Time:
02:39More in
People & Blogs

The new version of the game, developed by Maxis in conjunction with the organization Games for Change, will force players to reckon with the consequences of their energy choices. If you put coal-fired power plants in your city, for example, you may see a rise in pollution and a decline in public health. You also may have negative impacts on nearby cities being run by your gaming friends. The new version is due out next year.

Concept art showing the headquarters of “Coal Enterprises,” from the upcoming version of SimCity. Credit: Maxis.

“In ‘SimCity’ resources are finite, you struggle with decisions people are struggling with today in the real world and your decisions can have a global impact,” said Maxis studio senior vice president Lucy Bradshaw at a recent conference in San Francisco.

The game, which was last updated about a decade ago, will also undergo a major facelift, including the addition of slick 3-D graphics.

The multiplayer features of the new game will enable gamers to act as local, regional and global leaders. “Want to be a bad neighbor? Produce mass pollution and watch your friends’ Sims become sick,” the SimCity official website states. The site notes that gamers can “participate in global challenges like lowering the total pollution output in the SimCity world to unlock a trophy to place in your city.”

Here’s the video trailer for the new game:

Following are a few photographs shared by netizens:

A few inches is all it takes, photo by Mohammad Magayda

Away from everyone, photo by Ehab Othman

LumaQ tweeted:

Lots of snow in Dabouk and Khalda area it’s like another country

And Reem Al-Masri turns her snowman on his head:

More fun snow creations can be found on this post while BeAmman crowd sourced these photos of a snowed in Amman.
And check out Reem Manna’s photo set on 7iber.

Written by Nadine Toukan

With below average snowfall across much of the U.S. this winter, it’s tough to find good skiing conditions. But who says there has to be fresh powder in the mountains in order to ski? This video, shot last year in British Columbia, proves that it’s possible to ski in an urban area — even on pavement (although that can’t be good for your skis). The skier in this video risks life and limb as he heads down flights of stairs, up and over dirty snowbanks, and performs risky aerial maneuvers. Making the video especially awesome is the soundtrack, by the now defunct LCD Soundsystem.

Image extracted from video.

Time:
01:16More in
News & Politics

Time:
01:03More in
Music

We experienced rare technical problems on the server side, which has since been resolved.  This is our first down time in our 4 years of existence.

We sincerely hope this did not cause you too much inconvenience.

Jacques Hallé,

editor, World Weather Post

Click here to share this image on Facebook

Americans from all walks of life who want to fight climate change and build a clean energy future have sent a clear message: the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is not in the national interest. Working with a large coalition of partners, our goal was to send a half million messages opposing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to the Senate in just 24 hours. The messages opposed a Senate effort to overrule the President’s denial of the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. An unprecedented coming together of people from across the country eclipsed that goal before the challenge was half over. Over the last 24 hours the air was filled with tweets, facebook posts, blogs, and emails asking people to make their opinion known and how they responded! With counts still coming in, we are already at almost 800,000 messages sent.  It’s time for lawmakers to start heeding people across the country who are saying no to this Big Oil project and other dirty energy projects. Lawmakers and the oil industry should consider this an anti-Valentine message for tar sands. We don’t love it and we don’t need it. Americans know that we can do better for our climate, water and farmlands than expansion of destructive and expensive Canadian tar sands.

Once again, we see how much people value their clean air and water. We see that people are worried about what a changing climate in the form of violent storms, floods and droughts means for their homes and pocketbooks today and for their children tomorrow. We see that Americans know that we have the ability to do better than going after ever dirtier and more expensive forms of fuel such as high carbon tar sands that are strip-mined and drilled from under Canada’s Boreal forests and wetlands. And we see that Americans know that we should not bear the risk of a tar sands pipeline that is more likely to leak and more difficult to clean up than regular oil. Once the public learns about the risks of tar sands – they say no to that energy source and its pipeline. Americans are enthusiastic about clean energy and using American innovation and ingenuity to get there. There is no love for dirty energy solutions such as tar sands.

In their latest shenanigan, a number of Republicans in the Senate have proposed an amendment to the transportation bill to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Congress approving a single pipeline project? What happened to our normal environmental review and permitting process, you might ask. The sad tale of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is that the review process was underway and expected to be completed in early 2013. Many Republicans in Congress didn’t want to wait and so they attached a requirement to make a decision on the tar sands pipeline to the end of year payroll tax relief legislation. With only 60 days to make a decision, President Obama denied the permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in January. That should have been the end of the story. But a number of Republicans in Congress are now coming back and trying to have Congress itself approve this project that is already dead. A pipeline approval provision passed in the Republican House and just this week a number of Republican Senators have introduced an approval provision to the completely unrelated transportation bill.

The transportation bill should not be weighed down by controversial and unrelated provisions such as an attempt to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. And this assault on fair process and on health and environmental safeguards has sparked an outcry from across America. I have been so inspired to see the outpouring of enthusiasm from all walks of life in just the last 24 hours, saying yes to clean energy and no to dirty tar sands. And I hope that our Senators listen – the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is not where the love is.

See Bill McKibben on the Colbert Report about the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and the effort to get a half million messages to the Senate in 24 hours: http://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/bill-mckibben-talks-keystone-xl-colbert-report-video.html

Russian scientists have penetrated miles of Antarctic ice as others race to analyze its waters for alien-like life, according to the news agency Reuters.

An artist’s cross-section of Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica. The depth of the drill core has increased since the diagram was created. Credit: Nicolle Rager-Fuller, NSF

Valery Lukin is head of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute that oversaw the scientific drilling in the sub-glacial lake of Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. He said:

It’s like the first flight to the moon

After 30 years, Russian scientists finally announced on February 8, 2012, that they had penetrated 3769.3 meters of glacial ice to reach the waters of Lake Vostok, which hasn’t seen the light of day in over 15 million years.

Russian researchers at the Vostok station work in a snow bore pit. (Russian Geographical Society)

Oceanographer Chuck Kennicutt of Texas A&M heads the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, which coordinates research in the area. Kennicutt told EarthSky:

This is truly a breakthrough event. Our Russian colleagues should be congratulated on an outstanding feat of accomplishment, technologically. This has been a long time in the planning. There’s been great interest for more than a decade, that these are very unusual environments that we know little about, primarily because they’ve never been penetrated.

So this first entry, in and of itself will only be the beginning of providing information about what might be living in the lakes, how have these lakes evolved over time, do these lakes impact the overlying ice sheets, are ice streams associated with accumulations of water, and just a whole range of scientific knowledge will ultimately come from the exploration of these environments.

Russian Vostok station and 5G drill tower. (Russian Geographical Society)

Russian scientists call Lake Vostok “the pole of cold,” with average surface temperatures a chilly -56 degrees Celcius (-68.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Scientists worldwide suspect that microbes might be living in the sub-glacial waters of Lake Vostok. The extreme conditions there are similar to what life on other worlds might face. Dr. Kennicutt explained the search for alien-like life at Lake Vostok:

Fundamental to the existence of life as far as we know it is the existence of liquid water. That has always been the touchstone for looking for where life might exist beyond planet Earth. This is particularly true in our own solar system such as the discovery of icy moons like Europa, that we’re convinced now from studies does have liquid water beneath a thick ice sheet; and also the moon of Saturn, Enceladus. We do know that there are places in our solar system that have thick ice sheets over what appears to be liquid water. And that’s the analogy that’s often given.

These lakes in Antarctica are similar, though there are much more severe conditions once you get off of planet Earth. There is at least the analogy that these are locations that organisms could possibly have colonized that are beneath large ice sheets in liquid water. That’s the connection that people make in trying to understand where is the most likely place to look for life beyond Earth.

Jupiter’s moon Europa, which scientists also suspect might harbor life beneath miles of ice.

Bottom line: Russian scientists penetrated miles of Antarctic ice to reach Lake Vostok, and scientists worldwide are racing to analyze samples for possible alien-like life.

Racing against time to strike liquid water in frozen, ancient Lake Vostok

EarthSky 22: Penetrating Lake Vostok

Rick Santorum has been talking about the “politicization of science” a lot lately—although (a pet peeve of mine) he seems to have a problem with pronouncing the phrase. He says “polititization.” Check it out here.

Not as bad as the people who say “political-ization,” but don’t get me started.

Anyway, this is part of a broader narrative Santorum has woven, one in which the left wants to misuse science in order to exert control over you and quash your freedoms. This is particularly apparent in Santorum’s recent CPAC speech, where he once again hints at a climate conspiracy theory: Global warming was made up to help leftists take control of the global economy.

In another recent speech in Oklahoma, meanwhile, Santorum said similar things but made a point of asserting that Republicans are not the ones politicizing science. “You hear all the time, the left: ‘The conservatives are the anti-science party,’” Santorum said. “No. No we’re not. We’re the truth party.”

Well, actually, the data clearly show that Republicans distrust the scientific community more than Democrats do, at least on environmental issues. They really are more “anti-science,” at least when the term is defined in this manner—based on trust in the scientific community.

Nevertheless, I understand what Santorum means.

He means that he and his fellow Republicans don’t feel any deep aversion towards scientific inquiry in general, and don’t think of themselves as anti-science—they’re just calling out bad science in one particular area. And I fully acknowledge that this is what they think they are doing.

However, Santorum’s own manner of speaking about the climate issue—in a black and white way, where the leftists (bad guys) have made up phony science to dupe average Americans (good guys)—gives away the game. So incidentally, does his very confident use of the word “truth.”

Global warming is nothing if not a complicated issue—one with scientific aspects to it (across multiple disciplines) but also economic aspects, policy aspects, geopolitical aspects, ethical aspects, and so on. For all of these reasons, it cannot possibly be understood without some sense of nuance, and some appreciation of scientific (and economic) uncertainty.

This uncertainty, properly understood, does not make us less worried about global warming. Rather, it makes us more worried—we don’t know how bad it is going to be, but we know it could be very, very bad.

Appropriately, the scientists who study the climate are trained—and often, temperamentally disposed—to see the world in gray, rather than black and white. That’s what makes them good at catching mistakes and incorrect interpretations—they’re not too sure of themselves. In the scientific community, nobody proclaims to have suddenly discovered “the truth”; rather, knowledge proceeds incrementally, and everything has error bars around it.

So the idea that Santorum can look at a complex topic like this, proclaim that he knows the “truth” about it, and on top of that also proclaim that all the scientists who study the climate are not only flat-out wrong, but actually involved in hoaxing or duping us…well.

If Santorum were really so interested in truth, we can be confident he would not be so sure of himself—especially not in holding such a far-fetched belief.

“Truth party,” then, isn’t very accurate. Truth, in science, is only approach incrementally, and uncertainty can never be fully dispelled.

No, it would be better to call Republicans (especially the Republicans to whom Santorum appeals) the “certainty party”—certain that they’re right, and environmentalists/liberals are wrong. Certain, even, that their political enemies would make up the science if they had to, in order to grasp for more power.

Hence Santorum’s repeated recourse to the climate conspiracy theory.

Now, in fairness, certainty works in politics. It gives people confidence in strong leaders. It imparts an aura of decisiveness and control.

But it is also extremely dangerous—and never more so than when you’re wrong.

On the night between February 10 and 11, an airplane of the Czech airline CSA first circled for 40 minutes trying to get the dysfunctional flaps to work, and then performed an emergency landing. The pilot managed to stop the plane at the end of the recently extended runway.

Among the passengers were the British Member of the European Parliament Richard Howitt, and the Macedonian Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Popovski. Within the EP Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Howitt serves as the Rapporteur on Macedonia – and he is also an avid Twitterer. He tweeted immediately after the incident:

All now fine but just had emergency landing at Skopje on aircraft whose flaps failed. Told take brace position. Thought could be the end.

Richard Howitt MEP tweeted immediately after touching ground.

…and added some more details:

Emergency landing. Snow on runway. Fire engines lined up. Stewardess said: “pray, pray, pray.” #Czech Airline staff heroes. All OK now.

A report by MIA (a Macedonian state news agency) provided more details:

As the plane was landing, smoke appeared from the tires and the captain managed to stop the aircraft right at the end of the runway.

Howitt later commented:

…I didn’t know at time about smoke. Told Foreign Minister: give pilot medal for stopping plane

Quite a few people re-tweeted Howitt’s info and wrote to express support and relief. Mallen Baker wrote:

Glad it ended well – nightmare situation that anyone flying would prefer to avoid! Great that everyone safe

Extension of the runway was a part of the deal with the Turkish company TAV, which renovated and manages the airports in Macedonia through a 20-year lease contract.

While the cited flaps malfunction might have nothing to do with the weather, the ongoing Balkan snow storm does affect the air traffic in the region. A few days ago, the Macedonian Army helicopters that were supposed to carry supplies to the cut-off mountain villages could not take off [mk] due to continuous snowfall.

Written by Filip Stojanovski

Countries all over the world are singing praises of what seems to be a record winter with less snow and warmer temperatures. But the milder season isn’t helping Winnipeg, Manitoba. With less snow than usual, the city had to buy 200 loads of snow to accommodate their annual Festival du Voyageur, an event centered around snow sports and ice sculptures.

The artificially-made snow is coming courtesy of a nearby winter recreation area, which is similar to snow made by machine for ski hills.

More details can be found at Reuters.com

First up is J.J. Abrams’ Revolution, which was just picked up by NBC. Described as a new “high octane action drama . . . following a group of characters struggling to survive and reunite with loved ones in a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously ceased to exist.” I was happy to see that Lost’s Bryan Burk will be writing the script alongside Abrams.

An early logline for Revolution describes it like this, “In this epic adventure thriller, a family struggles to reunite in a post-apocalyptic American landscape: a world of empty cities, local militias and heroic freedom fighters, where every single piece of technology – computers, planes, cars, phones, even lights – has mysteriously blacked out . . . forever.” Hmm. Sounds a little like Lost meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I’m in.

The other project is Snow Piercer, an indie science-fiction flick set to star Tilda Swinton (Alyssa, you’re right, Swinton is from the future and The Help’s Octavia Spencer. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Snow Piercer, is set in “a future where, after a failed experiment to stop global warming, an Ice Age kills off all life on the planet except for the inhabitants of the Snow Piercer, a train that travels around the globe and is powered by a sacred perpetual-motion engine. A class system evolves on the train but a revolution brews.”

Interesting that this is another “global warming ends in an Ice Age” movie – the previous one being The Day After Tomorrow released in 2004. I guess, psychologically, Ice Ages must resonate as more unpleasant to the reptilian part of our brain. Oh, and as for that “sacred” perpetual-motion machine, we already have them today – they’re called the sun and the wind.

On a related note, for anyone watching Luck on HBO, it’s also reported that David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood) has been tapped to write the screenplay for Heavy Rain. Based on a video game, Heavy Rain centers around the hunt for a murderer known as the Origami Killer, who drowns his victims on exceptionally rainy days and leaves behind folded paper calling cards. Four characters over four days track down leads in a desperate attempt to prevent the killer from claiming a new victim and each character’s decisions affect the plans of the other three (the scientific term for this is a “feedback loop”).

I can’t help but secretly hold out hope that Milch, who writes in a Shakespearean style and talks openly of his interest in telling stories about redemption and cooperation – might decide to bring in a little climate science. The global warming/extreme rainfall connection (and check out this great video that explains why climate change is like steroids for the atmosphere) is solid and it fits nicely with the theme of feedbacks.

Of course, movies with science themes can be tough to tell. Back in a 1999 essay in the journal Science, Michael Crichton cautioned scientists that “showing the scientific method presents genuine problems in film storytelling. The problems are insoluble. The best you will ever get is a kind of caricature of the scientific process.”

I’d like to think that our best storytellers, like Milch and Abrams, are able to show complexity without falling back on caricature. After all, at the heart of scientific discovery sits fundamental questions about how we might live together on this increasingly crowded planet without destroying it in the process.

In any event, I hope the folks working on these projects will connect with scientists via groups like The Science & Entertainment Exchange – a program of the National Academy of Sciences that “connects entertainment industry professionals with top scientists and engineers to create a synergy between accurate science and engaging storylines in both film and TV programming.”

Here’s to seeing some science (fiction) on the big screen . . . and the little one, too!

Men shoveling snow from a street in Sarajevo. Record snowfall has paralyzed transportation in the Bosnian capital, where a state of emergency has now been declared. Photo by Sulejman Omerbasic, copyright © Demotix (5/02/12).

Serbia’s national television network, RTS, and other media reported on Friday that a state of emergency has been declared by the government, while citizens have been reporting critical situations throughout the country and that municipal services have been doing a poor job of tackling the snowfall in many urban areas.

In an article titled “Serbia Blocked by Snow, State of Emergency in 27 Municipalities, Recommendation to Call Off School Attendance” [sr], the Head of the State of Emergency Sector of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Predrag Maric, is reported to have stated on Friday:

27 municipalities in Serbia have declared a state of emergency due to heavy snowfall. Maric has told Beta news agency that the most difficult situations are in Sjenica, Ivanjica, Prijepolje, Crna Trava and Surdulica, where the height of snow has reached approximately 2 meters. According to him, power supply is “relatively good,” outages are being fixed quickly and there have been no long power outages.

Maric also announced the possibility of declaring a full state of emergency nationwide, which the Government did on Sunday evening, cancelling school throughout Serbia at least until Friday, February 10, among other things.

Several actions have been organized by the online community in Serbia and the region to fend off the snow and to attempt to regain a functional state in urban areas at least, such as a #lopataup (”#shovelup”), organized by one online community leader, Zoran Torbica, and other local Twitter users.

In the meantime, Al Jazeera Balkans, the recently established regional office of Al Jazeera news network in the region, has joined forces with the team from Ushahidi to set up a platform for tracking verified information on everything from road blocks, power outages to other critical points and information in the entire region. Ushahidi is an open-source platform for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping, which was also used in Serbia just after the earthquake in Kraljevo in November 2010 to map and track damage in the area.

Haris Alisic, who heads the New Media team for Al Jazeera Balkans, launched the platform on Sunday evening, and many members of the online community, including some of the region’s GV authors, have joined the Al Jazeera-Ushahidi team in curating, tracking and verifying reports from the region.

The adapted Ushahidi platform can be located on Al Jazeera’s official site, while reports can be sent in by anyone using the following channels:

- via SMS to +387644218661
- via Twitter by using the hashtags #kolaps #sneg #snijeg #lopataup #iskljucenje
- via email to oluja2012@aljazeera.net
- or by entering information directly into the form on the”pošaljite izvještaj” tab on the Al Jazeera page

If you would like to volunteer your time to help map critical areas and are familiar with using online tools, please contact the author of this article, or Haris Alisic via Twitter, or leave a comment here on Global Voices, and we will contact you for more information on what you can do to help. We also ask that you all begin reporting from your area on Twitter and using the above-mentioned hashtags on Twitter, which are automatically collected by the platform and then reviewed and verified by Al Jazeera and volunteers.

Bosnian men are trying to push a car away from the deep snow. Photo by Sulejman Omerbasic, copyright © Demotix (5/02/12).

Written by Danica Radisic

Wait, you thought we were going to talk about Sunday night’s football game? That small clash between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 46, watched by more than 100 million fans in the U.S.?

Well, we are. Sort of. Because Sunday’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis capped this snowless winter’s coming-out party. Thanks to the winter that wasn’t, Indy was a big hit. Temperatures in the city averaged approximately 25 degrees higher than normal this week. Mild, snowless winters like this one may be more common as the world continues to warm, as will extreme variations in weather patterns. Much of Europe has been enduring that kind of variation as severe cold and snow has killed hundreds across the continent the past few days.

When Indianapolis was awarded the Super Bowl several years ago, the groans from the football congnoscenti were audible. Indianapolis? A hick town in the Midwest? Do they have any other restaurants other than St. Elmo’s? And did anyone tell them the Super Bowl is in February?! The logo should have been a set of snowblowers.

Some of the whining came from the party crowd that would rather have every Super Bowl in Miami or New Orleans, but almost everyone prefers sunshine and beaches to ice scrapers and rock salt. The game wouldn’t be affected because the Colts had the good sense to build a dome over Lucas Oil Stadium, but the city’s week-long party leading up to it is always colored by the weather.

But once the moaning stopped and people arrived in Indy this past week, they were treated to mild temperatures that were pushing 60 degrees. All the gloom and doom about ice and snow, about how it would snarl traffic and keep people from flocking downtown to celebrate the event? That happened last year, when the Super Bowl was in Dallas.

So the locals in Indy celebrated the unseasonably balmy weather by throwing a great party, with hundreds of thousands flocking downtown to see a city transformed by the NFL’s big show. There was even a temporary zip line over downtown that people slid down without gathering icicles. The national media gushed over the atmosphere.

Locals in Indy celebrated the unseasonably balmy weather by throwing a great party, with hundreds of thousands flocking downtown to see a city transformed by the NFL’s big show. Credit: Carl Van Rooy/flickr.

“It’s at the top of the list. It’s one of the best Super Bowls I have ever covered,” said Rick Gosselin, a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. “Indianapolis got a break because of the weather. This has not been a cold winter. I have always thought this is a great big event town.”

This year, the first dip in the weather came the day before the big game, when it rained.

Colts owner Jim Irsay joked that it was all part of the plan. “I know the way we’re preparing and the way we’ve controlled the weather, which is hard to do. But we’ve had certain techniques that we’re going to keep hidden,” he said.

And what’s the next cold-weather, turned warm-weather venue seeking Super Bowl stardom? Two years from now when it comes to the greater New York area. It gets a big opportunity to show off then because not only is some of the fun outdoors, but so is the game.

Oh yeah. One more thing. The final score was New York 21, New England 17.

Additional Online Resources:

Super Bowl Revelers Flock Downtown — The Indy Channel

Reaction: What Super Bowl 2012 journalists are saying about Indy — IndyStar.com

Super Bowl week begins in Indianapolis; ice and snow no-shows — Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Responding to public demand, NASA scientists created a companion image to the wildly popular ‘Blue Marble’ released last week. The new image is a composite of six separate orbits taken on January 23 by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite. Both of these new ‘Blue Marble’ images are images taken by a new instrument flying aboard Suomi NPP, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).

Compiled by NASA Goddard scientist Norman Kuring, this image has the perspective of a viewer looking down from 7,918 miles (about 12,742 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface. The four vertical lines of ‘haze’ visible in this image shows the reflection of sunlight off the ocean, or ‘glint,’ that VIIRS captured as it orbited the globe. Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense.                                Credit: NASA/NOAA

On this date back way back in 1745, a man named John Jeffries was born in Boston.  He later became a physician, serving as a surgeon with the British Army in Nova Scotia and New York during the American Revolution.

Not only was Jeffries a skilled physician and surgeon, but he also had a “thing” for the weather.  He loved to take and record weather observations wherever he was stationed.  In 1784, he flew the first known “weather balloon” to a height of 9,000 feet over London, taking readings on a thermometer, barometer and a hygrometer (a device used to measure humidity).

So, National Weather Person’s Day was created to commemorate Jeffries’ birthday and celebrate his feats as one of the world’s first weather observers.

We’ve certainly come a long way in weather science since Jeffries’ trip over London in the 1780s!

Weather balloons are now launched at least twice per day at over 800 locations all around the world.  The data is then fed into giant supercomputers that perform millions (or even billions) of calculations per second and spit out detailed forecast models of what the weather is likely to do anywhere from one hour to 360 hours in the future.  It is up to your local weather person to interpret that data and develop an accurate forecast so that you can plan your day, your birthday party, outdoor wedding, etc.

We now have sophisticated weather radars powerful enough to detect a flock of birds on a clear day and the rotating winds of a supercell thunderstorm about to spawn a tornado on a stormy day.  Severe weather warnings issued by your local weather person (or persons) are saving lives, giving some 20+ minutes advanced warning in many cases.

So, if you’re in the neighborhood of Amherst College today, be sure to stop by the Archives Section of the library and sign the guest book for the John Jeffries collection.

On the other hand, I guess you could take the easy way out and just shoot an e-mail or send a tweet to your favorite local weather person and thank him or her for their service today.  They get lots of negative press when things don’t go quite as expected (although that doesn’t happen as often now as it did even 10 or 15 years ago), so I’m sure they’d appreciate some positive feedback on this special day that they share with John Jeffries…

Oh, and to my dear wife:  how about waffles instead of pancakes next time?

If you enjoy reading ‘The Original Weather Blog’, please be sure to “like” our facebook page!

Photographer: Bill Metallinos; Bill’s Web site
Summary Author: Bill Metallinos; Jim Foster

The photo above showing a startling fireball appearing to rip apart the night sky was seen during a star observation session at Mount Pantokrator on the Greek island of Corfu. I had set my camera up to get a picture of our small group and before long this brilliant meteor lit up the surrounding landscape. It was approximately -8 magnitude or about 25 times brighter than Venus at its brightest — so bright that we were bathed in a sea of blue-green light. You can see the reflection on my 16 in (41 cm) telescope, on the table at right-center and on the side of my car. Click here to see a short animation.

Photo details: Canon EOS 40D camera; 15mm fisheye lens; f/2.8; ISO 800; 30 second exposure; Photoshop; Cropped.

• Corfu, Greece Coordinates: 39.622317, 19.929843
• Related Links
  • Fireball Breakup
  • Jack Fusco’s Quadrantid Meteor
  • John Chumack’s Quadrantid Meteors
  • Fireball FAQs
  • USGS: Introduction to Bolides
  • Absolute Magnitude of Asteroids
• Earth Observatory
  • Looking Down on a Shooting Star

1)     She has little patience for people who are wasteful (This applies to many things; leftover food, lights left on etc.)

2)     And more importantly: What Gramma says, goes. (If you forget this rule, you might get a friendly ‘reminder’ pinch.)

Now don’t get me wrong – my Gramma is a caring, loving, kind person (the best Gramma, I would argue) but she certainly is firm.

My actual Gramma, Marie.  (The best, right?)

So when I saw the WWF National Sweater Day reminder video from Granny Ruth, I was immediately reminded of my Gramma. She and Ruth would probably get along quite well if they ever met.

VIDEO: National Sweater Day: Ruth

And I’m sure they’d agree that on February 9 -National Sweater Day – granddaughters and grandsons nationwide should turn down their thermostats a degree or two and put on a sweater (bonus points if it’s a Gramma-knitted original). Heck, why not leave the thermostat down all the time?

If not only to look fashionable in your sweaters, do it to save some money and help conserve energy.

Helpful Hints:

• -You can easily save energy in the winter by setting the thermostat to 68°F while you’re awake and setting it lower while you’re asleep or away from home. By turning your thermostat back 10°–15° for 8 hours, you can save about 5%–15% a year on your heating bill—a savings of as much as 1% for each degree if the setback period is eight hours long.

• -Open the drapes or blinds on sunny days and bask in the ‘free’ heat. Remember to close the drapes or blinds when the sun sets, to hold in the warmth.

Happy National Sweater Day, however you will be celebrating!

It is the one-year anniversary of the Groundhog Day Blizzard in Chicago.

The storm brought the area from central Oklahoma to the lower Great Lakes and central New England between 1 and 2 feet of snow spanning Jan. 31 to Feb. 2, 2011, affecting over 100 million people along its path.

To see photos of the blizzard in Chicago, click here.

The area from northeastern Missouri to northeastern Illinois was hit the hardest.

Wind gusts to 60 mph in the Chicagoland area brought travel to a standstill with haunting images of stranded vehicles in waist-deep snowdrifts along the Lake Michigan shoreline. The storm resulted in power outages, school closings and halted mail service for a time.

Chicago was buried under 20.2 inches of snow from the storm.

Hundreds of cars were stranded on Lake Shore Drive Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011, in Chicago. A winter blizzard of historic proportions wobbled an otherwise snow-tough Chicago, stranding hundreds of drivers for up to 12 hours overnight on the city’s showcase lakeshore thoroughfare and giving many city schoolchildren their first ever snow day. A year later, temperatures are in the mid-50s and flirting with record highs for this date. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)

This AccuWeather.com Facebook fan photo was taken by Jan in Claremore, Okla., on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011, before snow headed toward Chicago and Detroit.

More Photos of the Chicago Blizzard

Submit Your Photos to the AccuWeather.com Facebook page

Content contributed by AccuWeather.com Expert Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.

COMMENTARY
By Geoff Grant
Here’s a Monday morning conversation starter for the casual sports fan: did global warming cause Sidney Crosby’s concussion?

No, the National Hockey League’s biggest star did not sustain a head injury by slipping and falling on receding polar ice. But he is the victim of the same kind of resistance to science that has made climate change such an accelerating and intractable problem.

In hockey and other contact sports, doctors have been warning for years about the dangers of concussions, as more and more research shows how dangerous they are, how remarkably easy they are sustained, how much damage they can do to players’ brains over the course of their lives. But the NHL has done almost nothing until recently to begin preventing them. And even in taking the tiny steps that they have – short suspensions for players delivering blatant, intentional hits to the head from the blind side of an unsuspecting opponent – they do not accept the considerable body of science that says so many of these players will experience unnatural cognitive decline as they age.

Crosby — and if you’re not a hockey fan, think Albert Einstein on skates — has been sidelined for much of the past year, including sitting out Sunday’s All-Star Game in Ottawa. Despite missing it’s most marketable star for an agonizingly long stretch, the league has been slow to try to reduce the risk of brain trauma for its players. Alarmed experts and many fans have called for the elimination of all hits to the head, rules common in international hockey, but they have been met with stubborn official resistance. The NHL’s, ahem, brain trust does not believe the game needs fundamental change.

Worse, evidence has emerged that another of the NHL’s traditions — fighting — has taken a heavy toll on its practitioners’ brains. Three notable enforcers died in the summer of 2011, all under circumstances that could be linked to the head trauma that was a part of their jobs. As the New York Times’ John Branch detailed in a comprehensive three-part series, one of the league’s most fearsome fighters, Derek Boogaard, had his brain examined by researchers at Boston University after he died of a drug overdose. He was found to have advanced CTE, a disease closely related to Alzheimer’s and believed to be caused by repeated head trauma. Unfortunately, it is not something that can be diagnosed until after death. Boogard was the fourth hockey player examined by the BU researchers and at 29, by far the youngest. All four had CTE. The center has been studying football players as well, 19 in all, and 18 had CTE.

The NHL’s response to its bleak summer news was more denial. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman called the research “preliminary” and defended fighting on the grounds that fans like it. To Bettman, and the team owners for whom he works, fans’ entertainment is higher on the league’s priority list than the health of its players’ brains. They don’t want to change the game and risk affecting its popularity and thus, their bottom line.

The parallels to the battleground that is climate change are startling from front to back. There is the science that people feel free to discount, even as evidence mounts pointing inexorably in one direction. There is the economic resistance to change, an unwillingness to consider a new business model. There is the inability to grasp consequences far down the road, even as cues emerge that the consequences are coming sooner than expected.

That resistance is all too familiar to climate change. Although climate science has evolved to the point where scientists are virtually certain that humans are causing the warming of the planet and there is every reason to believe that at least some potentially cataclysmic effects will result from climate change, public policy has changed little. It’s been 14 years since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, and the only thing different today is that greenhouse gas emissions have increased to even more alarming levels.

Even among politicians and business leaders who do grasp and appreciate the risks, there has been little momentum summoned for the real changes needed to keep climate change from becoming catastrophic. There appears to be a mysterious tipping point we have not yet reached when the dangers are alarming enough for society to loosen its allegiance to the atmosphere-choking status quo.

With climate, as with hockey, people seem to be waiting for the definitive A-leads-to-B line to be drawn for them. But just as it’s impossible to link one hurricane in Florida to climate change, doctors cannot say with absolute certainty that any one hit, or even any one concussion, leads to long-term brain damage and functional decline. In climatology as in medicine, science is rarely an open-and-shut case. Certainties reside in mathematics, not science. And waiting for scientific certainty when lives are on the line almost always has a very high cost.

As Ken Dryden, a Hall of Fame NHL goaltender and former member of the Parliament of Canada wrote on Grantland.com, by waiting for absolute proof . . . ,

“thousands of asbestos workers and millions of smokers died. The fact is, as a society we rarely have the luxury of waiting for science on big, difficult, potentially dangerous questions to meet its standard of proof. We need to take the best science we have, generate more and better information, then apply to it our best intuition and common sense — and decide.

“There are debates among doctors, now played out in the media, over the correlation between hockey’s blows to the head and CTE, between blows suffered now and a player’s long-term future. These debates will continue. But there can be no debate about the impact of those blows on players now. . . . This is about what we can see. This is what we absolutely know. This is about now.

“We look back on those people 50 years ago who defended tobacco and asbestos and think, How could they be so stupid? (Commissioner) Bettman and the NHL cannot wait for this generation of players to get old just so they can know for sure.”

Sound familiar? People who want absolute certainty in hockey are sacrificing the health of the current players, despite growing certainty that the news will only get worse. Climate skeptics are doing the same with the health of our planet.

his video was taken by the crew of Expedition 30 on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots was taken January 3, 2012 from 15:01:30 to 15:08:17 GMT, on a pass from the Indian Ocean, just west of Australia, to south of Australia, west of Tasmania. The pass begins looking eastward toward southern Australia at the Aurora Australis. The crew captures the aurora just before the sun begins to come up in this short video. A few orbiting satellites pass by throughout the video as well.

Credit: NASA / ISS

Image extracted from NASA video.

Today marks the 90th anniversary of the deadly roof collapse of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington, D.C., resulting from a massive blizzard that struck portions of the South and the mid-Atlantic.

The weight of heavy snow proved too much for the flat roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, which was built in 1917. Drifting of snow likely led to an uneven distribution of weight that added to the devastating roof collapse that killed 98 people and injured 133 others late on Jan. 28, 1922.

Photo of the Knickerbocker Theater following the collapse of the roof from NOAA’s Historical Photo Collection. Click here to see more incredible photos of Washington, D.C., covered in snow from the Knickerbocker Blizzard.

Washington, D.C., was buried by 28.0 inches of snow from the blizzard, setting a record for the heaviest snow in 24 hours. This record still stands today.

Other snow amounts include 19.0 inches in Richmond, Va., and 33.0 inches in Rock Creek Park, which sits along the Washington, D.C.-Maryland border. Railroads between Philadelphia, Pa., and Washington, D.C., were buried beneath as much as 36.0 inches of snow.

Up to 16-foot-high snow drifts occurred with the ferocious winds accompanying the storm between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

The storm shut down all forms of travel in the nation’s capitol, forcing people to travel to work on foot in treacherous conditions. A 24-hour record snowfall in Baltimore, Md., brought travel to a halt as well.

By Trish Snyder

Every night I perform a ritual that started when I was in grade school by setting out my clothes for the next morning. At this time of the year, I organize quite a hefty stack:

1 set of unmentionables

1 pair of long johns

1 pair of jeans

1 camisole

1 long sleeved cotton shirt

1 thick turtleneck

1 bulky wool sweater

1 fleece pullover (optional)

1 pair of slippers with thick rubber soles

1 pair of merino wool socks

1 wool scarf (optional)

Photo credit: Morgan Harris, Trish’s 9-year-old daughter.

Lemme guess what you’re thinking: maybe I’m a lumberjack or someone who works 12-hour shifts outdoors on film sets? The truth is I run my own business as an editor/writer, which means most days I don’t leave my Toronto home. But I pile on a whack of layers to cope with my preferred office heating policy: when I’m at home alone, the furnace stays of. For me, every day is Sweater Day.

It started a few years ago when I returned to freelancing after leaving an editing job. Our thermostat had been programmed to fall to 16C after everyone left for work and school, and rise to 20C when we arrived home for the evening. That first morning of freelancing I was plugging away in my basement office when I felt a chill. I hustled up to the main-floor thermostat: by mid-morning it had slipped to 17.5C; likely a few degrees cooler in our how-very-Canadian uninsulated basement.

With less effort than it takes to dial a phone, I could have nudged that furnace to life and bumped up the temperature to a more civilized 20C. I admit I considered it: no matter what I wear, I’m chronically cold. I hate being chronically cold. Don’t I deserve to earn a living without my lips turning blue?

But then my green voice spoke up — the part of me that cycles year-round, orders organics from local farms, pays a premium for green energy from Bullfrog, and researched every element of our eco-chic kitchen renovation. My treehugger side wondered why I would heat every inch of our 1,100 square foot home when I was occupying less than 100? After all, I always remind the kids not to leave lights burning in empty rooms. I pulled on another sweater and brewed a pot of mint tea.

The kids think I’m nuts. I prefer passionate and optimistic, but the truth is I’d never force them to follow my extreme example. I just hope to show them that life is a series of choices, and every action we take has consequences for the earth. I simply wish to make more good choices than bad ones.

Some days, when the temperature hits 16C, and four layers and a blanket aren’t enough to stop my teeth from chattering at the keyboard, I cave and switch on a small electric heater for 10 minutes while I make chai and fret about the water footprint of my tea habit. Oh well, at least I’m boiling water on an energy-smart induction range.

Trish Snyder is executive editor of EcoLiving, a magazine and website produced byGreen Living and Scotiabank to help Canadians make green choices on home improvement projects. Someday she will insulate her chilly basement.

As soon as it started snowing in the mountainous regions of Jordan (around 1,000 meters above sea level), a flow of tweets and Facebook posts, along with photographs and videos, started making the rounds on social media. In Jordan, citizen journalism plays it’s role very well since almost everyone owns a smart phone connected to the Internet at all times. And netizens were not only commenting on the snow and weather, but giving their followers updates on traffic caused by snow as well as warnings of slippery roads here and there.

Hanin Abu-Shamat, @HaninSh, tweeted this photograph of snow falling in her area in Amman:

Snow in Amman, Jordan. Photo credit: Hanin Abu Shamat, shared on Flickr

Elwan Bader, @kharooof tweeted this picture from Queen Rania Street in Amman aka University Street:

A photograph of snow on Queen Rania Street in Amman. Photo shared on Twitter by Alwan Bader

@BaselAnabtawi lives in Dubai, UAE, and he tweeted this picture on behalf of his sister who lives in Amman:

Man, the view from our house in Amman! It’s snowing .. My sister just sent me this! Mashallah, enjoy it #amman

Snow from Basel Anabtawi sister’s house in Amman, Jordan. Photo shared on Twitter

The photograph tweeted by Dima Haddadin (@Haddadin) of a young man directing traffic in one of Amman’s traffic lights after it broke down gave Jordanians online a sense of pride of how the everyday citizens can help solve a big problem such as traffic. People talked about the photograph and shared it on all social networks:

A young Jordanian directs traffic after the traffic sign broke down. Photo shared by Dima Haddadin on yfrog

Netizens also shared numerous videos of snowfall across Jordan. Here are videos I shared on YouTube showing snow falling in two different areas in Amman:

All in all, snow brings joy and happiness to the people of Jordan and hope that the upcoming cold fronts would bring more snow to the lower areas in Amman, which fall below 1,000m above sea level.

Written by Ali Alhasani