Further to our recent news about the unseasonally early formation of Hurricane Pali in the Pacific the National Hurricane Center has just announced that:

OUT OF SEASON SUBTROPICAL STORM FORMS OVER THE FAR EASTERN
ATLANTIC…

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In an extremely early start to the 2016 Pacific Cyclone Season the Central Pacific Hurricane Center announced early this morning that Hurricane Pali had reached category 1 strength. They currently report that:

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I stayed up late last night (UK time) to watch Barack Obama deliver his 2015 State of the Union address to the United States Congress. I was particularly interested to hear what he had to say about climate change. In the event he said the word "climate" four times. Apparently that's a new record.

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In the wake of the IPCC meeting in Stockholm last week we idly wondered:

When will the world's policymakers stop spouting hot air and start taking practical measures to mitigate the inevitable climate change that we all must now face.

The answer seems to be "not just yet", because in the United States the Democrat and Republican parties are still at loggerheads in Congress over "Obamacare", and as a result many "non-essential" services have been shut down, and getting on for a million US government workers have been told to stay at home. Here's a video report from Al Jazeera on the current state of the nation in the land of the free:

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This weekend The Mail Online published a story purporting to explain how "How [the Arctic] Ice Sheet Grew 920,000 Square Miles In A Year". The story was written by David Rose, so of course it did nothing of the sort!  We've come across Mr. Rose before, when he regurgitated one of his "Great Green Con" stories earlier this year, so now let's take a closer look at his most recent "Great White Con". I quote David's opening words of "wisdom":

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The set of cracks in the Arctic sea ice across the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas that we showed three days ago have now refrozen, and some new ones have opened up nearer the north coast of Alaska. However whilst that has been going on another set of "cracks" over on the Russian side of the Arctic have been growing ever wider. Here's how the Laptev Sea looks from space this morning:

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The ice covering the Beaufort Sea has already found itself split by fractures many hundreds of miles long more than once this year. Now it is cracking at the seams once again, as this picture taken by the Terra satellite yesterday reveals:

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NASA have recently been flying low over the sea ice in the Arctic on their latest IceBridge mission, measuring its thickness and recording a variety of images too, amongst other things.  In our All Fools' Day quiz here on econnexus.org.uk we took a close look at the sea ice around the Disko Bay area of Western Greenland. One reason for doing that was because, as Julia Slingo who is chief scientist at the UK's Met Office pointed out only yesterday:

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You may recall that a couple of weeks ago we showed you some satellite images revealing that the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska had become covered with a vast spider's web of cracks. Then last weekend gaping fissures tens of miles across opened up in the ice cap north of Greenland. Today we take you back to the Beaufort Sea once more, where this is what the latest satellite images reveal:

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I've just stumbled across an exciting new (to me at least) section of the NASA web site. It's called Worldview, and it does what it says on the tin. It's part of NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS for short), and it gives you a satellite's view of planet Earth a bit like Google Earth, except that it's updated on a daily basis! To give you some idea of the power of Worldview, and also an insight into why I was wandering the virtual corridors of NASA late last night, here's a "close up" image of Cape Morris Jesup, the most northerly point in Greenland, taken on March 18th 2013:

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