The Temperature in Alaska this morning was 40 below zero.?

it sounds like you might be a reasonable person. kudos to you. you realize that the term "smart climatologists" is an oxymoron right?

<<Alaska and Greenland are having temperatures below -40 degrees>> No they're not and the map you linked to confirms this. The coldest place shown on the maps is Barrow at the extreme north of Alaska, the temperature here at the moment is -19C which at this time in the morning is quite normal (the climatic average for 10am in January is -20°C so it's just a touch warmer than the norm). <<Is this helping the Ice Caps to Grow?>> I would suggest conducting some research into the nature of the ice caps but in a very small nutshell - snow falls in the interior regions of the ice caps, consolidates due to gravity and additional burdon then through the process of glacial creep it edges to the peripheries where it calves. Your assumption is that snow falling on the ice caps increases the overall mass. This would only hold true if the additional mass exceeded that of the mass lost due to melting - which it doesn't. The annual net loss of ice from the Greenland ice cap is 300* billion tons a year, from Antarctica it is 220 billion tons. * Edited as I originally and erroneously stated 600gt.

It gets to 40 below virtually every year in Alaska, it is not that unusual. Global warming is a statement about changes to the mean climate, and does not mean that you still won't have unusually cold temperatures. However, they may become more unlikely as the Earth warms.

As for weather prediction, it has vastly improved over the past 15 years, and 5 day forecasts now are about as accurate as 2 to 3 day forecasts in 1990. In general, however, there are limits to have far in advance you can predict the weather, and it appears at present that no matter how much data we have and how fast our computers are, there is no hope for predicting weather more than about 3 weeks in advance. At present we can't even get close to that.

Just because we can't predict what the weather will be two weeks from now does not necessarily mean that we can't make useful predictions about future climate, though. Climate scientists are not trying to predict individual hot and cold waves, or storms, but are trying to forecast things like average temperature and rainfall. It is possible that you can make forecasts like that even when you can't predict the weather, as long as your forecasts have the right number of storms and heat waves you don't need to know their exact timing.

Well, we know that -40 in Alaska is not extreme, that Alaska has had -40 many times before. You get the coldest weather in Alaska when air out of the arctic pours across Alaska.

Now that in turn means that the air over the arctic is being replaced by air pushing in from the south at another area, such as from the Atlantic. And of course the wind from the Arctic will be pulled down by low pressure area over the Pacific.

But Alaska, in the Interior, can be -40 this time of year without any air flow to speak of. And this is not exactly surprising. After all, global warming is less than 2 degrees per century. You should not expect a temperature change much greater than that to result from global warming over your lifetime.

That temperature was caused by changes in weather and global warming is a change in climate. Global warming's effects are not sudden unlike weather and happen gradually overtime. We're still gonna have cold weather.

this weather is pure and perfect for 2, or husband and wife. especially if they are lilt over weight.they Ned no heat. why you thing Alaska government Palin have 5 children's?

If it really was 40 below zero you would be dead. The electricity would be shut off and you would not have power.

it was -6c, here in Surrey,UK today at 9.00am.

I thought that was cold