UK: Cold weather hits The Lizard wildlife

A very dry December and very cold start to 2009 has hit nature hard on National Trust land on The Lizard. Data from the Met Office reported a temperature of -7.8 Celsius on the night of the 6th/7th January: the coldest recorded temperature at Culdrose on the Lizard in a January for twenty years Figures from the Met Office showed that Culdrose actually recorded three consecutive hard frosts with temperatures also falling to -4 Celsius and -5 Celsius, making it one of the coldest starts to January in the area for many years.

The cold snap has been bad news for the common frog tadpoles, wiping out a whole generation of frogs as their shallow breeding pools have been turned to thick ice with heavy frosts on three consecutive nights. Its also made life more difficult for the Cornish chough, which are found on the Lizard, as it feeds by poking its beak into the ground to get at small invertebrates. The frost this week has also penetrated deep into the soil, potentially affecting some winter annuals.

The global tropical cyclone season of 2008: below average

It was a below average year for global tropical cyclone activity, and the destructive power of these storms was close to the lowest levels observed since since reliable records began in the early 1980s.
...
The 2008 global tropical cyclone season shows that these storms are subject to large natural variations. Given this high natural variability and the short record of good data we have (just 25 years or so), it will be very difficult at present to prove that climate change is affecting global tropical cyclone activity.