Historic snow hits Houston; hackers target Canadian climate scientists

Snow fell over a 60-mile swath of southeast Texas yesterday, piling up to depths of four inches over some locales. The one inch of snow that fell on Houston was the earliest snow on record there, beating the record set just last year, on December 10. Remarkably, Houston has had more snow this year (1.0 inches) than Chicago (0.2 inches). The storm also dumped up to two inches of snow on portions of Louisiana and Mississippi. The 0.2 inches of snow that fell on Lake Charles, Louisiana was that city's earliest snowfall on record. The early season snow was caused by a sharp kink in the jet stream, which funneled cold, Canadian air far to the south over the Gulf of Mexico. An area of low pressure developed over the Gulf, and pulled in plenty of Gulf moisture that was able to fall to the ground as snow, due to the cold temperatures.

Hackers target Canadian climate scientists
According to an article in the National Post, the offices and computers of climate scientists working at the University of Victoria in Canada have been targeted by thieves and hackers in recent months. University spokeswoman Patty Pitts said there have been attempts to hack into climate scientists' computers, as well as incidents in which people impersonated network technicians to try to gain access to campus offices and data. These incidents took place at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, an Environment Canada facility located at the university. In addition, Dr. Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist working at the University of Victoria and a key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had his office broken into twice late last year, and his papers rummaged through and a dead computer stolen. "The key thing is to try to find anybody who's involved in any aspect of the IPCC and find something that you can...take out of context," Dr. Weaver said. "People don't like it, so they try to discredit it, and the way they try to discredit it is by attacking the individual responsible for it. The real story in this is, who are these people and why are they doing it? They're trying to find anything. They don't care what it is." Dr. Weaver stated that he believed the campaign is driven by the fossil-fuel industry, citing "a war for public opinion."

Other posts in this series
Embattled UK climate scientist steps down
The Manufactured Doubt industry and the hacked email controversy
Is more CO2 beneficial for Earth's ecosystems?

I'll have a new post on Sunday.

Jeff Masters