Extreme cold affects millions in northwest China

Closed roads and delayed flights left thousands of travelers stranded Tuesday following blizzards and extreme cold that killed four people and affected 1.6 million others in northwestern China, a government spokesman said.
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Four people had died because of the bad weather, Wang said Tuesday. He did not give details.
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In neighboring Mongolia, an official appealed for help from the international community as his country battles the most severe winter it has seen in three decades.

Storms in China's far western Xinjiang flattened or damaged about 100,000 homes, and more than 15,000 head of livestock were killed by the cold front that began on Sunday night, according to Xinjiang Meteorological Station forecaster Wei Rongqing.
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On Monday, Mongolia's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Zandanshatar Gombojav said most rural provinces in the poor, landlocked country sandwiched between China and Russia were covered by up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) of snow. He said nearly 800,000 animals had been lost while many transport routes were blocked by heavy snow.

2008: Lack of global warming forces Mongolian horsemen to abandon nomadic life

Three particularly harsh winters since 2000 have killed a third of the nation's livestock.

In 2001, the temperature dropped to a record-breaking -57C. Some 15,000 herders lost all of their animals through starvation and cold, and with them, their money and food.
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Among them is Byambaa Nurdev (22) a former herder in the Gobi Desert. She and her husband Tumenbayar (31) had some 600-700 sheep and goats, making them relatively wealthy. But between 2002-5 they lost every single animal.

John Walsh: 'Met Office predicted a warm winter. Cheers guys' - John Walsh, Columnists - The Independent

For a quasi-governmental organisation (it's part of the Ministry of Defence) that was founded 150 years as a service to seamen and which has supplied BBC with forecasts since 1920, this is a matter of head-hanging shame. If the UK's national weather service is disowned by the UK's national public broadcaster, where on earth can it go? Who's going to trust it, after its own family has rejected it?
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You could forgive it some errors of computation in what is, of course, an imperfect science, where words like "probability" and "projections" sometimes seem to mean "guesswork". But medicine is an imperfect science too (my father, a GP, used to refer to his stethoscope as "the guessing tubes") and you suspect that, if the Met Office was a doctor, his surgery would be littered with dead bodies. Its actual head office is in Exeter, Devon, a purpose-built £80m glass-and-steel beauty (opened in 2004) that dazzles in the sunlight but fails to shine when it comes to supplying useful medium-term information.
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Some climatologists hint that the Office's problem is political – its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren't borne out by the facts. To the Met Office, the weather's always warmer than it really is, because it's expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I'm afraid it deserves to be shown the door.

The Big Question: Should the BBC drop the Met Office as its official weather forecaster? - Big Question, Extras - The Independent

Rather than renewing its current weather forecasting contract with the Met Office automatically, when it expires in April, the BBC is putting it out to tender – for the first time since 1922, when national broadcaster and national forecaster first became partners.

Coalition challenge to Wong on emissions [scam]

AS THE Government does a daily countdown to the Opposition's release of its climate policy, Coalition spokesman Greg Hunt has demanded Climate Change Minister Penny Wong answer 10 questions about the Government's revamped emissions legislation.