RSN: CNN Mongers the ISIS Fear Then Wonders Where It Came From, Sanders Campaign Begins Work on Converting Trump Supporters, NSA's Targeting of Israeli Leaders Swept Up the Content of Private Conversations With US Lawmakers, Storm Pushes North Pole 50 Degrees Above Normal for This Time of Year

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Charles Pierce | CNN Mongers the ISIS Fear Then Wonders Where It Came From

Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The sad fact is that nothing that actually happens on the ground against Daesh is likely going to have a material effect on the culture of fear that has been created to infest the American psyche by so many people who should know so much better."
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Sanders Campaign Begins Work on Converting Trump Supporters
Bradford Richardson, The Hill
Richardson writes: "Canvassers working on the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are being instructed to sell their candidate to Donald Trump supporters. The campaign provided them a specific script to use when encountered by people who say they back the billionaire Republican businessman."
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Amanda Marcotte | It's Not Too Late: Why Finally Charging Bill Cosby Is a Victory for All Victims of Sexual Abuse
Amanda Marcotte, Salon
Marcotte writes: "But the fact that there are charges now and there weren't at the time also suggests something about then cultural shift in attitudes around the issue of sexual abuse. After all, the rumors and accusations about Bill Cosby are nothing new."
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NSA's Targeting of Israeli Leaders Swept Up the Content of Private Conversations With US Lawmakers
Adam Entous and Danny Yadron, The Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: "President Barack Obama announced two years ago he would curtail eavesdropping on friendly heads of state after the world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs. But behind the scenes, the White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch."
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America's Incarcerated Population, Largest in World, Grew Even More Last Year
Zaid Jilani, The Intercept
Jilani writes: "The federal government's Bureau of Justice Statistics has released new numbers detailing how America's incarcerated population - already the world's largest - grew even bigger in 2014."
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Top US General May Seek More Troops for Afghanistan
Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
Vanden Brook writes: "Afghanistan's security situation is so tenuous that the top U.S. commander there wants to keep as many U.S. troops there as possible through 2016 to boost beleaguered Afghan soldiers and may seek additional American forces to assist them."
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Storm Pushes North Pole 50 Degrees Above Normal for This Time of Year
Angela Fritz, The Washington Post
Fritz writes: "A powerful winter cyclone - the same storm that led to two tornado outbreaks in the United States and disastrous river flooding - has driven the North Pole to the freezing point this week, 50 degrees above average for this time of year."
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The dramatic decrease in the area and thickness of Arctic sea ice due to rising temperatures has been 
especially hard on polar bears. (photo: Reuters)

 powerful winter cyclone — the same storm that led to two tornado outbreaks in the United States anddisastrous river flooding — has driven the North Pole to the freezing point this week, 50 degrees above average for this time of year.

From Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning, a mind-boggling pressure drop was recorded in Iceland: 54 millibars in just 18 hours. This triples the criteria for “bomb” cyclogenesis, which meteorologists use to describe a rapidly intensifying mid-latitude storm. A “bomb” cyclone is defined as dropping one millibar per hour for 24 hours.

NOAA’s Ocean Prediction Center said the storm’s minimum pressure dropped to 928 millibars around 1 a.m. Eastern time, which likely places it in the top five strongest storms on record in this region.

“According to the center’s records, the all-time strongest storm in this area occurred on Dec. 15, 1986, and that had a minimum central pressure of 900 millibars,” Mashable’s Andrew Freedman reported on Tuesday. “The second-strongest storm occurred in January 1993, with a pressure of 916 millibars.”As this storm churns north, it’s forcing warm air into the Arctic Circle. Over the North Sea, sustained winds from the south are blasting at 70 mph, and gusting to well above 100 mph, drawing heat from south to north.

Although there are no permanent weather stations at the North Pole (or really anywhere in the Arctic Ocean), we can use weather forecast models, which ingest data from satellites and surrounding surface observations, to estimate conditions at Earth’s most northern location.

On Wednesday morning, temperatures over a vast area around North Pole were somewhere between 30 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit, and for at least a brief moment, surpassed the 32-degree threshold at exactly 90 degrees North, according to data from the GFS forecast model.

Data from the International Arctic Buoy Programme confirms that temperatures very close to the North Pole surpassed the melting point on Wednesday. A buoy (WMO ID Buoy 6400476) at a latitude of 87.45 degrees North hit a high temperature of 0.7 degrees Celsius — or 33 degrees Fahrenheit.

Chart showing recent temperature change at the North Pole. (photo: The Washington Post)

“Consider the average winter temperature there is around 20 degrees below zero,” wrote the Capital Weather Gang’s Jason Samenow on Monday. A temperature around the freezing mark signifies a departure from normal of over 50 degrees, and close to typical mid-summer temperatures in this region.

In other words, the area around the North Pole was about as warm as Chicago on Wednesday, and quite a few degrees warmer than much of the Midwest.

Meanwhile in habitable areas around the North Atlantic, winds are howling and waves are rocking the coastline. In Britain, a week of excessive rainfall has pushed rivers and streams well beyond their banks, stranding vehicles and buckling bridges.

In a blog post on Monday, the U.K. Met office said that December has been a record-breaking month for rainfall in parts of the United Kingdom. A Christmas weekend storm brought up to 8 inches of addition rainfall on saturated soil. The Met Office listed just a small portion of the December records that were set this weekend, in some cases blowing away the previous December records by 10 inches.

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS AND INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON LINK:
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34349-storm-pushes-north-pole-50-degrees-above-normal-for-this-time-of-year