Brrrrrrr....Now that is cold......

So far here in the Toledo area we've had a really mild winter. Parts of Russia have not been so lucky, as some selected parts of the above linked article from The Independent states:

Russians take pride in the fact that their harsh winters defeated both Napoleon and Hitler and believe they are better equipped physically to survive extreme cold than foreigners. They even have a dark, joky saying about it: "What is good for a Russian spells death for a German."

Cash machines along Tverskaya, Moscow's main thoroughfare, were frozen solid, the city's small army of cranes was motionless, and lifts were shut down in many apartment blocks. The overhead cables for the Soviet-era trolleybuses snapped in the brittle cold, and people listening to personal stereos looked on bemused as their earphone wires transmogrified into stiff television aerials on contact with the outside air.

Some forecasters predict that, in the weeks to come, the temperature could begin to approach that of the Russian capital's coldest winter, in 1940. On that occasion the thermometer went just beyond -42C. Temperatures yesterday were the lowest recorded for 19 January since 1927, meteorologists said. So far, this year is the coldest since the winter of 1978-79, when temperatures dropped to -38C. Today is forecast to be its coldest yet, possibly going beyond the -33C threshold.

That it is -50C and even -58C in far-flung parts of eastern Siberia in the Asian segment of the country is nothing new. What is unusual is that Moscow, St Petersburg and huge swaths of European Russia have come, in the past few days, to resemble the Arctic. Despite its enormous reserves of oil and gas, the country is now stretched to capacity merely keeping itself warm and illuminated

A total of 116 people are reported to have died of exposure since October in Moscow alone. If this is what a cold snap can do to Russia, a country inured to harsh winters, one can only wonder what it would do to Western Europe or the United Kingdom.

Being curious as to what our local weather history has been in comparison. I went to the National Weather Service's Cleveland Ohio website. The normal temperature for today is 31 degrees, the highest temp record for this date is 70 degrees in 1906, the coldest was -20 degrees in 1984. Our weather of course is (F) Russia is (C).

The summary of monthly record temps on file for Toledo can be found here.

The numbers for the top ten average month temperature for January are below, so far it doesn't look like as warm as this January has felt that we are going to make the top ten warmest month when it's averaged out, the average so far as been 30.1 for this January.

WARMEST
1. 40.2 1880
2. 37.8 1932
3. 36.1 1890
4. 35.8 1933
5. 35.7 1876
6. 35.2 2002
7. 34.7 1906
8. 34.2 1990
9. 33.9 1950
10. 33.1 1989


COLDEST
1. 9.6 1977
2. 13.7 1918
3. 14.9 1963
4. 15.2 1912
5. 15.8 1982
6. 16.0 1893
7. 16.2 1970
8. 16.6 1984
9. 16.7 1978
10. 16.7 1945

While I don't place alot of belief on the global warming theory being more man than cycles of nature perhaps influenced by man....Mike over at historymike's musings had a post a few days ago that looks at global warming, and The Real Ugly American had a piece on some new research as well as Kyoto last week.