What a difference 20 years makes

2 07 2008

Recently, Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS gave his 20 year anniversary speech before congress, in which he was restating the urgency of the global warming crisis we now face. Warnings of tipping points,  and a call for putting “energy executives on trial for crimes against humanity and nature” were parts of that speech.

Here are the just published global temperature data sets for UAH (University of Alabama) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) and the 20 year time-line. Dr. Hansen if you are reading can you kindly point out where in the time-line the crimes occurred and tipping points are?

Click for larger images

I would have thought the CO2 enhanced warming would have been further along by now. Maybe the graphs are inverted?


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Categories : Uncategorized

Northwest Passage: still impassable

2 07 2008

impassable

im·pass·a·ble  [im-pas-uh-buhl]

–adjective
1.  not passable; not allowing passage over, through, along, etc.: Heavy snow made the roads impassable.

2.  unable to be surmounted: an impassable obstacle to further negotiations.

There has been a lot of hype this year citing data which is suggesting that we’ll be able to navigate the Northwest Passage and some even so bold as to suggest a completely ice free Arctic Sea. You could say: “A picture is always worth 1000 data points.”

I’d say “impassable” fits this picture pretty well:


Image rotated- click for source image. Credit: Terra/MODIS  true color

Some reference views to help you get your bearings, here is what the area would be like if “ice free” as some folks are predicting to happen this summer:

And here is the overall photo area with more familiar landmasses visible:


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Categories : Uncategorized

UAH Global Temperatures, June 2008 still low “unofficially”

2 07 2008

While the official number for June 2008 global temperature anomaly from UAH is not out yet, Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit reports it to be -0.114 for the global number.


Click for a larger image
A number of commenters there are puzzled as to how Steve might have this “inside information” when it has not yet been published. Normally you’d find that data here

Steve left a clue in comments at CA when Lucia asked:

Did you get Roy Spencer to email you the data? I cleared cache and I don’t see June.

Steve: No.

Knowing Steve, I’m guessing he wrote a script to scrape data from this page  http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/ (or a page like it) and then calculated the June global UAH numbers from it. Steve McIntyre is careful and cautious about such things, so I would trust his number even though UAH has not officially released it yet.

Congratulations to Steve on getting the “scoop”!


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Categories : Uncategorized

Winter in the high Rockies finally gets plowed

2 07 2008

From the International Herald Tribune, a reminder of just what a significant winter we’ve had.

“So much snow still remains that the Park Service had to move the 75th-anniversary celebration of the highway, held last Friday, off the pass to lower elevations.”

From the EU Referendum:

The Going-to-the-Sun Road, which connects the two sides of Glacier National Park in the Northern Rockies, is usually open by the first week of June. But huge amounts of snow still blanket the high country, in part because of record snowfalls in Montana this year. Now, the opening was delayed to today, the latest on record by a day, except for World War II, when the road was not plowed at all.

Crews have been working on the Big Drift near the top of the road. At 70 feet deep, the drift was the plougher’s biggest obstacle. It was also next to a cliff, making snow even more challenging to remove. A storm in mid-June dumped three to four feet of snow in the mountains.

It’s not all bad news though – the farmers get more water – but the tourist industry is not having a good time of it. In Yellowstone National Park, some backcountry areas are blocked by snow and some rivers are high and muddy. “Our ongoing challenge is backcountry access,” said Al Nash, a park spokesman. “We have high flowing water, mud and, in shady areas, snow. It just isn’t accessible right now. It could easily be another month before we have access.”


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Categories : weather

Hansen Poll Results and the Backup Poll

2 07 2008

As many readers know, I started a poll last week regarding Dr. Jim Hansen’s statement that energy company executives “be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature”.

The one week poll results are shown below:

What is interesting is there was an apparent effort on both sides of the political spectrum to do some vote stuffing. Between Monday night 7/1 and now, about 10,000 votes were added to question number one. Such is the weakness of this online poll service, for which some folks, such as “Frankbi” found and published exploits for.  One of my own readers found an exploit which appeared in comments. The poll makeup started out a lot differently as Michael Smith recorded with a series of screen caps: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Announcements

Sydney’s historic weather station: 150 meters makes all the difference

2 07 2008

Here is an interesting story about the weather station in Sydney at the Astronomical Observatory (well sort of, it got bumped off). It seems the astronomers and meteorologists at the observatory got into a tug of war in 1912 over a cottage and the resulting move in 1917 ended up skewing the entire temperature record irreparably. First, here is a photo of what the observatory and grounds looked like “back in the day”. While I can’t be certain, the latticed canopy at the left may be where they had the early thermometer exposure. Early attempts at sheltering the thermometer from sunlight were often large affairs like this. It may also simply be a lounge area, but the design doesn’t look relevant for that.


Photo circa 1874, more photos and history here

Now here is the article of interest from The Sydney Morning Herald:

How hot heads caused climate change

Richard Macey
July 2, 2008

NINETY years ago Sydney’s temperature took a leap. However, it had more to do with rising political, rather than global, heat.

The instant climate change was remembered yesterday as Bureau of Meteorology staff, and astronomers, gathered on Observatory Hill to mark 150 years of Sydney’s weather observations. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, climate_change, weather_stations