Comments on: Northeast Siberia braces for extreme cold of -60C

By: Mike Bryant

Mike Bryant — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:17:52 +0000

Frim ICECAP,

“By Chris Horner, in Human Events

The most expensive secret you’re not supposed to know is that George W. Bush leaves office with the planet cooler than when he entered. This dangerous trend threatens the multi-billion dollar “global warming” industry, adding new urgency to the ritual shriek of “we must act now!” in the scramble to impose a costly regime of mandates and energy taxes.”

He was fighting Global Warming the whole time! Don’t tell anybody.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:01:13 +0000

Seems as though the cold air is rolling off the top of the world and landing in lower elevations. It’s been colder in Minnesota than Barrow, AK – very strange. Hence, no sea ice buildup and brutal winter conditions in upper North America and Siberia.

By: David Holmes

David Holmes — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:52:26 +0000

How does town such as Oymyakon get supplies such as coats, food other such items if it is so remote?

David Holmes

By: Susan Duke

Susan Duke — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:23:41 +0000

I received a letter in November from a man living more or less on the Equator in Kenya. He said “There was a funny snow cloud which fell near to Lake Ol’Bolosat and covered about 200 hectares, but no one died for the area is not settled by people.” This area is about 7000 feet above sea level, and my family lived there for fifty years, like my friend I had never heard of such a thing.
Susan Duke

By: Rhys Jaggar

Rhys Jaggar — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:24:17 +0000

Walter DNes

‘The reason for the halt is warm water. See water temperature anomalies at http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.12.15.2008.gif
There’s a tongue of above-normal water sticking up between Labrador and Greenland and there’s anarea on the west side of Novaya Zemlaya Island. In addition, there are some way-above-normal hotspots…
- on the northern tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula
- on the north and west coast of Svalbard
- on the north coast of Iceland

As long as those warm areas remain, no more major freezing.’

Thanks – a very good explanation and certain to be right.

By: Roger Knights

Roger Knights — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:42:46 +0000

Typo: “same those maps” should be “save those maps” (I mention this because I want those maps saved)

By: MattN

MattN — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:42:10 +0000

Alex, same those maps so we can go back to them and see how right/wrong NOAA was. I predict a boatload of FAIL!

By: gary gulrud

gary gulrud — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:03:24 +0000

Here in central MN we set an all-time record for a low pn evening/morning of Dec. 15-16 at a balmy -23F, overturning that of 1963 of -21.

In my memory this is early by 10 days for the coldest snap of the winter, so we can expect lower.

By: M White

M White — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:49:57 +0000

Changes ‘amplify Arctic warming’

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7786910.stm

By: Karl Heuer

Karl Heuer — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:06:05 +0000

“Oymyakon is known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold, because on January 26, 1926, a temperature of −71.2 ℃ (−96.2 ℉) was recorded there (however, this fact is arguable because the temperature was not directly measured but obtained by extrapolation). ”

-attributed to wikipedia (missed putting on the front end of the quotation marks)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon

By: Karl Heuer

Karl Heuer — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:04:21 +0000

Many of those record low temps were extrapolated, not measured

Oymyakon is known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold, because on January 26, 1926, a temperature of −71.2 ℃ (−96.2 ℉) was recorded there (however, this fact is arguable because the temperature was not directly measured but obtained by extrapolation). ”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon

By: B Kerr

B Kerr — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:33:52 +0000

Thank you George E. Smith for taking the time to answer my question.

I still have concerns about past temperature records.

I read in an article where cold temperatures were estimated to be -83F.
Fine I’m happy with that I can understand the need to estimate. Months later the temperature was calibrated to -81.3F

The estimate is now accurate to one decimal place.

The same is true with early CET temperatures.
Temperatures in 1600’s are to the nearest degree C and then to the nearest half degree C.

Yet averages are given correct to two decimal places.

Mind you these temperatures would have been measured in degrees Fahrenheit then converted and rounded to C.

By: Alex Baker

Alex Baker — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:03:46 +0000

At a slight tangent to this report of extreme cold in Siberia, I was looking at other Northern Hemisphere temperature predictions for the near term weather and climate. I couldn’t help but look at the NOAA CPC forecasts as they would seem a place that should have decent scientific data and forecasting capability. In looking though, I had to ask myself a very strange question:

Why does every NOAA Climate Prediction Center forecast for the next 13 months only show US temperatures as being EC (equal chance for above or below) or A (above normal)?

My scientific spidey-sense is all a-tingle saying something is wrong. Most well-grounded forecasts include some variations above and some variations below.

Are the models at NOAA CPC so broken that they have lost all variability and are only showing the future as being warmer than average?

Something is rotten in the state…of NOAA…

Do the same models they are using show Siberia (yes, I realize it’s outside the US and even North America) as experiencing warmer than normal average high temperatures at a -30 celsius? Do these near record low temperatures being experienced even show up in their models? Call me model-naive and forgive me if you’ve said these things before and repeatedly, but…something seems off track at NOAA…

By: Walter Dnes

Walter Dnes — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:35:31 +0000

For those who are wondering…

according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol ethanol freezes at -114.3 C (-174 F) and boils at 78.4 °C (173 F)

And yes, freezup has come to a screeching halt the past few days. It was screaming along for a few days while Hudson Bay and Ungava Bay were rapidly freezing. Once they froze up, things came to a screeching halt. See the sequence of images…

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=12&fd=09&fy=2008&sm=12&sd=10&sy=2008
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=12&fd=11&fy=2008&sm=12&sd=12&sy=2008
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=12&fd=13&fy=2008&sm=12&sd=14&sy=2008
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=12&fd=15&fy=2008&sm=12&sd=16&sy=2008

Note that the pictures are reduced by the HTML code. In Firefox right-click on the pictures and select “View Image” to see the full-sized image. Sorry, I don’t know what the Internet Explorer command is.

The reason for the halt is warm water. See water temperature anomalies at http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.12.15.2008.gif
There’s a tongue of above-normal water sticking up between Labrador and Greenland and there’s anarea on the west side of Novaya Zemlaya Island. In addition, there are some way-above-normal hotspots…
- on the northern tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula
- on the north and west coast of Svalbard
- on the north coast of Iceland

As long as those warm areas remain, no more major freezing.

By: Bobby Lane

Bobby Lane — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:58:13 +0000

OT some, but here is a story from Reuters alleging that heat kills more people than…well, earthquakes. And thunderstorms kill more people than…well, hurricanes. No mention, of course, of cold or wintry weather of any sort.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N16172535.htm

By: George E. Smith

George E. Smith — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:48:36 +0000

Well officially it was his low temperature studies that won him the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics; but he did discover superconductivity in 1911.

I would think, that the Kammerlingh-Onnes (its modern name ) lab in Leyden, along with the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the Cavendish, and the Rutherford labortatories, would have been great places to got oschool in the early parts of this century.

Rutherford by the way was Kiwi, no matter what those Limeys say.

By: George E. Smith

George E. Smith — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:40:40 +0000

Verdamnis !

Evidently Heike Kammerlingh-Onnes, was born in the Netherlands (still sounds Finnish to me), and his work was done in Leyden.

He was the first to liquefy Helium (bloody clever process), and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913 or thereabouts for discovering superconductivity.

Man were those ever the golden years of Physics.

By: George E. Smith

George E. Smith — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:30:34 +0000

“” B Kerr (12:47:31) :

This is a fascinating question and I have been waiting for someone to explain how it is actually done.

paminator (08:58:13) :

>deletions<
Would someone please be kind enough to explain how low temperatures are measured, and how they were measured in the 1800’s without the use of modern electronics. “”

Well the short answer for the 1800s is “they weren’t”.

For most of that period, I would think that various types of “liquid” thermometers would be used, but maybe electrical resistance thermometers might have been in experimental stages.

If I ever knew when the Platinum Resistance Thermometer was devised, I certainly don’t remember now; but it would have been sometime after Ohm’s law was discovered (which doesn’t say anything like 99.99 % of electronics engineers say it says.)

In principle, today, you can use semiconductor junction thermometers (Bandgap devices) to measure as low a temperature as the semiconductor packaging can survive in.

The forward Voltage difference between two semiconductor diodes operating at a fixed current density ratio, is a function of the semiconductor Bandgap Voltage, and a linear function of the absolute temperature, and that Voltage goes to zero at absolute zero, so it can make a pretty good and very linear thermometer; in principle down to zero K.

HP once made (maybe Agilent Technologies still does) a quartz crystal thermometer. HP discovered a particular linear temperature coefficient of frequency quartz oscillator cut; I believe out of all the possible ways of cutting a single crystal of pure quartz, there is only one possible orientation, and mode of oscilation that provides a constant temperature coefficient of frequency; but I imagine that practically that only persists over a limited temperature range, before some secondary packaging phenomena introduce non linearities. But over its operating range it is a pretty nifty thermometer; but far too expensive to put up in a barn owl box in Siberia.

To get into the very cold technology era, you have to dig up stuff on Kammerling-Onnes; who has to be the all time low temperature guru; and I have to apologise to our Scandahoovian friends, that I don’t exactly remember his species. Something tells me his friendly handle was Heike or something like that, and maybe that is Finnish; but someone in Norway/Denmark/Swededn can straighten me out if I got that wrong. Certainly early thermometry was (and maybe still is) one of the problem areas of Physics.
Photometry takes the cake for the most screwed up part of physics; there being almost as many standard units of photometry as there are languages on planet earth; and most of them don’t make any more sense that the rod/stone/fortnight system, that now only the USA uses.

By: E.M.Smith

E.M.Smith — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:08:17 +0000

davidcobb (12:40:11) :
It does not pass the smell test because it uses modeled mass balance (modeled precipitation input- estimated outflow) to determine GIA (Glacial Isostatic Adjustment) which is 80%+ of gravity signal. Neat trick. Using modeled mass balance to determine actual mass balance.

David, thanks for this information, otherwise I would never have know… but still:

URK! I think I feel sick… How come if I fail to keep some spam email for 7 years (per Sarbox legal requirement) I can go to jail but folks can do this kind of thing? Modeled fiction driving fantasy speculation… and use it to drive the state of the world economy. Is there no adult supervision in science any more?

By: George E. Smith

George E. Smith — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:59:24 +0000

Well Pierre,

Just what would constitute real world testing that would convince you that the CO2 global warming hypothesis is something to be broadly in favor of ?

Would it influence your decision, if someone were to present data that showed a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 leading to a SUBSEQUENT significant increase in global surface temperature; or a significant decrease in atmospheric CO2 leading to a SUBSEQUENT significant decrease in global surface temperature ?

Because that sort of data might convince me in a real hurry.

The only problem, that I have, is that so far we have NO SUCH DATA; not ever; but we do have oodles of data showing the exact reverse situation.

So I am going to wait for data that so far at least the last 3/4 million years of data have failed to turn up ?

I don’t think so; but I’ll become a believer if and when such data does show up; well if I live that long of course. Meanwhile I have other more important things to do.