facing is set to continue into next week." -
SKY News.
More Than 220 Rescued From Ice Floes Off Latvian Coast.
More than 220 people have been rescued after two ice floes broke off from the Latvian coast and were blown into the Gulf of Riga, Latvian emergency services said Friday. All 181 people on the larger floe near the capital city of Riga were removed by boat, and 42 people were rescued by helicopter from the smaller floe off the coast of Jurmala, a nearby seaside resort town. One person remained for some time on the floe off Jurmala because he refused to be rescued by helicopter, emergency officials said. That man told authorities he was waiting for a friend to pick him up in a plastic boat, according to the Baltic News Service. Eventually, rescuers helped both the stranded man and his friend on the boat return safely to shore. The same report said that, once the rescue operation ended around 4:30 p.m. (10:30 a.m. ET), one person was treated for possible frostbite. The fire service earlier said that rough seas were complicating the rescue efforts by the Fire and Rescue Service, National Border Guard, Coast Guard and military officials. Oil company manager Kaspars Skrabans said he was down at the beach by Jurmala with his family when he noticed that a crack had appeared in the ice extending from the shore out into the gulf. He realized that nearly 50 people were on the ice that had become separated from the shore and being blown out to sea by the prevailing wind. Some people were likely there to enjoy a walk on a sunny day, he told CNN, while others were ice fishers. Temperatures were above freezing Friday in Riga, CNN forecaster Mari Ramos said. Ice is more likely to break off from shore as temperatures rise in spring. -
CNN.
WATCH: Hundreds rescued off Latvia's coast.
Incredible North Atlantic Storm Spans Atlantic Ocean, Coast To Coast.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a storm this big before.
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| © NASA. |
The storm shown here stretches west to east from Newfoundland to
Portugal. Its southern tail (cold front) extends into the Caribbean and
the north side of its comma head touches southern Greenland.
Not only is it big, but it's also super intense - comparable to many
category 3 hurricanes. The storm's central pressure, as analyzed by the
Ocean Prediction Center, is 953 mb. Estimated peak wave heights are around 25-30 feet.
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| © Ocean Prediction Center. |
The storm is forecast to remain more or less stationary over the next
few days before substantially weakening and then eventually drifting
into western Europe in about a week as a rather ordinary weather system.
Note to Washingtonians: this is the same storm that
blanketed the region with 1-4 inches of snow Monday.
It's grown into a monster from humble beginnings. The storm's giant
circulation has drawn down the cold and windy conditions we've had since
it passed. -
Washington Post.
It’s The Cold, Not Global Warming, That We Should Be Worried About.
A few months ago, a group of students in Oslo produced a brilliant spoof
video that lampooned the charity pop song genre. It showed a group of
young Africans coming together to raise money for those of us freezing
in the north. "A lot of people aren't aware of what's going on there
right now," says the African equivalent of Bob Geldof. "People don't
ignore starving people, so why should we ignore cold people? Frostbite
kills too. Africa: we need to make a difference." The song - Africa
for Norway - has been watched online two million times, making it one
of Europe's most popular political videos.
The aim was to send up the patronising, cliched way in which the West
views Africa. Norway can afford to make the joke because there, people
don't tend to die of the cold. In Britain, we still do. Each year, an
official estimate is made of the "excess winter mortality" - that is,
the number of people dying of cold-related illnesses. Last winter was
relatively mild, and still 24,000 perished. The indications are that
this winter, which has dragged on so long and with such brutality, will
claim 30,000 lives, making it one of the biggest killers in the country.
And still, no one seems upset.
Somewhere between the release of the 1984 Band Aid single and Al Gore's 2006 documentary
An Inconvenient Truth,
political attention shifted away from such problems. The idea of people
(especially old people) dying in their homes from conditions with which
we are all familiar now seems relatively boring. Much political
attention is still focused on global warming, and while schemes to help
Britain prepare for the cold are being cut, the overseas aid budget is
being vastly expanded. Saving elderly British lives has somehow become
the least fashionable cause in politics.
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| Inconvenient suffering: the idea of people
(especially old people) dying in their homes from weather conditions
with which we are all familiar now seems relatively boring Photo: ALAMY |
The reaction to the 2003 heatwave was extraordinary.
It was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and taken as a warning that Britain was
horribly unprepared for the coming era of snowless winters and barbecue
summers. The government's chief scientific officer, Sir David King,
later declared that climate change was "more serious even than the
threat of terrorism" in terms of the number of lives that could be lost.
Such language is never used about the cold, which kills at least 10
times as many people every winter. Before long, every political party
had signed up to the green agenda.
Since Sir David's exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the
cold, and 10,000 from the heat. It is horribly clear that we have been
focusing on the wrong enemy. Instead of making sure energy was
affordable, ministers have been trying to make it more expensive, with
carbon price floors and emissions trading schemes. Fuel prices have
doubled over seven years, forcing millions to choose between heat and
food - and government has found itself a major part of the problem.
This is slowly beginning to dawn on Ed Davey, the Secretary of State for
Energy and Climate Change. He has tried to point the finger at energy
companies, but his own department let the truth slip out in the small
print of a report released on Wednesday. The average annual fuel bill is
expected to have risen by £76 by 2020, it says. But take out Davey's
hidden taxes (carbon price floor, emissions trading scheme, etc) and
we'd be paying an average £123 less. His department has been trying to
make homes cheaper to heat, and in a saner world this would be his only
remit: to secure not the greenest energy, but the most affordable
energy.
By now, the Energy Secretary will also have realised another
inconvenient truth - that, for Britain, global warming is likely to
save far more lives then it threatens. Delve deep enough into the
Government's forecasts, and they speculate that global warming will lead
to 6,000 fewer deaths a year, on average, by the end of the decade.
This is the supposed threat facing us: children would be less likely to
have snow to play in at Christmas, but more likely to have grandparents
to visit over Easter. Not a bad trade-off. The greatest uncertainty is
whether global warming, which has stalled since 1998, will arrive
quickly enough to make a difference.
It's daft to draw any conclusions from this freakish, frozen spring. But
in general, the computer-generated predictions do not seem as reliable
as they did when Al Gore was using them to scare the bejesus out of us. A
few weeks ago, scientists at the
University of Washington
found that man's contribution to global warming may have been
exaggerated - by a factor of two. The natural cycle of heating and
cooling, they discovered, plays a far bigger role than they had
imagined. Mr Davey's fuel bill taxes may do nothing for the planet. But
they will certainly lead to poorer, colder homes and shorter lives.
Our understanding of climate science may be weak, but our understanding
of basic medicine is not. Low temperatures increase blood pressure and
weaken the immune system, making everyone more vulnerable to bugs. For
the elderly, this can be fatal. People don't actually die of frostbite,
as the Norwegian video teasingly suggested. They die of flu, or
thrombosis, or other conditions they would not have acquired if their
house had been warmer. Far fewer Scandinavians die in winter, because
they have worked out how to defeat the cold: keep the heating on;
insulate houses. It really is that simple.
So what's stopping us? For years, various government schemes have sought
to insulate lofts or upgrade boilers, but nowhere near quickly enough.
When MPs looked into this three years ago, they heard from a Mr P of
Cornwall. "The offer of a boiler is very much appreciated," he said. "We
hope that we will still be alive when we get the visit about the end of
February." With someone dying of the cold every seven minutes during
winter, that may not have been a joke. The modest insulation scheme has
been hit by cuts, while the mammoth winter fuel payment scheme continues
untouched. The word "fuel" is, of course, redundant: it's a simple
bung, paid to all pensioners - who are more likely to vote.
I once drank a winter fuel allowance. It had been paid to a self-made
millionaire who was appalled that people like him were being written a
cheque, and he had used it to buy a magnum of claret in protest. He was a
major philanthropist, but wanted to make the point to his lunch guests:
the winter fuel payment is a scandal, whose very existence suggests
that government is not serious about helping people make it through
winter.
No one would wear a wristband or pin on a ribbon for the elderly victims
of the cold - and yet freezing weather kills more than diabetes or
breast cancer. The cause of death is perhaps too familiar, and the
remedy too obvious, to attract much attention. If the money for winter
fuel payments was instead used to help insulate homes, we might - like
Norway - be able to joke about winter. As things stand, dying of the
cold remains a horribly British disease. -
The Telegraph.
