Senior meteorologist on extended USA cold blast to last past Groundhog day: 'WOW F..ing WOW'

Brrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So Al Gore is in Washington for the next two weeks?
Perhaps AL can make even more money by being paid not to visit.

This is exactly the January weather that David Archibald postulated for _next_ year, here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/05/further-to-a-1740-type-event/ and here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/18/two-years-to-a-1740-type-event/
David had his charts lining up for the cold weather in 2015. But it seems we have quite the massive cold spell in 2014. It will be fascinating (and scary) to see if the rest of this year matches the curve, whether this is just a precursor to an even more damaging 2015 freeze, or whether the pattern diverges from here.

re: arthur4563 says: January 21, 2014 at 1:14 pm

US soldiers returning from the Great War didn’t have a 4 year experience, and soldiers in the trenches were healthier than just about anyone else alive at that time. They were hardly physically “weakened” by the war. more likely just the opposite.

Arthur, I don’t have a clue where you got that information from, but conditions in the trenches were notoriously horrendous. Large numbers of men died from tuberculosis and other diseases. Influenza was also a huge problem that war conditions and travel definitely helped spread..
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918

In the fall of 1918 the Great War in Europe was winding down and peace was on the horizon. The Americans had joined in the fight, bringing the Allies closer to victory against the Germans. Deep within the trenches these men lived through some of the most brutal conditions of life, which it seemed could not be any worse. Then, in pockets across the globe, something erupted that seemed as benign as the common cold. The influenza of that season, however, was far more than a cold. In the two years that this scourge ravaged the earth, a fifth of the world’s population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40. This pattern of morbidity was unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy (Deseret News). An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby). 1918 would go down as unforgettable year of suffering and death and yet of peace. As noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association final edition of 1918:
“The 1918 has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked, the end at least for a time, of man’s destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all–infectious disease,” (12/28/1918)….
…The Great War, with its mass movements of men in armies and aboard ships, probably aided in its rapid diffusion and attack. The origins of the deadly flu disease were unknown but widely speculated upon. Some of the allies thought of the epidemic as a biological warfare tool of the Germans. Many thought it was a result of the trench warfare, the use of mustard gases and the generated “smoke and fumes” of the war….
…. The origins of this influenza variant is not precisely known. It is thought to have originated in China in a rare genetic shift of the influenza virus. The recombination of its surface proteins created a virus novel to almost everyone and a loss of herd immunity. Recently the virus has been reconstructed from the tissue of a dead soldier and is now being genetically characterized. The name of Spanish Flu came from the early affliction and large mortalities in Spain (BMJ,10/19/1918) where it allegedly killed 8 million in May (BMJ, 7/13/1918). However, a first wave of influenza appeared early in the spring of 1918 in Kansas and in military camps throughout the US. Few noticed the epidemic in the midst of the war. Wilson had just given his 14 point address. There was virtually no response or acknowledgment to the epidemics in March and April in the military camps. It was unfortunate that no steps were taken to prepare for the usual recrudescence of the virulent influenza strain in the winter. The lack of action was later criticized when the epidemic could not be ignored in the winter of 1918 (BMJ, 1918). These first epidemics at training camps were a sign of what was coming in greater magnitude in the fall and winter of 1918 to the entire world.
The war brought the virus back into the US for the second wave of the epidemic. It first arrived in Boston in September of 1918 through the port busy with war shipments of machinery and supplies. The war also enabled the virus to spread and diffuse. Men across the nation were mobilizing to join the military and the cause. As they came together, they brought the virus with them and to those they contacted. The virus killed almost 200,00 in October of 1918 alone. In November 11 of 1918 the end of the war enabled a resurgence. As people celebrated Armistice Day with parades and large partiess, a complete disaster from the public health standpoint, a rebirth of the epidemic occurred in some cities. The flu that winter was beyond imagination as millions were infected and thousands died. Just as the war had effected the course of influenza, influenza affected the war. Entire fleets were ill with the disease and men on the front were too sick to fight. The flu was devastating to both sides, killing more men than their own weapons could….

I note the Yahoo story says we are “frying eggs on shovels” in Australia. It neglects to mention that temperatures in much of the northern part of Oz have been considerably lower than average during most of January. While Adelaide had maxes in the mid 40s (celsius), Alice Springs was basking in low thirties. Of course not as many people live in the north, so southern warmists overlook the effect of its temperatures on the national average.

Several people have been critical of the linking of the disastrous “Spanish Flu” outbreak in 1918, with the weather, arguing that there was no connection between the two. However, there may be a connection if the theory of the great British cosmologist, Fred Hoyle, and his Indian colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe, is correct. They claimed that the flu viruses originate in outer space and they mention the spread of the 1918-19 pandemic as evidence.
Influenza from Space?
http://www.panspermia.org/panfluenza.htm
The lethal wave of influenza in 1918-19… was first detected on the same day in Boston and Bombay. Yet in spreading within the United States it took three weeks to go from Boston to New York. — Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe (1)
One of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s more controversial claims is that influenza outbreaks are often caused by newly arriving viruses from space. Among several lines of evidence, they noticed that the worst flu epidemics coincide with peaks in the eleven-year cycle of sunspot activity. When an unusually vigorous flu epidemic again matched the pattern in January, 2000, they renewed the story in Current Science, a weekly journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences. …

I remember about a two week period of heavy snow and brutal cold in Pittsburgh sometime in Jan or early Feb 1977. I have never seen anything like that since then, although Jan 1996 saw so much snow they closed the interstates in eastern PA and NJ for three days.

Roy says:
January 22, 2014 at 1:59 am
Several people have been critical of the linking of the disastrous “Spanish Flu” outbreak in 1918, with the weather, arguing that there was no connection between the two. However, there may be a connection if the theory of the great British cosmologist, Fred Hoyle, and his Indian colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe, is correct. They claimed that the flu viruses originate in outer space and they mention the spread of the 1918-19 pandemic as evidence.
You forgot to include in your post an explanation of how in the near absolute zero of space a virus would evolve (or be created?) with exactly the membrane configuration RNA sequence for transmembrane infection of human cells, reverse transcriptase another enzymes to work with the human genome to achieve replication of both the viruses RNA and nuclear sheath, developed a strategy for evasion of the human immune system and had just the right characteristics for airborne transmission.
I don’t subscribe to any of the life-from-space theories, in Holye’s case such ideas came I think more from religion (pantheism) than science.

Here in the south, we all learn very quickly that cold air from the north and warm moist air from the gulf, along with a strong jet stream, causes bad weather. The weather pattern we are in is similar to what we saw in the 70’s…..Extremely cold weather in the east and drought conditions in the west. Are we in store for a spring that resembles the ’74 outbreak of tornadoes? 2011 was terrible. Also, you know as well as I do that if this happens, all the AGW folks will be screaming “See…..We told you so”!

Those of you in the USA who are freezing cold at the moment must realize that you “just happen to be in the wrong place – at the wrong time -. Just like The Famous Few Antarctic ‘Frozen In’ Scientist said when they arrived in NZ. (UK BBC news report this morning)
Oh, by the way no-one living in Europe know that it is freezing cold all over the USA at the moment. – Maybe that is because, right now, it is very – unseasonably – warm in most parts of the EU. No White 2013 Christmas for the southern half of Norway (60 deg. N). – That’s a first in my lifetime (start 1940).
Maybe the MSM don’t think it is worth rocking the boat/cradle while the going is good. After all; most of the “the little darlings/people” (or sheeple) to whom they have been telling ‘good night stories’ are still in a deep sleep.