“Chills will linger along the Atlantic Coast yet today and Tuesday, but otherwise the big cold snap of 2010 is over,” David Salmon, a forecaster for Weather Derivatives of Belton, Missouri, said in a note to clients.

Cold and snow have played havoc across the Northern Hemisphere for more than a week, snarling travel and commerce in Europe and forcing Chinese authorities to curb power use. Much of the U.K., in the throes of its worst chill since 1981, was warned that more was to come, and German economists predicted reduced economic growth for the first quarter because of the weather.

Orange-juice futures plunged from a two-year high today on signs that weekend freeze damage in Florida may be less than some analysts expected as growers had time to take precautions.

About 5 percent of Florida’s orange crop, the world’s largest after Brazil’s, may have been damaged overnight, said Dale Mohler, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather Inc.

Futures for March delivery slipped 18.35 cents, or 12 percent, to $1.328 a pound at 11:50 a.m. on the ICE Futures U.S. exchange in New York, after earlier dropping by as much as the exchange’s 20-cent limit.

Mixed Blessing

Joel Widenor, the director of agricultural services at Commodity Weather Group, said high temperatures in most of the citrus belt may be well into the 70s by late this week, and that may add to crop damage assessments.

“Citrus doesn’t respond well if you have a quick turnaround in temperature,” Widenor said. “It can accelerate the rot if they don’t get out there and get what has been damaged harvested fast enough.”

Hog futures fell today for the first time in three sessions on speculation that deliveries to meatpackers will increase. Shipments were delayed in the Midwest last week by snow-covered farm roads and risk of frostbite.

“We’re looking for vastly improved weather for the next two weeks,” said Dennis Smith, a senior account executive at Archer Financial Services Inc. in Chicago. “There’s going to be a lot of hogs available to the packer.”

Hog futures for February settlement fell 0.575 cent, or 0.9 percent, to 66.675 cents a pound at 9:51 a.m. on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Power-Plant Output

U.S. power-plant output rose 9 percent in the week ended Jan. 7, according to an analysis by Genscape Inc. Power output at plants monitored by Genscape accounts for about 46 percent of all electricity generation in the nation.

Heating demand over the next few weeks will be below-normal nationwide, said Matt Rogers, a forecaster at Commodity Weather Group.

“The warm-up will last at least two weeks at this time,” he said in a telephone interview from Bethesda, Maryland. “We may tip-toe into a colder pattern late in January and then it gets more impressive in February.”

Natural Gas Pipeline Co. of America, the largest transporter of the fuel into Chicago, said shipments are curtailed in Texas because of cold weather.

Also in Texas, the Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery in Baytown, the largest in the U.S., suffered a weather-related upset in a lubes unit, Kevin Allexon, a company spokesman, said today. He said customer needs were being met.

Mississippi Cold

Ergon Inc. reported “a release of sulfur dioxide from a flare due to multiple units shutting down from the cold weather” at its Vicksburg, Mississippi, refinery over the weekend, Greg Flynn, a spokesman with the Mississippi Emergency Management agency, said in an e-mail.

A high pressure area that had formed above the Arctic Circle and was responsible for pushing frigid weather across much of the Northern Hemisphere, is “weakening quite a bit,” Rogers said.

“Europe will get a bit of a respite, but their forecast is for normal to below-normal temperatures over the next couple of weeks,” he said. “They’re not warming up as much as we are in the U.S.”

Airlines in the U.K., France and Germany, including British Airways PLC, reported scattered delays and cancellations. Eurostar Group Ltd. operated a reduced service as wintry weather in Europe snarled transportation.

Forecast for Snow

The U.K.’s central weather office today warned Wales and much of central, western and southern England to expect widespread icy roads while “heavy snow” was predicted for the Yorkshire and Humber region. Weather-related accidents have already left at least 26 dead in Britain, including a 90-year- old woman who fell and froze to death in her garden, the Press Association news agency said.

Germany’s first-quarter economic growth might be reduced as the weekend winter storm and the continued cold hobbled construction and shipping, said Volker Treier, chief economist at the DIHK chambers of trade and commerce.

If the cold snap persists through January, the DIHK’s forecast for as much as 0.7 percent growth in the first three months could be cut, he told Bloomberg Television in Berlin.

Snow and floods are easing in Germany after bringing northern parts of the nation to a standstill yesterday, leaving cars and trains stranded and cutting off coastal villages.

French Power Use

French electrical demand may rise to a record today as power prices jumped to the highest in a year, grid operator Reseau de Transport d’Electricite said on its Web site.

Freezing temperatures in China have led to the worst sea ice off Shandong province’s coast in three decades, the Xinhua news agency reported. Some 200 fishing boats were frozen at a port in Dongying by ice as thick as 30 centimeters (12 inches).

Blizzards in China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang, killed one and forced authorities to evacuate 5,000 residents, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said. More snow is forecast for Xinjiang today and tomorrow, the China Meteorological Administration said.

Freezing weather in China is also forcing cities including Beijing and Shanghai to ration the use of natural gas and electricity to ensure sufficient energy for heating as temperatures fall.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency — and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. “It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else,” Carlin said. “That was obviously coming from higher levels.”

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to “have any direct communication” with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

“I was told for probably the first time in I don’t know how many years exactly what I was to work on,” said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. “And it was not to work on climate change.” One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.

For its part, the EPA sent CBSNews.com an e-mailed statement saying: “Claims that this individual’s opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This Administration and this EPA Administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency and science-based decision making. These principles were reflected throughout the development of the proposed endangerment finding, a process in which a broad array of voices were heard and an inter-agency review was conducted.”

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. “My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide),” he said. “There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down.”

Carlin’s report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there’s “little evidence” that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth’s temperature.

If there is a need for the government to lower planetary temperatures, Carlin believes, other mechanisms would be cheaper and more effective than regulation of carbon dioxide. One paper he wrote says managing sea level rise or reducing solar radiation reaching the earth would be more cost-effective alternatives.

The EPA’s possible suppression of Carlin’s report, which lists the EPA’s John Davidson as a co-author, could endanger any carbon dioxide regulations if they are eventually challenged in court.

“The big question is: there is this general rule that when an agency puts something out for public evidence and comment, it’s supposed to have the evidence supporting it and the evidence the other way,” said Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C. that has been skeptical of new laws or regulations relating to global warming.

Kazman’s group obtained the documents — both CEI and Carlin say he was not the source — and released the e-mails on Tuesday and the report on Friday. As a result of the disclosure, CEI has asked the EPA to re-open the comment period on the greenhouse gas regulatory proceeding, which ended on Tuesday.

The EPA also said in its statement: “The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding.”

That appears to conflict with an e-mail from McGartland in March, who said to Carlin, the report’s primary author: “I decided not to forward your comments… I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” He also wrote to Carlin: “Please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc.”

One reason why the process might have been highly charged politically is the unusual speed of the regulatory process. Lisa Jackson, the new EPA administrator, had said that she wanted her agency to reach a decision about regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act by April 2 — the second anniversary of a related U.S. Supreme Court decision.

“All this goes back to a decision at a higher level that this was very urgent to get out, if possible yesterday,” Carlin said. “In the case of an ordinary regulation, these things normally take a year or two. In this case, it was a few weeks to get it out for public comment.” (Carlin said that he and other EPA staff members asked to respond to a draft only had four and a half days to do so.)

In the last few days, Republicans have begun to raise questions about the report and e-mail messages, but it was insufficient to derail the so-called cap and trade bill from being approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Rep. Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce committee, invoked Carlin’s report in a floor speech during the debate on Friday. “The science is not there to back it up,” Barton said. “An EPA report that has been suppressed… raises grave doubts about the endangerment finding. If you don’t have an endangerment finding, you don’t need this bill. We don’t need this bill. And for some reason, the EPA saw fit not to include that in its decision.” (The endangerment finding is the EPA’s decision that carbon dioxide endangers the public health and welfare.)

“I’m sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach,” Rep. James Sensenbrenner, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said in a statement. “But the EPA is supposed to reach its findings based on evidence, not on political goals. The repression of this important study casts doubts on EPA’s finding, and frankly, on other analysis EPA has conducted on climate issues.”

The revelations could prove embarrassing to Jackson, the EPA administrator, who said in January: “I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.” Similarly, Mr. Obama claimed that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over… To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy. It is contrary to our way of life.”

“All this talk from the president and (EPA administrator) Lisa Jackson about integrity, transparency, and increased EPA protection for whistleblowers — you’ve got a bouquet of ironies here,” said Kazman, the CEI attorney.

McNabb’s status was questioned because he has one year left on his contract and he’s failed to lead Philadelphia to a Super Bowl victory in 11 seasons.

“That’s my call,” Reid said Monday when asked who will make the decision to bring McNabb back. “I think he’s a great player. His work over the last 11 years has proven that. I truly believe it’s a team sport, it’s not one guy.”

McNabb had one of his finest seasons, but struggled badly in consecutive losses to Dallas. The Cowboys beat the Eagles 34-14 Saturday night in an NFC wild-card playoff game.

After the loss, McNabb said he wanted to return to Philadelphia.

As a lifelong suffering Eagles fan, and having seen McNabb play like this since he was drafted here years ago, I don’t think much will change. He just hasn’t done the job when it counts. Maybe he will be like John Elway who also struggled until the end of his career to win the big one. I sure hope so for may sanity!