Deadly Freeze Grips Europe.(dial-up warning..photos)

[SoCalDem]

AFP/DDP - Wed Jan 25, 5:02 PM ET
Cold pitch : Soccer shoes lie on the snow-covered pitch at the Millerntor stadium in Hamburg prior the German Cup quarter final football match St. Pauli against Bremen. (AFP/DDP/David Hecker)

Reuters - Wed Jan 25, 5:26 AM ET
The temple of the Parthenon as seen from Philopappou hill during heavy snowfall in Athens January 25, 2006. Snow has covered most parts of the country and, along with very low temperatures, caused traffic problems leaving hundreds of villages stranded. REUTERS/Yiorgos Karahalis

AP - Thu Jan 26, 6:13 AM ET
A ferry, carrying people from the city's European side to the Asian side, sets sail in Istanbul's Bosporus, Turkey, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006. Cold weather from Russia, with snow and sub-zero temperatures, hit Istanbul, causing difficulties in traffic and paralyzing daily life in the Turkish metropolis. (AP photo/Osman Orsal)

AFP/ANA-HO - Wed Jan 25, 2:22 PM ET A man digs a path in the snow to reach the gate of his home in the village near the town of Larissa, some 350 km north of Athens. A relentless Arctic weather front wreaked more havoc across a wide swath of eastern Europe, killing 53 people overnight in Ukraine alone and severely disrupting transport networks in half a dozen countries.(AFP/ANA-HO/V. Pashali) Email Photo Print Photo

AFP/ANA-HO - Wed Jan 25, 2:22 PM ET
Ice shapes sculptures on the banks of the lake in the Greek town of Ioannina, northwest of Athens. A relentless Arctic weather front wreaked more havoc across a wide swath of eastern Europe, killing 53 people overnight in Ukraine alone and severely disrupting transport networks in half a dozen countries.(AFP/ANA-HO/P. Pappa)

AFP - Mon Jan 23, 5:58 PM ET
A man walks through the steam from an underground ventilation system in Bucharest, Romania, on a freezing morning. Bone-chilling weather claimed dozens of lives across Europe as glacial temperatures swept the Baltics to the Balkans, brought rare snowfalls to Istanbul and sparked a scramble for heating fuel.(AFP/Daniel Mihailescu)

Reuters - Sat Jan 21, 8:45 AM ET
A man takes cover under a plastic foil to protect himself from severe frost while fishing in the Gulf of Finland at St. Petersburg's seaport January 21, 2006. After a cold snap gripped European Russia this week with temperatures dropping to their lowest in a generation, the thermometer in St Petersburg rose to a more common for the region -22 degrees Celsius (-7.6 Fahrenheit) on Saturday. REUTERS/Alexander Demianchuk

AFP - Wed Jan 25, 4:43 PM ET Many a snowman : A woman looks at snowmen installed at the Arbat, a popular pedestrian shopping and entertainment street in Moscow. (AFP/Denis Sinyakov)

AFP - Wed Jan 18, 2:22 PM ET A Muscovite walks past snow-covered shrubbery in Moscow. A sharp drop in Russian gas supplies to Europe as Arctic weather conditions hit western Russia renewed concerns in the European Union about the bloc's dependence on Moscow for energy supplies.(AFP/Denis Sinyakov)
AFP - Fri Jan 20, 6:20 PM ET

Russian people walk past snow-covered shrubbery in a park in Moscow. Freezing air from Siberia sent temperatures across much of northern and eastern Europe diving and the death toll from the cold rose to more than 70 in Russia, the hardest hit in the region(AFP/Denis Sinyakov)

AFP - Fri Jan 20, 6:20 PM ET
Moscovites walk along the Red Square in Moscow with St. Basil Cathedral on the background. Freezing air from Siberia sent temperatures across much of northern and eastern Europe diving and the death toll from the cold rose to more than 70 in Russia, the hardest hit in the region(AFP/Yuri Kadobonov)

Reuters - Mon Jan 9, 10:32 PM ET
A homeless Indian migrant worker sits with her child beside a bonfire by a road in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh January 9, 2006. Most aid agencies regard India's official 2 million homeless as a dramatic underestimate and in the cruel winter of the north, many are desperate to get into the few shelters there are. Winter temperatures in northern India are nowhere near as bad as in North America or Europe, but thousands die every year for lack of warm clothes or decent shelter. More than 100 have died in the past six weeks. Photo taken January 9, 2006. To match feature Weather-India-Homeless. REUTERS/Ajay Verma

AFP/DDP - Thu Dec 29, 2:38 PM ET
A young boy stands with his sledge underneath a snow-covered plate reading 'Afrika', which is the name of a village in the eastern German region of Brandenburg. France reported a second death from freezing temperatures as blizzards swept through northern and central Europe, forcing flight cancellations and cutting power and rail links in Scandinavia.(AFP/DDP/Michael Urban)

AFP - Thu Dec 29, 2:38 PM ET
A horse licks snow in a field in Vendenheim near Strasbourg, Alsace, east of France. France reported a second death from freezing temperatures as blizzards swept through northern and central Europe, forcing flight cancellations and cutting power and rail links in Scandinavia.(AFP/Ilan Garzone)

AFP - Wed Dec 28, 5:24 PM ET A barrier closing the access to the A84 motorway in Caen, northwestern France, due to heavy snowfalls overnight. Europe shivered in the grip of an icy cold snap, with France hardest hit by blizzards that left thousands of motorists stranded in sub-zero temperatures or forced into roadside shelters overnight.(AFP/Mychele Daniau)

[NMDemDist2]

1. WOW! incredible

no climate change here, move along..... :sarcasm:

K&N

[Radio_Lady]

3. Is this Global Warming? I guess not! Fabulous photos --

especially the Parthenon with snow.. Amazing!

[SoCalDem]

4. warming?cooling? the problem is the uncertainty of it all

People all over the world are experiencing "wildly weird" weather all year long..

[malmapus]

9. Google "little ice age"

Really neat occurance that went on for a couple of centuries and ended in 1850. I often wonder if we are starting to see the signs of another.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

31. Yeah...real neat. Millions starved to death when crops failed. Neat.

[pitohui]

17. this is what winter used to look like every yr

ya'll don't even remember the 70s?

hell, one of those photos is from st. petersburg, in russia, others are from frickin germany

in one short generation people have forgotten what winter is?

there is nothing wildly weird abt it, good lord, anyone remember chicago in 1980, they claimed to have wind chill factor of 200 below, now i'll admit they were wildly exaggerating, but come on

this used to be just a normal winter in europe

read dickens, hell, it used to snow in london

people have forgotten what normal is, we're in bizarro world

[Tin Man]

27. Agreed. n/t

[napi21]

28. Heck yea! I'm OLD but I remember snow on the ground

all the time from beginning to end of the winter months in Pa. It was standard stuff to buy your kids a pair of boots, leggins, gloves or mittens and a tassel cap every year!

I remember leaving home to drive to work at 6AM so I would miss the nasty traffic and how beautiful it was as I made the first tracks in the snow covered roads. How about the earmuffs? Do they even sell them anymore?

I don't know what has happened, but winter isn't really winter any more!

[CrownPrinceBandar]

41. What about the huge amounts of snow in Greece?..............

I don't seem to remember that from the 70's.

[smirkymonkey]

47. That's what is was like in Upstate NY in the 70's

We never thought it was unusual - just winter. Tomorrow it is supposed to be almost 60 degrees in NYC. This morning it was about 20 degrees. I have never seen this kind of volatility in the Northeast.

[FreedomAngel82]

19. And according to NASA 2005 was the warmest year ever

[bloom]

6. Global extremes

I think the extreme weather is part of global warming - even when it doesn't look like it.

[hatrack]

14. Google for "thermohaline collapse"

That's the problem with "global warming"- lousy phrase. "Climate destabilization" is a much better description, but it's kind of hard to pack into a short, punchy headline.

[SoCalDem]

15. How about "Extreme Weather" or "Weather F-U"

[Ronnie]

26. Or Global Warning.

...

[StClone]

22. One of the theories of Global Warming

Atmospheric warming will push and pull cold air off the poles more efficiently. Some areas will experience unusually extreme cold bouts followed by a rapid return to temperatures warmer than normal.

Weather here in the USA: The drought of the southern plains will abate as Spring arrives and reappear in the Central plains into Canada and much of the U.S. by summer. Much of the summer of '06 will be hotter and drier than normal in N. America. Next winter much of Central and East U.S. will experience extreme cold.

[bloom]

43. And the "chimneys" have already gone from 12 to 2

"Cambridge University ocean physics professor Peter Wadhams points to changes in the waters of the Greenland Sea. Historically, large columns of very cold, dense water in the Greenland Sea, known as "chimneys," sink from the surface of the ocean to about 9,000 feet below to the seabed. As that water sinks, it interacts with the warm Gulf Stream current flowing from the south.

But Wadhams says the number of these "chimneys" has dropped from about a dozen to just two. That is causing a weakening of the Gulf Stream, which could mean less heat reaching northern Europe. The activity in the Greenland Sea is part of a global pattern of ocean movement, known as thermohaline circulation, or more commonly the "global conveyor belt.""

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/05/10/gulfstream/

-----

The headline of one article says 45% - but if you read it - it's more like 70% at the rate we're going:

45% chance Gulf Stream current will collapse by 2100 finds research
mongabay.com
December 7, 2005


New research indicates there is a 45 percent chance that the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean could shut down by the end of the century if nothing is done to slow greenhouse gas emissions....

“...We found that there is a 70 percent likelihood of a thermohaline collapse, absent any climate policy,” Schlesinger said. “Although this likelihood can be reduced by the policy intervention, it still exceeds 25 percent even with maximal policy intervention.”


http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1207-uiuc.html

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/05/1206climate.html

[SoCalDem]

45. The UK has been very lucky to have had such mild weather for so long

Once things shift, they will be very cold indeed..

[TheModernTerrorist]

33. the problem with global warming...

is that yes, the upper atmosphere warms, the ice caps melt, thus sending in abnormal amounts of chilled water into the oceans, thus entering currents (in this case, the Gulf Stream, which caries warm waters from the Gulf of Mexico up towards Europe, which in effect controls their climate and keep Northern Europe from being really really cold). So all this cold water cools the Gulf Stream considerably, thus giving Europe the strange weather patterns they're experiencing in the pictures.

[eve_was_framed]

12. I was just thinking the very same!

[cyberia]

38. Well, this does happen, you know.

Remember the winter of Stalingrad? It was a great help to the Soviets. They were piling up frozen bodies of German soldiers who died of hypothermia. They didn't have to fire a shot.

[u4ic]

52. Welcome to DU!

:toast:

[radwriter0555]

2. We had a SNOW DAY here near Cannes... My kid's school sent the bus

riders home early due to snow coming down, and the buses didn't even show up! Luckily she got a ride from a girlfriend.

I haven't seen snow in YEARS!!!!! it was very exciting and Lola the Wonderdog didn't even give a crap.

[Solly Mack]

5. Great pictures! Mannheim is covered in snow

and temps have been miserable :(

[bloom]

7. That's got to be really unusual for Athens

Here are some more extremes:

Periods of heavy snowfall that began in Japan during the month of December 2005 persisted into mid-January. Some areas of the country were buried under some of the deepest drifts on record (~4 meters or 13 feet), with 82 fatalities since the period of severe winter weather began. Injuries relating to the heavy snowfall totaled around 1,900. Nagano and Niigata prefectures, located to the northwest of Tokyo, were the worst affected. Tokyo received 7 cm (2.8 inches) of snowfall on the 21st, or the heaviest snowfall since January 27, 2001 (Reuters).

Across northwestern China in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, cold weather and heavy snowfall was blamed for the deaths of more than 9,000 head of livestock (IFRC).

In India, frost was observed in New Delhi for the first time in 70 years as cold air sweeping in from the Himalayas produced a low temperature of 0.2°C (32.3°F) on the 9th. On January 16, 1935, Delhi reported -0.6°C (31°F). There were 180 deaths blamed on cold weather in India since early December 2005. In neighboring Bangladesh, unusually cold weather was blamed for 100 fatalities during the same time span (IFRC).

In Russia, a severe cold wave which arrived during January 17-18 brought some of the coldest temperatures to the region in decades. In Moscow, temperatures plummeted to -30°C (-22°F), or the coldest readings since the winter of 1978-1979, when temperatures dropped to -38°C (-36°F). The coldest temperature on record is -42.1°C (-44°F), set in 1940. There have been numerous cold-related deaths, primarily the homeless (Reuters). Snow and cold weather penetrated unusually far to the south in eastern Europe, with heavy snow forcing the closure of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece on the 25th. Cold weather was blamed for 66 deaths in Ukraine, 27 in Romania, 14 in Poland, 10 in the Czech Republic and three in Bulgaria (Reuters). Temperatures in eastern Europe dipped to -35°C (-31°F) in mountains of northeast Italy.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/hazards/index.html

[Art_from_Ark]

32. Tokyo got an even heavier snowfall last Saturday

and there were still some patches of snow and ice remaining in the built-up areas today, 6 days later. I've never seen that before in all the years I've been here.

But some of the local people a little north of Tokyo tell me that when they were kids, they used to see icicles in winter, but I have never seen icicles in this part of Japan.

[Crunchy Frog]

8. What Europe will look like after it loses the Gulf Stream

ironically, due to global warming.

[Canuckistanian]

21. Exactly! It's because of the loss of the Gulf Stream

If you look at, say, London on a map, you'll see that it's almost at the same latitude as the Canadian sub-arctic.

The Gulf Stream is what keeps the UK (and a lot of Europe) from being a nordic country.

[GreenPartyVoter]

10. They're getting the colder air that usually comes to Maine. Our winter

has been pretty "warm" thus far. We've had a few rainstorms this January rather than blizzards. The other day I went for a walk without a coat or anything because I got to hot when I wore one.

[SoCalDem]

11. I thought you guys were getting tons of snow..

:)

[CatholicEdHead]

13. That is where our Minnesota winter went to

It was pushing 60 today in the southeast part of the state. This is usually our coldest week of the year.

The last winter I remember that would be as bad as Europe and Japan would be the 1996-1997 winter in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

[Odin2005]

25. This HAS to be the warmest winter recorded in MN.

This weather is really freaking me out. :scared:

[SmokingJacket]

16. they're getting the cold weather the US north has been missing.

Today we finally have some cold and snow in upstate NY -- first since November...

Seems like the global weather patterns are disrupted.

[LizW]

24. Yep, snow is a thing of the past

I live in north central Alabama, and my kids (13 and 11) have only seen snow on the ground about twice in their memory.

We used to have a couple of "snow days" built into the school calendar every year. Now they are called "tornado days" (for those bad days we have in the south where there are tornado warnings all over the state for hours on end). The last two years the kids have missed school because of hurricanes -- and we are 6 hours from the coast.

I miss the show. Nobody here can drive in it, so everything shuts down and we stay home and play.

[FreedomAngel82]

18. Amazing

[backwoodsmurder]

20. They're getting our crappy weather.

I live in Winnipeg (aka Winterpeg) and it's only -2 C. Should be like -25 or -35. Weird. We've only had a couple "normal" cold days.

[Canuckistanian]

30. -2? That is astounding.

I lived in the 'peg for a year back in the '80's. THAT was an experience. What I remembered was that everything froze solid in November and didn't thaw until the end of March.

And I found out the hard way that block heaters in your car are NOT an option.

[Odin2005]

23. Holy Shit.

Looks more like Fargo in the winter of '96-'97, not Greece.

:wow:

[Berserker]

29. I live in the North

and I have fished through the ice for many years and I do not know what this statement means?

A man takes cover under a plastic foil to protect himself from severe frost while fishing in the Gulf of Finland at St. Petersburg's seaport January 21, 2006.

Next time I go I better bring some plastic so I don't get frosted.

[Kellanved]

34. Well, it is winter

Cold weather in not that unusal in that season.
0°F is uncommon, but not unprecedented.

[rman]

40. Indeed, an unusually cold winter.

Even if it would be an ice-age it would not be "unprecedented".

[ninkasi]

35. Just north of Houston, Tx here

and this past month we've had days in the 70's and close to 80. It's been an extremely warm winter, even for us.

[0007]

48. So so here in Midland Texas with the last week being fairly cool

[malaise]

36. Frightening and beautiful at the same time

Thanks

[Swamp Rat]

37. Thanks for posting this. n/t

:)

[leftchick]

39. It reminds me of that movie

about global warming and weather extemes with Dennis Quaid? What was the name of that?

[bloom]

42. Was that the "Day After Tomorrow" movie?

[leftchick]

44. that is the one!

I can never remember movie titles!

[phoebe]

46. and it's insanely hot in Australia right now ..

n/t

[lovuian]

49. Lowering of Salinity in the Ocean + polar shift = Europe freeze

and I might add the BIG story here is to heat Europe they need oil and gas lots of it too...

[SoCalDem]

51. and their already short growing season gets even shorter

and their livestock will suffer too..

[savemefromdumbya]

50. Definitely effects of global warming

[meow2u3]

53. Only one good thing will come out ot this

extreme cold: The Olympic Games at Torino (Turin). They'll have perfect weather for the Games: lots of fresh snow; good ice for hockey and speed skating; and fast sledding track.