Earlier I wrote about the Arctic Oscillation Index going strongly negative in December and what new cold to expect in January. From NASA’s Earth observatory, we have a high resolution temperature anomaly map that provides visualization of the effects. This image was taken while the Copenhagen Climate Conference was in progress.
A wave of frigid air spilled down over Europe and Russia from the Arctic in mid-December, creating a deadly cold snap. According to BBC.com, at least 90 people had died in Europe, including 79 people, mostly homeless, in Poland. In places, the bitter cold was accompanied by heavy snow, which halted rail and air traffic for several days during the week of Christmas.
This image shows the impact of the cold snap on land surface temperatures across the region from December 11–18, 2009, compared to the 2000–2008 average. The measurements were made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Places where temperatures were up to 20 degrees Celsius below average are blue, locations where temperatures were average are cream-colored, and places where temperatures were above average are red. Light gray patches show where clouds were so persistent during the week that MODIS could not make measurements of the land surface temperature. The biggest anomalies were in northern Russia, but a swath of below-average temperatures stretched across the countries around the Baltic Sea as well.
See also:
- Daily, 8-day, and monthly land surface temperature anomaly maps
- Animation of monthly global land surface temperature anomalies
h/t to WUWT reader “JT”
Don’t worry, smoothing(smearing) will take out some of that cold. There are warmer areas in the midst.
During the The Little Ice Age in Europe, greater cold caused major reductions in food production with consequent major famines. This was associated with 400% to 700% increases in food prices.
Today
One Could Say the Cupboard is Bare, But Actually There is No Cupboard
Apr. 09, 2008
Xiong, W., Lin, E., Ju, H. and Xu, Y. 2007. Climate change and critical thresholds in China’s food security. Climatic Change 81: 205-221.
We need to INCREASE CO2 to increase food production to feed the world’s growing population.
Sorry to go off topic, Anthony, but I thought you’d appreciate this. Through my numerous quest posts here at WUWT, I am now in the pocket of Big Oil:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/12/memo-to-big-oil.html
Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell Big Oil, or they’ve been sending the checks to the wrong Bob Tisdale. Just my luck.
Now in Europe the heat is on again.
Temps in the Mediterranean are back to +15ºC … so…
In Italy and Greece, with 21ºC, people WENT TO THE BEACH.. ON CHRISTMAS!
Even in Continental Europe, Temps are ABOVE FREEZING, so all the snow that fell should have melted away.
See the NOAA links:
1) Temperatures of last 7 days:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_07.rnl.html
2) Temperature ANOMALIES of last 7 days:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_07a.rnl.html
There is a BIG WARM ANOMALY ( between +3ºC and +9ºC) IN THE ARCTIC …
… despite the NEGATIVE Artic Oscillation values.
Also warm anomalies in Europe. The only notable cool ones are in Siberia-Scandinavia. This air masses will move away as the day pass, but …
I BET THE ARCTIC WILL STAY VERY WARM ALMOST ALL WEEKS UNTIL NEXT SUMMER.
Anyone wants to defy the bet?
And how much of those $billions discussed in Copenhagen is going to help out in areas being slammed by these storms and temperatures?
Gotta add in all those hot spots around Hopenhagendaze due to the chartered jets landing, taking off, landing again, and then waiting at the auxiliary airfields in Sweden, Germany, France ….
On threshold of a probable 70-year “dead sun” Maunder Minimum, thanks to decades of Luddite sociopaths’ sabotage of coal, oil, and nuclear energy economies, the benighted U.S. population will finally face the consequences of supine acquiescence to death-eating Climate Cultists and their homicidal greenie-weenie friends.
Last time around, 1645 – 1715 defined the depths of a 500-year Little Ice Age when wolves froze to death in Rhineland forests and wine iced over in Louis XIV’s goblet at the Palace of Versailles. No-one born after c. 1980 has ever experienced winters of sustained deep cold, but Gaia and Sol are working to correct that oversight. Next time you meet Al Gore or any of his criminally malfeasant ilk, best knock ’em to pieces lest they freeze, impoverish, and finally starve you first.
Being that this daytime land surface temps, and not air temps, it’s kind of apples and oranges. Baseline is also 2000-2008. Here’s the description of what your looking at.
Land surface temperature is how hot the “surface” of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location. From a satellite’s point of view, the “surface” is whatever it sees when it looks through the atmosphere to the ground. It could be snow and ice, the grass on a lawn, the roof of a building, or the treetops in a forest. Thus, land surface temperature is not the same as the air temperature that is included in the daily weather report.
An anomaly is when the conditions depart from average conditions for a particular place at a given time of year. The maps show daytime land surface temperature anomalies for a given month compared to the average conditions during that period between 2000-2008. Places that were warmer than average are red, places that were near normal are white, and places that were cooler than average are blue. The observations were collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
Some land surface temperature anomalies are simply random weather phenomena, not part of a specific pattern or trend. Others anomalies are more meaningful. Widespread cold anomalies may be an indication of a harsh winter with lots of snow on the ground. Small, patchy warm anomalies that appear in forests or other natural ecosystems may indicate deforestation or insect damage. Many urban areas also show up as hot spots in these maps because developed areas are often hotter in the daytime than surrounding natural ecosystems or farmland. Warm anomalies that persist over large parts of the globe for many years can be signs of global warming.
i am excited to see if bastardini (wait…something is wrong with that spelling but you know who i mean) is right about the cold blast coming around jan 6th….
The problem with AGW politics is they are believers. This costs human life. No planning for reality only planning for fantasy based on falsehoods, thanks Skyrocket Energy Obama.
The link is: One Could Say the Cupboard is Bare, But Actually There is No Cupboard
We have a far greater challenge to deal with greater cold than increased warming:
Chapter 2, The Great Famine, The Little Ice Age: how climate made history, 1300-1850 By Brian M. Fagan
By contrast:
Chapter 7 – Biological Effects of Carbon Dioxide Enhancement
Gee I guess the 100s of climate refugees will be headed south instead of north?
Ckeck that, 100s of millions.
Even in Continental Europe, Temps are ABOVE FREEZING, so all the snow that fell should have melted away.
Why the all caps? Temperatures at this time of year are usually above freezing. Winter hasn’t really started yet.
I BET THE ARCTIC WILL STAY VERY WARM ALMOST ALL WEEKS UNTIL NEXT SUMMER.
My definition of “warm” is above 20°C, so I’m happy to take your bet. Let us say $1,000,000 ?
🙂
Brian D
Help me out here, as I am not familiar with MODIS. The NOAA website at
http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/specifications.php
does not seem to show land temperature, only various atmospheric measurements. Do you refer to “land/cloud/aerosol boundaries” and “land/cloud/aerosol properties”?
John
commonsense (18:04:01) :
This
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
says that the anomaly is all wrong.
NOAA has failed to call the last few years. They join the MET office and others who tied thier predictions to warming models instead of looking out the window at reality.
Falling down on the job failed.
I am nothing short of appalled at the waste of taxpayer dollars.
Move over, rover, and let Bastardi and Corbyn take over.
In fact, I would go so far as to propose that Bastardi be given the head job at NOAA and Corbyn can clean house at the MET.
Stop the %#$ decline! We’re still hiding the last batch and now here comes some more! It’s a travesty!
Shouldn’t there be a big red spot where Copehagen is located?
Yes lack of COMMONSENSE, I will “defy” your stupid bet.
It’s WEATHER when less than 30 years, REMEMBER?!?!?!?!?!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
already below average. WEATHER changes by the minute , unlike your AGW which is unphysical!!!! Different wind patterns moving warmer air over the arctic and cooler air from the arctic over lower latitudes will result in the warmer air over the arctic losing more heat to space than it would if still over the lower latitudes. Net result, cooler AVERAGE temps!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
But … but … Iceland is bright red! … we’re all going to fry … in Iceland!
Worse than we thought … Mariss Freimanis (18:51:28) :
In other news, an interesting story about “carousel” frauds in Europe, taking advantage of…… carbon trading.
Brian D (17:48:48) :
“Don’t worry, smoothing(smearing) will take out some of that cold. There are warmer areas in the midst.”
Drat! You beat me to it. I guess it was pretty obvious, though.
Mariss Freimanis (18:51:28) :
Getting mighty hard to hide any sort of decline what with that Tallbloke patented Heat Transfer Pump to the Arctic Energy Leak Zone.
The warmists were jumping up & down when the ice blew out of the Arctic in 07, but the reality of what was happening is just now sinking in.
Air makes a great insulator, but not when the barn door is left wide open.
juanslayton, the links are under the post. See also 1 and 2 are the links.
“commonsense (18:04:01) :
Now in Europe the heat is on again.
Temps in the Mediterranean are back to +15ºC … so…
In Italy and Greece, with 21ºC, people WENT TO THE BEACH.. ON CHRISTMAS!
Even in Continental Europe, Temps are ABOVE FREEZING, so all the snow that fell should have melted away.”
Unsinn. Tell that to the snow. I’m in Braunschweig, Germany. 10cm fresh snow on the cars and that’s here in the city. If you don’t believe me:
http://www.wetteronline.de/cgi-bin/aktframe?LANG=de&TYP=temperatur&ART=bild&JJ=news&KEY=DL
There’s a north-south divide here; the south is above zero and gets air from the west, we in northern germany are still slightly below zero.
Not an arctic blast ATM, though, or cold eastern wind from russia.
commonsense (18:04:01) :
When the arctic vortex is strong, the cold air stays locked up there, and just goes around and around and around the pole all winter. During such winters it is very cold up there, and more pleasant down here.
However this winter the cold is not locked up there. The hounds of winters have been unleashed, and arctic blasts are roaming far south. So, if the cold air is not trapped up there, of course it will be warmer up there.
Get it?
Now here is the mystery: In which case is there more cold air? When it is all locked up at the poles, or when it is warmer at the poles and the cold spreads down here?
Let me take a wild guess: It takes energy to lock the cold up there. When there is less energy available that cold air escapes. Therefore, contrary to what we might think, it might take more energy (heat) to make it colder at the poles.
Now here’s another wild guess. It might take more energy to create a cold La Nina than a warm El Nino, because it takes a lot of energy to shove all the warm water over to Austrailia and drag the cold, heavy, dense La Nina waters up from the depths. When there is less available energy the warm water comes sloshing back from Austrailia and cold water sinks back down, and you have an El Nina. IE: We have another result contrary to what we might think, as less energy (heat) creates a El Nino’s heating.
Conclusion: My wild guess is that less total energy might create a warm El Nino sending warmth north, at the exact same time less total energy sends the hounds of winter south from the poles. When these two forses meet they brew up super storms. Once again less makes more, as less energy creates more energetic storms.
I will prove my ideas are true, if you will figure out how I can get ten million or so of stimulous money, and a couple of genius geeks who are good at creating computer models.
Moloo, kuhnkat: my definition of “very warm” is a Temperature ANOMALY greater than 3-4ºC.
rbateman,kuhnkat: the link to Danish Centre for Ocean and Ice actually CONFIRMS the NOAA anomalies. The anomalies were greater than 4ºC, this is evident from both the NOAA maps and the Danish graph.
If you don’t see it, you should get a new pair of eyeglasses.
And if wasn’t clear in my post, these maps show WEEKLY anomalies. Just because last day the temperatures returned to normal levels, the WEEKLY anomaly is still astoundingly high.
Commonnonsense
Positive AOs and NAOs are always asssociated with warm anomalies within the high latitude ridges. They are warm core highs where dynamically air is piled on top of low level arctic air. They are associated with the largest surface high pressures on the edges where cold dense air and piled up air combine for greatest weight. These huge air masses push south and displace the polar front equatorward, resulting in unusual cold in middle latitudes.
More cold air is spreading across Europe this weekend and next week and Siberian air keeps invading China. India will have frost and freezes this week.
Give it up. The Dalton (Eddy) Minimum will just keep frustrating you and your warminista buddies the next few decades.
The far-left joker-morons will not relent, even if the glaciers doze their houses down. “Climate science” is becoming the comedy of the first decade of the 21st century! Let the comedy continue!!!!
To be perfectly fair, the MODIS satellite can only image land surface temperature under clear skies. In Winter, clear skies preferentially select for colder days. Therefore, during the sampling time period of 12/11/09 – 12/18/09, it will tend to be the colder days that get imaged.
I’m not saying you should “hide the decline,” but it shouldn’t be exaggerated either. I think MODIS images exaggerate the cold. As the grown-ups in the climate debate, those of us who are skeptical of AGW bear an extra burden to be sure we are presenting data in an unbiased fashion.
Is the anomaly in this image relative to other MODIS-derived temperatures? In that case, the cold biases would cancel. If it is relative to land-based thermometers, it should say so.
Every day reader but never comment but think this comment needs a challenge. commonsense (18:04:01) :
Now in Europe the heat is on again.
Could you inform me what city in europe you show above average. i checked several for the next 10 days and all are below normal/average. for example Helsinki average for Janruary is 30f/23f daily the 10 day forecast is 16f/12f with several snow days. Thanks in advance for your reply.
DirkH: at what elevation does your city stay?
The NOAA maps that I linked have not enough resolution to notice cold spots caused by elevation. Even the cold Alps are missed.
So they only give the Big Picture (at a 500 km scale).
Anyway, thanks for the comment.
“rob m (19:02:38) :
Shouldn’t there be a big red spot where Copehagen is located?
No, it’s a big red flag. The satellite couldn’t pick up the vertical flagpole.
LOL
It won’t surprise me to see NASA report December as one of the hottest months in decades. In fact I will surprise me to see them report this month as anywhere near one of the coldest, which will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they are either deliberately fudging the data or are using a invalid method to process the raw numbers. In either case they should be scolded and if possible punished for publishing bogus climate data, and it must be stopped.
An interesting exercise is to check Wiki on historical coolings, Little Ice Age etc. It’s a hoot. Among some facts and okay speculations you get, albeit covered by disclaimers, some possible causes:
– solar variations, which get a weak run
– “heightened” volcanic activity, which gets the longest treatment, even though there’s an admission that it only has a two year effect.
– population and agriculture decrease after Black Death, implying medieval AGW!
– ocean conveyor slowdown due to – yep – medieval warming
And you even get that grand old sporting implement, slightly re-bent…the hockeystick!
These AGW guys are burrowed in like [snip] snipers on the last Pacific islands. A personal appeal to Jimmy Wales in order?
OT
According to NOAA sea rise has been only 2-3 inches per century.
http://www.burtonsys.com/climategate/MSL_global_trendtablefc.html
“Conclusion #1:
According to NOAA’s data, global average mean sea levels have been creeping up at a rate of only about 2-3 inches per century (0.5-0.7 mm/year). That is about one-third of the 1.8 mm/year (7.1 inches/century) rate which AGW alarmists typically claim.”
“It will be interesting to see how the NASA imagery compares with the anomaly maps of GISS and HadCRUT for December when they are made available.”
It will be interesting to see if the mysterious Siberian hotspot will return to keep the global anomaly high.
Robert of Ottawa (19:07:21) :
But … but … Iceland is bright red! … we’re all going to fry … in Iceland!
It’s OK, they just had to import a lot of red ink to write up their National debt, some of it must have spilt.
Don’t expect the president to change his mind any time soon about man-made global warming.
Obama’s Involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange–The Rest of the Story
http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com/news-channels/usa/obama%E2%80%99s-involvement-in-chicago-climate-exchange-the-rest-of-the-story-5581.htm
Peter of Sydney (20:45:12)
Sorry to hear of your cool December. Here in northern Nevada, on the weather news this evening our local Meteorologist reported that this December will go down as the 4th or 5th coldest December along the Eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range since records have been kept. This of course is all prior to the necessary “adjustments” that you allude to are applied!
Steve Oregon (18:32:18) :
“Ckeck that, 100s of millions.”
I think the real figure will be closer to your first number.
Then again maybe many of the recent immigrants from the south may want to return after a few more winters like the last two.
Keith Minto (21:04:36) :
Robert of Ottawa (19:07:21) :
But … but … Iceland is bright red! … we’re all going to fry … in Iceland!
It’s OK, they just had to import a lot of red ink to write up their National debt, some of it must have spilt
There were these guys working with models who thought they had it sorted. When the GFC hit the fan I think they tried to repatriate money from the UK back to Iceland, but the UK Government actually dealt with them under the terrorism laws. So watch out Phil and fellow modellers at CRU, if there is consistency in the way the UK Government deals with these things there could be a rendition or two to who knows where.
We had 4 inches of global warming today. Now turned to rain… Methinks there will be more along shortly.
BTW. This is totally off topic, but I love this line;
“Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook. ”
Lets see who can name the film it is from. No googling!!!
Cheers!
rbateman: “Move over, rover, and let Bastardi and Corbyn take over.
In fact, I would go so far as to propose that Bastardi be given the head job at NOAA and Corbyn can clean house at the MET.”
I concur completely.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Bob Tisdale (18:03:34) :
“Sorry to go off topic, Anthony, but I thought you’d appreciate this. Through my numerous quest posts here at WUWT, I am now in the pocket of Big Oil:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/12/memo-to-big-oil.html
Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell Big Oil, or they’ve been sending the checks to the wrong Bob Tisdale. Just my luck.”
If it were not so tragic, it would be funny, Bob. Carry on.
The reasonable and sane of the world do not buy that bull**** for a hot minute.
It is plainly obvious that “Big Oil” has jumped on the AGW Train (anybody see the latest Shell commercials??) , so you could not POSSIBLY be a part of it.
The Difference: You actually have a brain. And a damn good one at that.
Carry on!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Peter of Sydney
as I sit here in 37C heat, a random review of BOM temperature data from about 30 towns across Australia indicates that December average maximums are up to 2 degrees above the long term average. I did find a couple of exceptions however.
Anyway Pete, there are two hemispheres; just because it’s cold in the NH doesn’t mean it’s cold here as well; as much as you appear to want it to be. It is summer here you know. And you would be aware that things generally don’t start really cookin’ here until mid Jan through February. It will be interesting to see what happens. I’m not sure what has happened in the rest of the SH and I’m not fussed either way.
So it’s not as cold as you imagine or maybe you’re just stuck in your fridge all day pulling out cold beers.
Caleb (20:20:58) :
Spot on!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Michael (21:15:36) :
So BO up to his armpits CarbonGate. Chicago carbon exchange, your money or your ….who would have guessed and Al was there too.
Steve Oregon (20:55:51) :
OT
According to NOAA sea rise has been only 2-3 inches per century.
Okay, big-head questions. We are burning hydrocarbon fossil fuels. How much new water are we making? I know it’s probably just a drop in the ocean, but not literally one. The planet gains mass continually from assorted “space dust.” How much of that is water, as is found with comets? Also, we are bombarded with cosmic rays, of which almost 90% are protons, naked hydrogen nuclei. Don’t they lead to the creation of new water as well?
Could a statistically significant part of that ocean rise per century, be because new water is being added to the oceans?
How much is the increase in heat over the arctic as shown on the DMI site due to the enthalpy of fusion or latent heat released by freezing water? Wiki shows an incredible amount of 333 Joules per gallon released from freezing. I also noticed on Roger Pielkes website that He mentions that Hansen claims that while the arctic ice sheet was melting that something like .25 W/M2 of the global heat imbalance acculumulating was used to either melt ice or lost in the deep ocean. Therefore now that the ice is growing and thickening it must be adding substaliatal heat to the atmosphere and ocean. The color of the anomaly for the sea ice on Cryosphere today is very purple (thick?)
“kadaka (22:12:04) :
….90% are protons, naked hydrogen nuclei….”
and off course this would statically charge the atmosphere.
I know Leif going to smack us, but just maybe a back of an envelop calc. put to rest this hypothesis.
commonsense (20:28:19) :
Moloo, kuhnkat: my definition of “very warm” is a Temperature ANOMALY greater than 3-4ºC.
You have an odd definition of “very warm.” A temperature of -31ºC in an area where the temperature is normally -35ºC is still pretty cold, in my book, and I’ve been in areas where a 12-hour wind shift altered the local temperature 5ºC for 48 hours.
Paul Friesen:
Current temperatures are given in this map:
http://www.eurometeo.com/english/chart/id_temp7001
Compare it to the January average Highs:
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/temper/images/01/tmax01.png
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/temper/images/01/t_max01.png
I could not find current temperature anomalies map. If you know someone, please share it.
The NOAA website shows warm anomalies in all Europe excluded Scandinavia and Siberia, were there are cool ones.
Bill Tuttle:
it’s not an odd definition when we are talking about climate.
But to settle things once for all,
I BET THE ARCTIC WILL STAY VERY (ANOMALOUSLY) WARM ALMOST ALL WEEKS UNTIL NEXT SUMMER.
That is, weekly surface temperature ANOMALIES above 3-4ºC.
Anthony,
The list of people dead because of the cold is unfortunately MUCH higher. I’ve compiled a list of this cold snap, and it’s at 275, and counting: http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2009/12/december-2009-cold-death-toll.html
Ecotretas
I was 74 years old yesterday, and was reared on a farm in Iowa. I went back to visit this last spring, having been gone since I was 22, to see friends and acquaintances of mine in high school, and there was talk of the expected crops this year. What was a “bumper crop” during the 1940s would not even make a mediocre crop in “modern times”. Speaking in bushels per acre. The only significant difference between times now and times then that I can see is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased a good bit.
The term “Global climate” has no meaning. Climates are local, sometimes a large locality, sometimes a very small locality. Weather, on the other hand, does kill people, sometimes lots of people in a short time, and does, on occasion destroy huge amounts of crops before harvest, and as of now, from what I can see, is quite unpredictable. “Average” temperatures over time are but an arithmetical calculation, and mean nothing. Attempting to extrapolate “trends” to peer into the future is futile, and can be very costly, if one would be so foolish to take heed of these “trend projections.” “Cold snaps”, as they are called, can be deadly. When the temperatures get to the higher range on occasion, are they called “hot snaps”?
Hey children!
Deadly cold? I live here, and I am not dead yet, not even close. We went to school in -35° C when I was a child.
Let’s return to deadly when the mercury has been frozen for a while and we approach -60°C.
This map is clearly wrong for Greece.
commonsense (20:37:47) :
DirkH: at what elevation does your city stay?
The NOAA maps that I linked have not enough resolution to notice cold spots caused by elevation. Even the cold Alps are missed.
So they only give the Big Picture (at a 500 km scale).
Anyway, thanks for the comment.
Braunschweig is at 75m elevation (which a quick google could have shown you if you were interested in obtaining factual information rather than waffling):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunschweig
BTW I am in Berlin (link is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin in case you are unfamiliar with the geography that city as well; it’s only a petty European capital after all), and we are having 10cm of snow (still falling) – over Xmas it was a bit warmer and thawing, but there had been another bout of snow the week before, with night temperatures below -10 degrees Celsius despite UHI, which is pretty unusual for this place that early in the winter I might say. Of course “weather is not climate”, but smoothed-to-death anomaly maps with less than 500km spatial (and similarly poor temporal) resolution are not even weather, just pretty pictures with hardly any resemblance to reality – more Disney animation than science….
“commonsense (18:04:01) :
“Now in Europe the heat is on again.”
You are seriously deluded – by which I mean you ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
Here in the UK, Scotland and the North of England have barely risen above zero for 19 successive days. Today, here on the Scottish Border we are enjoying our 19th day when snow has never melted from the ground and every night has brought severe frosts. It is snowing heavily as I write this. Most fo the roads in the Highlands and the Pennines are either blocked or being kept open only by regular snow-ploughing and intense gritting with salt. If the forecasts are correct, this cold period is going to last until at least the 10th January, which means we will have had 28 days when the ground has been covered in snow. I do not recall such a period in recent decades.
YAMAL!
Global centre of all the cold anomalies.
Again, the coherent pattern of land temperatures is obvious… and totally at odds with the treerings which are not just outliers, they are out-and-out-liars w.r.t. temperature.
commonsense (23:23:02) :
I BET THE ARCTIC WILL STAY VERY (ANOMALOUSLY) WARM ALMOST ALL WEEKS UNTIL NEXT SUMMER.
That is, weekly surface temperature ANOMALIES above 3-4ºC.
And I bet that, regardless of anomalies, it’ll still be cold enough to seriously inhibit the reproductive capabilities of simian figurines composed of copper-zinc alloy…
Commonsense?
Delusional might be a better choice of soubriquet!
Natural Variability Led to Extra-Cold 2008, Research Finds
ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230183204.htm
While i am on science daily:
No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds
ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091230184221.htm
commonsense (20:28:19) :
Moloo, kuhnkat: my definition of “very warm” is a Temperature ANOMALY greater than 3-4ºC.
It’s a seriously stupid definition of warm. Nevertheless I will take your bet.
Anomalies to be measured from the average for 2000-2009 using CRUTEM3.
(You may not under any circumstances choose 1979 and the actual temperatures at that time as your base point. I’ve seen that particular “joke” before.)
🙂
Commonsense
Very risqué that. Anomolie for Nov was 0.77°C. Hasn’t been to 2°C in the last 30yrs.
Not much common sense there then.
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
commonsense (18:04:01) :
“Even in Continental Europe, Temps are ABOVE FREEZING, so all the snow that fell should have melted away.”
Shoul I understand from this that your conception of “Continental Europe” does not include Denmark, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia or Rumania?
LarryOldtimer (00:16:21
You must be joking to suggest that CO2 is the main factor affecting farm yields since the 1940s. (And you don’t see other changes?) Massive increases in fertilizer might make a difference. New hybrids that are planted much more densely and grow taller as well. If farmers went back to the the 1940s seeds and farming practises, they would get 1940s yields.
The latest headline from the German daily Die Welt:
“Warmest decade in 200,000 years”
http://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article5678918/Das-waermste-Jahrzehnt-seit-200-000-Jahren.html
Oddly, Die Welt has no qualms using MetOffice data and graphs to make this dubious claim. Expect loads of such headlines in the coming days.
(Yet, don’t be surprised if the MSM puts them off until the weather moderates).
Graham,
No delusions. It’s cold in northern Europe and mild in southern Europe on account of a warm front that cutting through the continent. See the Low in northern France and the High in Turkey
http://www2.foxnews.com/weather/continent.asp?continent=europe
And temp distibution as shown here:
http://www.findlocalweather.com/weather_maps/temperature_europe.html
But the warmth will give way to the cold in the days ahead. (Click on the hours in the top bar).
http://www.wetter24.de/de/home/wetter/profikarten/gfs_popup/archiv/Europe/t2m/2009123106/nothumb/on/27/ch/81e530b66f.html
“commonsense (18:04:01) :
Now in Europe the heat is on again.
Temps in the Mediterranean are back to +15ºC … so…
In Italy and Greece, with 21ºC, people WENT TO THE BEACH.. ON CHRISTMAS!
Even in Continental Europe, Temps are ABOVE FREEZING, so all the snow that fell should have melted away.
See the NOAA links:
1) Temperatures of last 7 days:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_07.rnl.html
2) Temperature ANOMALIES of last 7 days:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_07a.rnl.html
There is a BIG WARM ANOMALY ( between +3ºC and +9ºC) IN THE ARCTIC …
… despite the NEGATIVE Artic Oscillation values.
Also warm anomalies in Europe. The only notable cool ones are in Siberia-Scandinavia. This air masses will move away as the day pass, but …
I BET THE ARCTIC WILL STAY VERY WARM ALMOST ALL WEEKS UNTIL NEXT SUMMER.
Anyone wants to defy the bet?”
You have to be more specific in the terms of your bet. “almost all weeks” is not clear.
Can I suggest a bet based on the minimum sea Ice level for September 2010?
Even money odds would be a fair bet at 6m sq Km based on
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
If the Arctic is going to be warm for most of 2010 you would expect a number approaching the 2007 record of 4.25m sq km.
The cold will peak on arounf Jan 7.
But this won’t keep warmists from saying that it’s warm in the mediterranean – in Greece or Sicily!
http://www.wetter24.de/de/home/wetter/profikarten/gfs_popup/archiv/Europe/t2m/2009123106/nothumb/on/168/ch/bc29547900.html
The Germans though will have a very different opinion.
commonsense (20:28:19) :
The mean for the 7 day timeperiod is 245K. The actual reading was 247K.
The math shouldn’t be too difficult for you to handle.
But, just in case, you might try running your mouse over to the 1970’s and checking out the very high winter anomaly periods that occured in the Arctic above 80N, when the Coming Ice Age was the scare of the day.
It will be interesting to see how the NASA imagery compares with the anomaly maps of GISS and HadCRUT for December when they are made available. More images are available at links below.
….
This image shows the impact of the cold snap on land surface temperatures across the region from December 11–18, 2009, compared to the 2000–2008 average.
I think we need to play fair here.
1. The MODIS image only covers one week not a complete month.
2. The anomaly base period is 2000-2008 while GISS and HadCRUT use 1951-80 and 1961-90 respectively.
Here, for example, is the GISS map for Mar 2009 relative to 2000-2008 (anomaly=-0.16)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=11&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=03&year1=2009&year2=2009&base1=2000&base2=2008&radius=1200&pol=reg
Commonsense said: “Now in Europe the heat is on again”.
When I went to the first NOAA link, I got a little exclamation mark at bottom left of my (IE) browser plus the message “Error on page.”
Clearly Microsoft know something!
Since Cyrosphere Today’s compare is back up, thought it would be appropriate to check on the Sea Ice and Snow Cover:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/New%20Image.GIF
Compared to last year.
commonsense (18:04:01) :
I bet you won’t go up to the Arctic this winter for your winter holidays and swim in the “VERY WARM” tropical waters. Maybe try going next summer when those hungry polar bears are looking for something to eat in among the steamy seas.
If you think its warm today then please read about the time when
crocodiles roamed the Arctic and breadfruit trees grew in Greenland!
We’re all doomed to runaway melting of ice, it’s worse than we thought. :o)
Bill, I spit my coffee all over my computer. Frozen that hard are they? Gotta warm them puppies up if you expect to shoot out of a cannon.
You can clearly see the city of Moskou. And you can see other urban area’s. You can see that the Rurh area with multiple city’s next to each other are still white.
Rather off topic, but Richard Heg’s reference above also had this in the sidebar:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0603-can_carbon_dioxide_be_a_good_thing.htm
It discusses the benefit of carbon dioxide, which is another interesting aspect of this whole discussion, and raises questions about the validity of (or perhaps confirms) the article entitled “No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds”
Commonsense has His day and he’s… right!
I didn’t see so much prejudice evinced by “Anti-AGW commenters” with their remarks here as far as I started to read WUWT.
One Commenter sensibly explained the present Europe’s weather – the South is warmer, and the North is colder. The border lies on NW to SE line. Here in Poland too, as in Germany, the upper part of my country is gripped by cold (mild cold), with the south being showered with rain day after day. But that doesn’t prove neither WARMING nor COOLING.
Here in Cracow just as in Berlin we have 5-10 cm snow and mild rain! This hour I can see snowing, the next one I will watch windows covered with rain drops. But generally **warm** touched the southern parts of Europe amnd that is the FACT the Commonsense pointed out. Whether some of you like it or not.
But what is of my concern is the vocabulary used by most of Americans or so called Westerners. As some of you know I read WUWT not only for the scientific news about climate but to get known with western culture.
Tell me Mr Watts why the dramatic title – “… deadly…” (cold in Europe and Russia).
Minus 10 centigrade is not a severe cold. Far from that. This part of northern hemisphere witnessed such temperatures many times in my life (I’m 53 years old). -30, -35 deg C is Siberian cold and it happened in Poland too.
I always wondered why Siberian or Russian people “laughed at you”, citizens over the Pond, when seeing you wearing fur hats with only 0 to -5 deg C outdoors!
Most of the “dead” are dead to their own free will! Alcoholics, “freedom lovers” aka homeless (but due their “style of life”), stupid drivers, or forgotten kinsmen. The deaths from cold were, are and will be occuring year after year. It seems to me that it is your Western culture with skewed views on humanity as a whole and with false and hypocritical attitude to a Man especially which suggest your minds such idiotic titles. In this context of Climate and Weather matters, course.
Not for the first time reading WUWT blog I felt like reading RealClimate scaremongers’ website.
Best regards and Happy New Year to all!
For those interested in wagering on more “mainstream” (i.e., global) projections of temperature, the well-known Dublin-based event-prediction website http://www.intrade.com takes bets on whether 2010 will be the hottest year on record. Ditto for 2011. It also takes bets on whether any or all of the years 2010-2014 will be one of the five warmest years on record. (The GISS temperature database is used to settle bets.)
The odds on that site (arrived at via a bid/ask market among participants) have a good track record of being right about elections and other events. Currently the odds on 2010 being one of the five warmest years on record are 75 to 25, and the odds of it being THE warmest are 33 to 67. You can visit the site to see how the odds are shaping up for the years ahead. (However, bets for future years have only recently been posted, so volume is low at the moment.) Click on:
Markets –>
Climate & Weather –>
Global Temperature –>
Will Global Average Temperatures for 2010-2011 be THE warmest on record? (Click on the + sign) –>
OR
Will Global Average Temperatures for 2009-2014 be AMONG FIVE warmest on record?
(If you want to bet (after you’ve registered, etc.), click: )
Trade (in the 2010.GLOBALTEMP.WARMEST box) →
(enter your Quantity and Price in the Bid/Asked box on the left) →
Click Buy (if you think 2010 will be the warmest on record), OR
Sell (if you don’t)
Quote: “It will be interesting to see how the NASA imagery compares with the anomaly maps of GISS and HadCRUT for December when they are made available.”
For an agency not-so-fondly referred to by some as “Never A Straight Answer”, NASA imagery and other media cannot always be trusted. Fortunately, the truth usually leaks out from conduits in NASA or through persons working with NASA, but not in the manner that you might expect.
Graham,
“Here in the UK, Scotland and the North of England have barely risen above zero for 19 successive days.”
I live in the midlands, and the temperature has not climbed above 3C. Yet in the anomaly map in commonsense’s link, the whole of the British Isles is shown orange, representing an anomaly of about +5C. Since the average for this time of year is 4C, the map is representing 9C, which is utter nonsense.
Clearly, there is something very, very wrong with that map.
BillD (03:42:19),
Correct about the increased use of fertilizer, etc. But increased CO2 does have a significant effect on plant growth. Here are some pics of plants of the same age grown at various CO2 levels: click
LOL!
Berlin Germany webcam:
http://www.wetter24.de/de/home/wetter/webcam.html
(You got about another 45 mins. before it gets dark)
Took me a sec to realise I was looking at icicles.
The anomaly map in commonsense’s link is way off…. 15 days of snow on the ground here in Aberdeenshire with 8cm of global warming last night with more due this evening and New Years Day…bring it on!
New Year celebrations cancelled in Inverness due to snow and ice:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8435578.stm
BillD (03:42:19) :
“You must be joking to suggest that CO2 is the main factor affecting farm yields since the 1940s. (And you don’t see other changes?) Massive increases in fertilizer might make a difference. New hybrids that are planted much more densely and grow taller as well. If farmers went back to the the 1940s seeds and farming practises, they would get 1940s yields.”
My lawn disagrees with you in regards to that last statement. Thirty years ago, I mowed every 10 to 14 days from May through September to keep my lawn height below 5 inches. Now I have to mow every 7 to 11 days for the same, and I’m at the same address as thirty years ago. I do not fertilize with any commercial products such as Weed and Feed (never have, since I’m a perpetual cat parent, and they like to nibble on the grass), except for dumping cow manure on the occasional bare spot. The same with re-seeding, just the bare and thin spots, never the entire lawn. I’ve also noticed substantially fewer problems with bare spots and thin areas, compared to thirty years ago. I do hope that CO2 % levels off, as I really do not want to have to mow the lawn twice a week in the future.
Primary data, I love it!
commonsense
There is a BIG WARM ANOMALY ( between +3ºC and +9ºC) IN THE ARCTIC …
… despite the NEGATIVE Artic Oscillation values.
Also warm anomalies in Europe. The only notable cool ones are in Siberia-Scandinavia. This air masses will move away as the day pass, but …
I BET THE ARCTIC WILL STAY VERY WARM ALMOST ALL WEEKS UNTIL NEXT SUMMER.
And where exactly is all this energy keeping the Arctic “very warm” coming from?
How are things in Australia this summer?
Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
“Tell me Mr Watts why the dramatic title – “… deadly…” (cold in Europe and Russia).”
I live in the UK, where the weather is milder than Poland and Russia. The old in particular here who do not have enough cash to heat their homes quickly succumb to hypothermia and pneumonia and other chest infections which lead to death.
Those countries that continually live in a cold climate appear much better able to survive the cold, so I assume it comes down to what you are used to.
Just look at the chaos on British roads and rail caused by an inch or two of snow to see what I mean.
Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
Most of the “dead” are dead to their own free will!
Do you ever read what you type before hitting “submit”?
“Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
[..]
Most of the “dead” are dead to their own free will! Alcoholics, “freedom lovers” aka homeless (but due their “style of life”), stupid drivers, or forgotten kinsmen. The deaths from cold were, are and will be occuring year after year. It seems to me that it is your Western culture with skewed views on humanity as a whole and with false and hypocritical attitude to a Man especially which suggest your minds such idiotic titles. In this context of Climate and Weather matters, course.[…]”
I gotta defend the Brits and Americans here while saying at the same time that you’re partially right, Przemysław.
But it is a fact that cold kills more people than warmth, and while you’re right about people sleeping rough dying and making the headlines in their local newspaper, there are much more cold-related deaths simply because more pneumonia cases happen, mostly killing the elderly. These are “silent” deaths nobody reports about. It’s so common that we are actually used to it in EVERY northern country.
Also the danger of bad harvests does exist and will, in my opinion, force wheat prices up severely. We will probably not be able to increase the production of biofuel, maybe we will have to reduce it again.
Some people here talk about famine and doom and gloom scenarios by comparing to the LIA. This is just silly, folks. Back then people didn’t have fossil fuels or nuclear power or large scale hydropower. We have all of these and OF COURSE we will use all that when necessary and forget about that little CO2 thingy that allegedly had something to do with the warming.
Our chancellor Frau Merkel just did her talk to the nation. As usual she warned of hard times ahead, bla bla bla, finishing with a warning that we also need to continue our CO2 reduction.
That was the LAST part of the talk. In other words, the least important. The entire CO2 mania is about to drop off the attention horizon sooner rather than later is my impression.
Przemyslaw, thanks, for your observation. I heartily agree. I grew up in Winnipeg in the 1950’s, and the cold we are experiencing now is still mild relative to then. Both sides of every argument tend to exaggeration in America, regretably. However don’t blame Anthony. He tends to be quite balanced, but he allows free reign to the less experienced and less equilibrated, and I suspect a lot of these folk don’t have much of any place else to vent. I also get irritated by the politicization of these discussions by numerous contributors, but that is also the temper of America at present. Murray
“Roger Knights (06:14:37) :
[…]
The odds on that site (arrived at via a bid/ask market among participants) have a good track record of being right about elections and other events. Currently the odds on 2010 being one of the five warmest years on record are 75 to 25, and the odds of it being THE warmest are 33 to 67. ”
Very interesting, like the Delphi principle as explained in “The Showckwave Rider” by John Brunner.
I find these odds realistic. My reasoning is: Temperatures were flat over 10 years and start to go down now due to beginning of solar minimum. So we are still near the maximum of the curve. It’s like a sine wave added to a long term warming trend starting in 1850. So even tough i expect 3 cool decades, i go along with what the odds say.
Maybe a bookie is a better (and cheaper) predictor than the GCM’s.
Smokey, to add to your point, for a while in my career, my job was to design & build control systems for “growth chambers”. These chambers were for speeding early growth of plants. You had to control not only temperature and humidity, but added CO2 to speed things along. It was interesting to see what a difference CO2 made on plant growth.
DirkH says:
We have a much larger population than we did then, and a great many of them depend on the energy we get from fossil fuels.
At the margins, there is an opportunity for a great many deaths if cold weather affects crops and the supply of fuels and the distribution of electricity.
It is important to compare and record the predictions (based on ‘value-added’ data by the Met Office and the other usual suspects) for the season we can expect (‘hottest winter evah1’) with what is going on in real terms.
However, while looking at global features we must not forget that these are of necessity coarse-grained. Local events are finer grained – and these are what people experience and record.
Take Europe – its not such a surprise that some countries and regions are warmer than others. They always have been, due to geophysical features. Thus something like the Alps or the Mediterranean sea do have influences on regional temperatures. After all, before WWI the rich Brits used to decamp to the Riviera, to escape the British weather and indulge in warmer temperatures.
I think it is a mistake not to keep in mind that local conditions can make for quite large variations in temperature, even within a small region: mountains, hills, aspect, closeness of large bodies of water – they all make a nonsense of the blanket predictions provided by the Met Office and such.
As I keep saying – looking at computer graphs and models is one thing, and very useful it is too, provided the input data are right. Getting out a bit into Nature and experiencing what weather is all about, on an individual level, should most definitely be a requirement for all climate scientists.
Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33)
Tell me Mr Watts why the dramatic title – “… deadly…” (cold in Europe and Russia).
Quite simple really, follow the title link to NASA just above the image:
“Deadly Cold Across Europe and Russia”
which goes here:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42067
…and you can read that very title at NASA, along with their mention of 90 dead, including 79 homeless. You might want to check things out a bit before expressing misplaced indignation at my use of NASA press releases.
Not all people are homeless by choice, and I know this because I was very nearly homeless myself once. I had lost a job, and was down to less than 10 dollars in my bank account. My rent was due. Had I not launched a frantic campaign to sell many of my belongings, I would have been homeless. Thankfully my luck changed the next month.
Some people don’t have the internal resources to overcome such adversity, or personal demons like alcoholism. Some are terrified of being indoors.
Here in my town of Chico, CA three years ago we had a man who died of hyperthermia on the front lawn of our local church. It was tragic, nobody understood this, until it was revealed that he had lost his home in a fire, and he himself had been badly burned. Like some earthquake survivors, he could not bring himself to stay indoors anymore though he had the means via insurance settlement and a bank account.
Not everyone who is homeless wants to be that way, but their demons dictate their behavior. But I agree, a few people who want to live unfettered are that way by choice.
– Anthony
That is a bit simplistic…
Since your childhood I do believe that a lot of new crop varieties have been developed producing better yield, farming equipment have improved, irrigation system have improved, target fertilisation schemes has been developed etc. etc.
I can go on, this is what I do at the university…and to add insult to injury, greenhouse growers deliberately add CO2 to their greenhouses to enhance/increase yield.
And the odd thing is, despite adding CO2 to the greenhouse atmosphere it does not get warmer, that would have been a neat trick to save energy.
A fun story to wrap up 2009. From Salt Lake City…
Snowstorm squelches climate change protest
A downtown protest of the climate change talks in Copenhagen became a victim of Wednesday’s snowstorm.
“Not many people showed up because of the blizzard conditions,” said organizer Clea Major, an international studies student at the University of Utah.
It didn’t take long for the six friends to pack up a bullhorn and posters they’d planned to use for their “scream-in,” an outlet for their frustration about the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks earlier this month to curb the pollution blamed for climate change…
She called Wednesday evening’s effort a success…
[source]
“AdderW (08:33:55) :
[…]
Since your childhood I do believe that a lot of new crop varieties have been developed producing better yield, farming equipment have improved, irrigation system have improved, target fertilisation schemes has been developed etc. etc. ”
Exactly. Yields grow slightly more than 1 % per year. Lomborg explains it in his book “The sceptical environmentalist” this way: You can increase the yield by using new varieties that direct more of their energy toward growing fruit than towards the stem. Which, incidentally, makes them more prone to fall over.
Przemysław Pawełczyk :
Thank you for supporting me. Finally there is someone that try to stop the “Coolinista” nonsense.
FOR ALL, globally warm anomalies for December far outweight the cool ones. Specially in the Southern Hemisphere Oceans, thanks to the El Niño, and obviously, in the Artic Basin.
But I don’t agree on your opinion about the poor people that have died in the streets under the cold snap. These are unemployed people, homeless. Please show respect for your poor brothers.
If they are how they are, it’s not their fault, but the fault of the Economic System that left them behind, unemployed and without any Health Care System that save them.
And don’t forget that there is a INFLUENZA PANDEMIC underway, and with the cold, it spreads like fire (The 2009A/H1N1 Virus, unlike Seasonal Influenza, can cause a fulminant viral pneumonia. If not treated within 24 hours, it will destroy the lung tissue and you will die).
Someone asked where the Arctic heat comes from: it comes FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN, that is releasing the heat accumulated during the Artic Summer. With the now THIN ICE, this heat in the waters is no longer isolated from the Atmosphere above. This is ARCTIC AMPLIFICATION.
For anyone interested, google the paper “The emergence of ocean-based Artic Amplification”. It is a recent paper.
And this phenomenom, that is at the root of the RECORD WARM ANOMALIES IN RECENT FALL AND WINTER (ARCTIC) SEASONS, began an intensified during the years of the so-called “Global Cooling”.
What Global Cooling ?!
It is just the La Niña cooling of 2007-2008. It affected the areas where ENSO is dominant.
I don’t know where to post this comment, but here it is.
Why not use the space station to perform atmospheric research by using the direct Sun’s energy on various atmospheric densities and compositions?
One could easily alter CO2 “without the atmosphere” getting in the way, and expose to “unaltered Solar energy”.
Couldn’t one also create a simulated magnetic field to test the Cosmic Ray input to cloud formation, etc????
Gee, a cloud chamber in space!!!
—–
May I also add that when people die because of the cold it is deadly, quite literally, even if NASA had not mentioned it. I believe over 70 people died in Poland at the start of this “mild cold” as you say. Try telling their families that the cold has not been deadly.
Last winter between December to March 2008/09 there were an estimated 36,700 more deaths in England and Wales. Is this deadly cold or not? At times like this you will often hear on the UK news individuals dying from hypothermia just returning from the bar or having a car breakdown and attempting escape on foot. That’s deadly my friend. I may be wrong but I believe that heatwaves can also kill but fewer people in the UK – man is a tropical animal remember.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
Cold is deadly to those that it kills each and every year in Europe and Russia.
Lucy Skywalker (02:01:05) :
A few things Lucy.
1. You should probably do your own estimate for the temperature around Yamal. a distance weighted average would probably be ok.
2. You really do have to look at the season, because the reconstruction only claims a seasonal recon. Some recons do annual recons other do seasonal
Anthony has already addressed the “why” for this specific post, now I’ll try to enlighten you the “why” pertaining to the use of exaggerated modifiers in American and Western vocabulary.
It’s all about creating headlines that grab attention. Reality needn’t play a role at all and sometimes the use of words like “deadly” can be rather comical as in: “a deadly airstrike.” As most airstrikes are intended to kill and smash things, adding “deadly” to the discussion of the airstrike is superfluous, but makes for dramatic presentation. When delivered by the talking heads on television, who add vocal and visual emphasis to the word “deadly,” you get even more drama.
The Western media has taken to referring to any event that costs any life as “deadly.” As few as one life is enough for an event to earn “deadly” status. Now even government agencies do it to get attention.
Think about it.
“Cold Across Europe and Russia.” Hmm…so what? It’s winter.
“Deadly Cold Across Europe and Russia.” Now I think I’ll read more.
It’s something great chefs learned long ago…it’s all in the presentation.
“and even art and literature*.”
“*O roving Muse, recall that wonderous year,
When winter reigned in bleak Britannia’s air;”.
“the hardened waters”.
“that brought dire consequences to its peoples.”.
…-
“The Little Ice Age in Europe
Western Europe experienced a general cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460 and a very cold climate between 1560 and 1850 that brought dire consequences to its peoples. The colder weather impacted agriculture, health, economics, social strife, emigration, and even art and literature. Increased glaciation and storms also had a devastating affect on those that lived near glaciers and the sea.”
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html
“*THE GREAT FROST – John Gay (1716)
from Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London
O roving Muse, recall that wonderous year,
When winter reigned in bleak Britannia’s air;
When hoary Thames, with frosted osiers crowned,
Was three long moons in icy fetters bound.
The waterman, forlorn along the shore,
Pensive reclines upon his useless oar,
Sees harnessed steeds desert the stony town,
And wander roads unstable, not their own;
Wheels o’er the hardened waters smoothly glide,
And rase with whitenened tracks the slippery tide.
Here the fat cook piles high the blazing fire,
And scarce the spit can turn the steer entire.
Booths sudden hide the Thames, long streets appear,
And numerous games proclaim the crowded fair.”
http://londonrelocationservices.com/blog/
Dying from hypothermia doesn’t just depend on the air temperature. There are numerous factors: how well clothed are you, how well insulated is your house, have you gone into water. I’ll end the list here as there are to many to list.
So for example an elderly person living in Finland might live in a double glazed house with adequate heating, food and clothing is less likely to die from cold compared to an elderly person living rough in the streets or in low quality housing and fails to pay their heating bills. -1C can kill!
rbateman wrote: “Since Cyrosphere Today’s compare is back up, thought it would be appropriate to check on the Sea Ice and Snow Cover:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/New%20Image.GIF
Compared to last year.”
The extent looks to be almost the same but judging from the colour there is a lot more thick ice. Interesting to note the much greater snow cover on land, i.e. without the patchiness of 2008. This probably also indicates thicker snow cover.
rbateman (18:49:08) :
commonsense (18:04:01) :
This
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
says that the anomaly is all wrong.
Why does it? The arctic plot and the anomaly map look quite consistent to me. It’s true the Arctic temperatures have dropped in the last few days but temperatures in the last 7 days have been above average.
Hey, big OT question:
Who is looking at deciduous tree lines in the arctic? Are severe cold events like this enough to push back the tree line? It would be an interesting experiment to see how many are killed & if the tree line even corresponds to average winter temperature.
It is not just Europe and America that is feeling the cold. Cold deaths on Bangladesh!
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/ … index_html
As always the poor suffer the most.
Cold in Pakistan:
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/homeless-women-and-children-suffer-in-pakistan-freeze
Cold in India:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34642958/ns/weather/
Cold in China:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Internation … 261862010/
However many die of cold in Europe and America you should multiply several times over to all for the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
Vincent (06:41:27) :
I live in the midlands, and the temperature has not climbed above 3C. Yet in the anomaly map in commonsense’s link, the whole of the British Isles is shown orange, representing an anomaly of about +5C. Since the average for this time of year is 4C, the map is representing 9C, which is utter nonsense.
I too live in the Midlands but I can’t see what map you are referring to.
Anthony Watts
“Not all people are homeless by choice, and I know this because I was very nearly homeless myself once.” Etc
Thank you for this Mr Watts. Too often the victim is blamed for the situation as an avoidance to the call for action.
Nice catch Smokey. Once I clean the Coffee from the monitor I will be sure to remember it is all just weather.
Seriously though, even if you subscribe fully to the “gas ‘o’ doom™” and it’s many wonderful properties, should you really be drawing attention to Global Warming … in a blizzard … at commuter time … with a bull horn …
Dishevelled individual at train station with a “repent ye sinners – the end is almost nigh” board comes to mind.
Then I read … “said organizer Clea Major, an international studies student at the University of Utah. ”
Now hop over to this thread and re-read some of the comments concerning (in the abstract) “international studies student[s]”. If a billion ton Asteroid were confirmed by NASA to be heading our way right now would you believe the news if it came from Bullhorn Clea?
Jeez, these people need to get some professional help. Probably from the same people that helped Hansen with his congressional testimony way back when.
[REPLY – I recall a cartoon where in the first panel, the prophet of doom is carrying a sign that says “The World Will End Tomorrow”. In the next panel, he is carrying a sign that says “The World Ended Yesterday” ~ Evan]
“commonsense (09:20:14) :
And don’t forget that there is a INFLUENZA PANDEMIC underway, and with the cold, it spreads like fire (The 2009A/H1N1 Virus, unlike Seasonal Influenza, can cause a fulminant viral pneumonia. If not treated within 24 hours, it will destroy the lung tissue and you will die).”
H1N1 turned out to be a very mild influenza. Lots of the school fellows of my kid already had it, stayed at home for a week and came back. The german vaccination campaign so far resulted in millions of doses leftover because few bothered to go.
“commonsense (09:20:14) :
And don’t forget that there is a INFLUENZA PANDEMIC underway, and with the cold, it spreads like fire ”
Wait commonsense – didn’t you just say it’s very WARM outside? Because of the very WARM anomaly? Caughtya! You’re a troll that just jumps on any bandwagon he can find. Happy new year 🙂
There was an implicit context to Anthony’s remarks about “deadly cold” that he did not bother to print because we WUWTers are aware of the writing of Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist. Namely, the high number of excessive (but unpublicized) deaths in Europe during cold winters, especially as compared to the highly publicized number of excessive deaths during a Paris heat wave a few years ago.
Whoa, Nellie!
PS: These deaths are not silly freedom-loving drunks freezing out in the open, but a much larger number of poverty-stricken retirees lacking money for enough heat for their homes.
As for whether there is deadly heat or deadly cold, Cap & Trade Holy Water blessings won’t save you.
It won’t matter how many Global Warming chants are recited, or how many demonstrations are attended.
Only preparation will make a difference.
Nobody controls the weather or the climate, though they fancy they might forcibly alter it’s course, with unknown consequences.
So, the answer, it seems, that Climate Changers give to alleged catastrophically anthropogenic warming is to catastrophically force the climate to a new state, the outcome of which is unknown.
You could end up with an Anthropogenic Ice Age.
There are but 2 choices here:
Adapt or Gamble.
This is precisely the overly dramatic vocabulary that Przemysław was pointing out. In the first place “pandemic” simply refers to the fact that the specific virus is spread across multiple regions and has infected a large proportion of the human population. The fact that there is a pandemic doesn’t make it more severe (in terms of mortality), just more widespread.
Second, your phrasing makes it sound like the cold in and of itself is causing the virus to spread faster. If you check the WHO and CDC websites, you will find that new H1N1 cases are actually declining with the onset of winter. Which is not to say that cold is slowing the virus either, but that there are numerous other factors that impact a virus’ spread.
http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_12_30/en/index.html
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/
Cold indirectly influences a more rapid spread of any virus due to the fact that people tend to stay indoors more and the enclosed indoor heat combined with people sharing space, coughing and sneezing, touching with contaminated hands makes an ideal viral breeding ground. But cold does not make H1N1 “spread like wildfire.”
Third, most people who get H1N1 fully recover. There have been roughly 12,000 confirmed fatalities worldwide due to H1N1. Even if the mortality is understated by 300%, that would still bring the total to only the annual seasonal flu mortality in the US alone.
Kindly cite your source for: “The 2009A/H1N1 Virus, unlike Seasonal Influenza, can cause a fulminant viral pneumonia. If not treated within 24 hours, it will destroy the lung tissue and you will die.” My search of both WHO and CDC found no specific reference to fulminant viral pneumonia as it relates to H1N1. However, I did find references to many other illnesses including other influenza virus strains that can lead to fulminant viral pneumonia. I admit that I may have missed it, so I’d appreciate a reference.
More ON topic, you are overly impressed by “anomalies”. They are simply deviations from an arbitrarily selected reference point, in this case an average of temps over a period of time (much manipulated and tortured).
That doesn’t mean that the average temperature over the selected period is the “right” temperature for the planet. I don’t believe we’ve really ascertained that yet. That’s not even taking into account the gymnastics involved in coming up with a “global average temperature” in the first place.
commonsense (18:04:01)
After reading the alarmist fraud redolent in the CRU emails & code, and after seeing how NOAA sites Stephons screens in this country (courtesy of Anthony Watts) I’m too suspicious of NOAA’S ground measurements to accept them as anything more than a curiousity. Want to convince someone of a scientific or engineering background? Show them data from satellites. Satellite data is fully transparent and open to the public. Satellite data isn’t cherry picked or have localized, unexplained, suspicious adjustments that change year to year.
Murray (08:15:09) :
Przemyslaw, thanks, for your observation. I heartily agree. I grew up in Winnipeg in the 1950’s, and the cold we are experiencing now is still mild relative to then.
And it’s not like it was when I were a boy ….
Incidentally, when Przemyslaw finds that his pension fund is worth jack due to some double dealing by it’s holders, perhaps I can suggest his last act – steal a few minutes on a net connection to tell us stage by stage all about Hypothermia. You-tube maybe? (no changing the video settings to make you look less blue though)
DirkH
Some people here talk about famine and doom and gloom scenarios by comparing to the LIA. This is just silly, folks. Back then people didn’t have fossil fuels or nuclear power or large scale hydropower. We have all of these and OF COURSE we will use all that when necessary and forget about that little CO2 thingy that allegedly had something to do with the warming.
“OF COURSE” the way things are going ATM you may get the chance to find out what happens when we all move to a “back then” culture [no fossil fuels]. It was, after all, so much better in the past, I just love history.
Cold is real, ice is real, crop volumes are real, famine is real, crops to bio fuel is real, hypothermia is real … and for everything else there’s always “2D, well mixed atmosphere CO2 theory”, eco-whack-jobs, the Cabal “hiding the decline” or Goldman Sachs and Shell attempting to fuel carbon markets and make a shed load of cash.
The eco-loon greens may well help us all to become the only species in Earth history to ever “vote” for it’s own extinction. Can we warm the Planet? if we could [v. doubtful] then we should. Our species has spent far too much time surviving the ice and cold, it is more than past time we had a party to celebrate the warmth [and abundance of food]. Though it’s a travesty that we should enjoy an interglacial and a travesty that we have one.
So on NYE 2009/10 I wish you all [even the drive-by idiots] a bountiful and warm new year. May you ignore the bull horns at the side of the road while you struggle home from work to your warm, well fed family. May it all continue for many years to come.
Anthony/mods – can we have a NYE thread for seasons greetings?
Mr Watts and other Commenters
I didn’t intend to touch THAT cord of human life. It seems to me every commenter, both you and me too, share his own part of the Truth of the debate.
But. The title of this post is Yours, not from NASA. You could conjured up a new one, more neutral but you decided to incorporate NASA’s title into your own one. So much for my “misplaced indignation”. Said that the question entails another one.
The interesting point in this line of thinking is the (in)famous language gap between a native speaker and a person to whom English is the second language. From my point of view you could use 1) the NASA title as an irony with “implicit context” (Roger Knights (11:06:02)) and/or as a sublime tool in this “climate discussion” or 2) you just published what you had just felt.
Did I make a bad assessment of your intentions? Really? If you publish globally, you must expect “global views” in return (it is from people with different cultural backgrounds).
Every year humanity as a whole pays horrendous “civilization dues” in the form of those killed in car accidents. “Paths of Life” someone could say. Why “cold” is elevated to “deadly cold” when it belong to the same category of “Man’s paths of Life” on this Globe?
Mr Watts, I really do appreciate what you do, but sometimes I see what does not belong to the mainstream topics on this weblog and you know that very well. Let’s say that it’s part of my inquisitive nature. 🙂
Best regards
Przemysław Pawełczyk
P.S.
On the other hand “something’s rotten in UK” as people in GREAT Britain dies at -1 degrees Celsius, isn’t it?
[REPLY – “Deadly cold” (or even “deathly cold”) as applied to weather is not an uncommon idiom in English. ~ Evan]
commonsense (18:04:01) :
Now in Europe the heat is on again.
commonsense (20:37:47) :
DirkH: at what elevation does your city stay?
You speak of elevation?
This afternoon I went for a walk on the Malvern Hills, and above 800ft. there is good snow cover; above 1200ft. it is quite crunchy still. Not much elevation there then?
Part way through my enterprise, I decided it was appropriate to do some research for my new crime novel Yellow Stains in the Snow. I was however, due to my reluctance, at this delicate stage of the project, to cause either alarm or hilarity (or arrest), obliged to desist, due to the large number of tourists in the area at the time. (And not wanting to give away the plot)
Many of the tourists were throwing handfuls of global warming at one another, in what I took to be a spontaneous expression of gratitude towards our glorious government for the caring way in which they have dealt with us during this heat wave.
Brian D
Doesn’t NASA automatically correct/ground truth the temperatures it measures using surface gauges that measure air temperatures? I would assume that NASA would do it as a matter of course and must have the computing power.
If not, can the NASA satellite data be trusted? Like all remotely sensed data, a little ground truthing will improve the estimates.
JDN and the Treeline
You’re joking, right? And what do you consider a tree? anything over 4 feet?
The arctic treeline isn’t just related to temperature otherwise you wouldn’t have trees just a few miles from Kugluktuk but would have trees 400 or 500 miles south at Rankin Inlet. That is like thinking that trees grow faster when temperatures are warming so trees in the desert would grow twice as fast as those in the mountains’ foothills.
Przemysław Pawełczyk (12:33:59) :
[REPLY – “Deadly cold” (or even “deathly cold”) as applied to weather is not an uncommon idiom in English. ~ Evan]
Thank you. You meant “terribly cold”? But this time “deadly cold” was explicitly connected with death tall.
Anyway thanks, idioms are true “tour de force” of learning foreign languages. 😉
Regards
Here’s a satellite nice view of our friends across the big pond as New
Year’s Eve approaches:
http://www.sat24.com/
Happy New Year from the States to one and all !
[quote] David L. Hagen (18:15:43) :
Chapter 2, The Great Famine, The Little Ice Age: how climate made history, 1300-1850 By Brian M. Fagan
The winter of 1215 in particular was exceptionally cold in eastern Europe and caused widespread famine.[/quote]
May I add to this note from David by mentioning “Arctic Ireland” IBSN1-870132-85-8 which describes famine in 1740-41 in Ireland, a famine more devastating than the famine of 1845-51 the “Potato Famine” of which many folks are aware
Piers Corbyn predicts that we’re in for bad weather in Europe; ferocious and dangerous in January and cold in February. http://climaterealists.com/attachments/database/WA10No1NewYearMessageFerociousWinterWeatherWarning.pdf
Happy new year to everybody from Italy,
a chilling wind is coming from the Tyrrenian sea, here in Naples…
Best regards!
savethesharks (21:55:29) “It is plainly obvious that “Big Oil” has jumped on the AGW Train […]”
Unless I’m misinformed, the most shrieking alarmist force in Canada is funded by BO. Elites will make money (& gain political leverage to control balance-tilt) with AGW (whether left- or right- wingers). It is the common people (of both wings) who stand to suffer the most from the infowar (war pigs theme). The elite can use engineered “control issues” like this to blow boom-&-bust bubbles and tweak the odds of what party will be in office. Depending on the transient short-horizon agenda, there can be more opportunity for strategic change & profit with one wing or another in office. It’s all about engineering elite-steering via controllable issues. The rest of us, whether left- or right- leaning: pawns. It seems that one feasible way to avoid being a pawn is to choose to be sensibly-balanced. (Becoming elite – not so easy, by contrast.)
–
Bob Tisdale, I posted some notes near the bottom of…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/28/the-arctic-oscillation-index-goes-strongly-negative/
…that give some insight into the El Nino step-changes you investigate.
In particular, note the connection between the upward jog here…
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/CumuSumAO70.png
…, the ~’88-’98 phase-concordance here…
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/GLAAM_LOD_AO_NAO.png
…, & a picture well-known to you:
http://i42.tinypic.com/2hfukjm.jpg
Extremes of global circulation coincided with extremes in acceleration of NH dynamics (including ice melt/blow) – hence the step changes.
Any strategic comments you might offer could be helpful in my plans to develop new methods & software to probe further.
Best Regards.
continuing from above …
In other words, the NH, caught in a global spin, blew its continental lid off and became more maritime.
Paul Vaughn: Why use cumulative AO (or NAO) when you could smooth it and invert it? The resulting curve would probably give you the shift you desired in terms that aren’t difficult to explain:
http://i37.tinypic.com/33c85c2.png
The comparison curve of the four variables to me illustrates the similarities between the NOA and AO, and between GLAAM and LOD. I see no relationship between the four, other than a random match one might expect with oscilllations.
And I can’t see where the TLT Hovmoller fits with the others. Would you be better off plotting TLT anomalies in a graph instead of using the Hovmoller? That way you can plot them with the other datasets in one graph. Visually, I have trouble comparing multiple graphs side by side. I’d much prefer to see comparisons on one graph. When I read papers and see two graphs aligned with each other, that’s a cue for me, indicating the datasets don’t really correlate.
Regards
Bob
My dear deniers…
DirkH: you said:
” “commonsense (09:20:14) :
And don’t forget that there is a INFLUENZA PANDEMIC underway, and with the cold, it spreads like fire ”
Wait commonsense – didn’t you just say it’s very WARM outside? Because of the very WARM anomaly? Caughtya! You’re a troll that just jumps on any bandwagon he can find. Happy new year :-)”
When I talk about warming I talk about ANOMALIES, so DirkH, finding a contradiction in my words really show that or you don’t think, or cannot understand the difference between ANOMALIES and the actual temperature values.
It is also easy to say that the 2009A/H1N1 is mild saying that a lot of people recovered… let’s do a little math:
Let’s assume a moderately high mortality: 0,5%
And an Attack Rate of 25%
Over a population of 200 million
RESULT: 250 000 DEATHS!
Now do it over the world population: 6000 million:
RESULT: 7 500 000 DEATHS!
Even the Mega-Killer 1918A/H1N1 had a mortality near 3%, and 50 to 100 millions died. Worse even than WWII.
What this one will turn to be?
Nobody knows.
Healthcare AVAIVABLE TO ALL INMEDIATELY is vital. Most deaths can be prevented by opportune attention.
For the ones that doesn’t know, WHO-PAHO said that PRIMARY VIRAL PNEUMONIA(an auto-inmunitary reaction that ocurrs in people with strong immune system i.e. young people) is the main killer mechanism (unlike seasonal flu, that kills by SECONDARY bacterial pneumonia in people with weak immune systems).
Search information and think.
THINK.
commonsense (20:25:14) :
Most deaths can be prevented by opportune attention.
Ok, if I may be permitted, I dispute this notion. There is a simple fact of life. This fact is as certain as taxes. Life will end. There is a point at which you are extending a life which otherwise would have ended, and must either support this life at great cost, or end this life. In effect, having only one payer ends up putting an upper bound on life simply because there is only one assessor of the cost versus benefit analysis that involves these decisions. This is one of the primary factors of health care costs being so high. Effectively, the government health care plan seeks to distribute the costs of expensive and highly technical procedures to people such as myself who have only been to the doctor in the past ten years but thrice.
Or, as you call yourself “commonsense”, everything done in the medical world is only a stall, not a cure for death.
Bob Tisdale (17:09:15) :
The resulting curve would probably give you the shift you desired…
Careful there. Why would the curves match is a more important question.
Nonsense would be a more accurate identifier.
So just making up numbers is how you do medical science? Earlier I gave you the links to both the CDC and WHO that give the confirmed numbers. No need to make crap up to hype your lame arguments.
FACT: Per the two links I gave you earlier, laboratory confirmed mortality from the current H1N1 strain is roughly 12,200 out of a global population of 6 BILLION and the infection rate is declining, not increasing. It’s possible that this may change again, but for now that is what is happening.
ASSUMPTION: Both the CDC and WHO ASSUME that the mortality figures are understated. Probably a good assumption, but both agencies agree they have no idea by how much. They also agree that we don’t know what the real infection rate is either, precisely because so many people seem to recover without seeking medical attention and many who do recieve medical attention are not tested for H1N1.
If we assume that the fatalities are understated by 1000% that still only makes 122000, or .002% of the population.
It isn’t “a lot” of people recover, it’s MOST people recover. BIG difference.
More making stuff up. According to the CDC the numbers are 20 – 50 million (that’s still a pretty wide error-band) which was more than WWI NOT WWII. And that is an estimate based on the latest CDC reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic.
No, basic health education and understanding how the virus spreads are the most cost-effective and effective means to prevent infection in the first place. Death can’t be prevented, merely postponed.
Think — something you aren’t really doing. Searching for information is just part of it. You also need to understand what you are reading.
So in addition to making up stuff and not understanding what you may be reading on the WHO web site, English grammar is not your strong suit either.
Earlier you said it was fulminant viral pneumonia that was the fatal mechanism, now you are saying primary viral pneumonia and never once have you offered a link to the reference. Both pneumonia types can be triggered by other viruses including other influenza strains.
Both links I provided earlier also point out that MOST fatalities due to H1N1 are still from high-risk groups that have underlying medical conditions like asthma or other lung ailments.
commonsense (20:25:14) :
I assume you switched the subject to health care because you became aware that people at this site know far more about climate change than you do, and you were getting intellectually thrashed.
I know far less about health care, but I suspect that if the 2000 page bill is anything like GISS data, the facts are fudged.
My own attitude towards health care was best expressed by the late, great Jimi Hendrix, who no one ever accused of being a conservative:
“I’m the one who’s gonna die
When it’s time for me to die,
So let me live my own life
The way I want to.”
commonsense (09:20:14,
“Someone asked where the Arctic heat comes from: it comes FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN, that is releasing the heat accumulated during the Artic Summer. With the now THIN ICE, this heat in the waters is no longer isolated from the Atmosphere above. This is ARCTIC AMPLIFICATION.
For anyone interested, google the paper “The emergence of ocean-based Artic Amplification”. It is a recent paper.”
Perhaps you should read your own citations before quoting them. The abstract reads:
“Abstract. Rises in surface and lower troposphere air temperatures through the 21st century are projected to be especially pronounced over the Arctic Ocean during the cold season. This Arctic amplification is largely driven by loss of the sea ice cover, allowing for strong heat transfers from the ocean to the atmosphere.”
Not the key point: Rises in air temperature are projected to occur during the 21st century. In other words, this is a model projection for the future – it is not happening now.
So I look at my meteorology book and read that arctic polar air masses cause colder weather and tropical or tropical maritime air masses cause warming. This is perfectly understandable because the air temperatures over the arctic in winter are freezing cold. Are you seriously suggesting that the warm anomolies in southern europe are caused by “warm arctic air” moving south and not by tropical air masses moving north?
This sounds more like magic than science to me.
Caleb (20:20:58) :
“….Conclusion: My wild guess is that less total energy might create a warm El Nino sending warmth north, at the exact same time less total energy sends the hounds of winter south from the poles. When these two forses meet they brew up super storms. Once again less makes more, as less energy creates more energetic storms.
I will prove my ideas are true, if you will figure out how I can get ten million or so of stimulous money, and a couple of genius geeks who are good at creating computer models.”
Sounds like you maybe onto something but you forgot to mention Glaciation is caused when wet winters are followed by cool summers and not by extremely cold winters. The layman always focuses on the temperature when it is the AMOUNT of snow accumulated and a cool summer that is key.
Why don’t you hit up the Rockefeller or Tide foundations for a grant?
TerryBixler (22:10:44) :
Michael (21:15:36) :
So BO up to his armpits CarbonGate. Chicago carbon exchange, your money or your ….who would have guessed and Al was there too.”
Do not forget the father of Global warming Maurice Strong, is also a partner. He started all this crap back in 1972 at the first earth summit.
Al Gore and Maurice Strong are members of the Club of Rome of course.
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
— in The First Global Revolution, pp.104-105 by Alexander King, founder of the Club of Rome and Bertrand Schneider, secretary of the Club of Rome
kadaka (22:12:04) :
Steve Oregon (20:55:51) :
“OT
According to NOAA sea rise has been only 2-3 inches per century….
Could a statistically significant part of that ocean rise per century, be because new water is being added to the oceans?”
You forgot all the silt washed into the oceans. Commercial farming methods cause a major increase in erosion. The 1940’s soil survey for my farm showed over two feet of loam, thirty years later when I bought it the soil tested 98% clay. Then there is the 3 million underwater volcanoes… 30000 are thought to be active.
Any geologist will tell you a lake will eventually become a swamp then a water meadow and then dry land as silt is deposited. Heck my pastures are filled with fist sized round rocks embedded in clay and I am 100ft above the river on a ridge.
I love how AGW uses selected evidence and never bothers to tell the whole story.
Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
Commonsense has His day and he’s… right!….
One Commenter sensibly explained the present Europe’s weather – the South is warmer, and the North is colder. The border lies on NW to SE line. Here in Poland too, as in Germany, the upper part of my country is gripped by cold (mild cold), with the south being showered with rain day after day. But that doesn’t prove neither WARMING nor COOLING….”
Remember two things. This is a discussion about the current weather in the Europe and we know the “official data” gets “corrected” The raw temperatures in my area (rural North Carolina) seem to be adjusted up by 4 F the next day on Wunderground
Second we like to have a reality check by those on the ground. Scotland, Germany… are saying it is cold and snowy, Austraila said it is hot and southern Europe seems to be average/ warmer.
Here in NC we expect four days of 36F/18F (2C/-8C) instead of the normal 50F/30F (10C/-1C) That is cold and means I have to deal with frozen hoses and livestock water tanks -YUCK – frozen fingers fishing the ice out of over a dozen tanks.
David L. Hagen
I am not so much concerned about just this one recent December /09 cold spell even if it was very cold , but more about the trend of the winter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. In Canada, the bellweather region for winter temperatures are the Northwestern Region and the Prairie Provinces. They are also one of our major food baskets. Their average winter temperatures have been declining since 2006 and are 6.6-7.1 C lower than 2006 winter. The 2010 winter is currently setting daily new records, with some regions setting as much 10 degrees lower than the previous daily record of only last year. So they are already at the 1970’s like lower winter temperatures .A significant part of the 2009 crops were at risk due to the late cold spring temperatures [snow in June] and lack of spring moisture. The winter temperatures for Canada as a whole have declined 3.6 C since 2006. The winter temperatures for the Contiguous US have declined 3.5 C since 2000 but more recently 2.4 C since 2006. The coldest weather during the last cool period was in the late 1970’s [1977-1979] well into the cool period of that era. It is the accumulating effect of many years of cooler weather that seems to be significant as well.
Europe ‘s winter temperatures only started to decline last year , so they are running some years behind North America in winter temperatures.
So I also see a serious problem for farming and crops in Europe and Asia by the middle of this new decade [2014-2015] due to the accumulating cold weather and moisture problems .This cool spell could last for several decades[2-3] and the difficulty in farming in these regions could be the real threat , not global warming. Many an invasion has been fought for a lesser cause.
So the second blogger David Hagen, on this track ,was quite right with his comments, in my opinion. Adequate Energy and food stocks will be vital for our future but the nations of the world are blindly preparing for global warming and demonizing fossil fuel. How foolish.
” Paul Vaughan (16:13:21) :
savethesharks (21:55:29) “It is plainly obvious that “Big Oil” has jumped on the AGW Train […]“
Unless I’m misinformed, the most shrieking alarmist force in Canada is funded by BO.”
Quite correct. I laugh myself silly every time I hear an activist scream “Deniers are funded by the oil companies” because Canada’s “Big Oil” is the “Father of Global Warming”!
Maurice Strong:
Strong started in the oil business in the 1950s. He took over and turned around some small ailing energy companies in the 1960s, and he was president of a major holding company — the Power Corporation of Canada — by the age of 35…..And in 1975, he was invited back to Canada to run the semi-national Petro-Canada, created by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of OPEC’s oil shocks.
Petro-Canada was a sop to Canada’s anti-American Left, then denouncing American ownership of the country’s oil companies. Strong talked a good economic-nationalist game — but he himself was a major reason why Canada’s oil companies were U.S.-owned. Ten years before, while at Power Corporation, he had enabled Shell to take over the only remaining all-Canadian oil company by throwing a controlling block of shares in its direction. As Maclean’s wrote, he now returned “amid fanfares” to rectify this….” http://www.afn.org/~govern/strong.html
“…It is instructive to read Strong’s 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited to raise hell at home. After Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the U.S., Britain, and Europe….” http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=9401
To add insult to injury Strong’s company is Canada’s top CO2 polluter too.
“…Ontario Hydro, an industrial concern, headed by Earth Summit secretary general Maurice Strong, which [b]is the biggest source of CO2 emissions in Canada. This corporation is currently selling nuclear reactors to Argentina and Chile….” [Strong’s minions are the reason the USA killed it’s Nuclear power plant programs]
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/061.html
These little tidbits are well worth copying and saving to whip out the next time activists start the “big oil funds them” malarkey.
David L. Hagen
I am not so much concerned about just this one recent December /09 cold spell even if it was very cold , but more about the trend of the winter temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. In Canada, the bellweather region for winter temperatures are the Northwestern Region and the Prairie Provinces. They are also one of our major food baskets. Their average winter temperatures have been declining since 2006 and are 6.6-7.1 C lower than 2006 winter. The 2010 winter is currently setting daily new records, with some regions setting as much 10 degrees lower than the previous daily record of only last year. So they are already at the 1970’s like lower winter temperatures .A significant part of the 2009 crops were at risk due to the late cold spring temperatures [snow in June] and lack of spring moisture. The winter temperatures for Canada as a whole have declined 3.6 C since 2006. The winter temperatures for the Contiguous US have declined 3.5 F since 2000 but more recently 2.4 F since 2006. The coldest weather during the last cool period was in the late 1970’s [1977-1979] well into the cool period of that era. It is the accumulating effect of many years of cooler weather that seems to be significant as well.
Europe ‘s winter temperatures only started to decline last year , so they are running some years behind North America in winter temperatures.
So I also see a serious problem for farming and crops in Europe and Asia by the middle of this new decade [2014-2015] due to the accumulating cold weather and moisture problems .This cool spell could last for several decades[2-3] and the difficulty in farming in these regions could be the real threat , not global warming. Many an invasion has been fought for a lesser cause.
So the second blogger David Hagen, on this track ,was quite right with his comments, in my opinion. Adequate Energy and food stocks will be vital for our future but the nations of the world are blindly preparing for global warming and demonizing fossil fuel. How foolish.
I have corrected the Contiguous US temperatures to Fahrenheit
Here is some more data about the Canadian 2009 winter impact on crops. The yield was about 20% less
In sharp contrast to their counterparts in Manitoba, agriculture producers in Alberta and Saskatchewan faced one of the most challenging growing seasons in years with drought, cold, floods and hail. Farmers rarely confront the dual threats of frost and drought at the same time, but parts of the Prairies experienced their driest spring in 50 years and their coldest in 35 years. Cool weather delayed crop development by three to four weeks, and with the risk of frost continuing into July, producers never caught up even when killing cold and the first snows came much later than usual in mid-October. Until the first hint of warmth in mid-June, all the talk was about the cold, especially its duration of six months and counting.
http://www.ec.gc.ca/meteo-weather/default.asp?lang=En&n=F2AE9E49-1
Gail Combs (11:50:56) “[…] Canada’s “Big Oil” is the “Father of Global Warming”!”
Dear Gail, I would very much like to hear your elaboration on this!
Re: Bob Tisdale (17:09:15)
It seems we are focused on different aspects of related phenomena – not a bad thing. Thanks for the notes.
Re: Gail Combs (11:50:56)
What I want to see is a cartoon that shows elites driving bubbles – (they’d be sitting (seemingly on air) inside bubbles of a variety of sizes, cutely clutching floating steering-wheels, & driving aimlessly… – it would be left to the reader to imagine what comes next [*bang!].)
Maybe owning a bubble alters one’s sense of humor…
agree with Paul Vaughan
Vincent (08:33:49) :
You said:
“Not the key point: Rises in air temperature are projected to occur during the 21st century. In other words, this is a model projection for the future – it is not happening now.”
Return to planet Earth. This phenomenon was predicted for the future, but DATA show that is is happening right now. I will not repeat the links I give earlier, just jump above and see the BLAST OF HEAT ABOVE THE ARCTIC.
What this show is that climate models get it wrong: THE ARTIC IS WARMING AND ARCTIC SEA-ICE IS MELTING MUCH EARLIER THAN MODELS PREDICTED.
So Global Warming impacts in the Arctic were severely UNDERESTIMATED.
This is quite obvious, unless you ignore the facts that you don’t like.
Then you said “So I look at my meteorology book and read (…).
Are you seriously suggesting that the warm anomolies in southern europe are caused by “warm arctic air” moving south and not by tropical air masses moving north?
This sounds more like magic than science to me”
What is magic is how you can invent words that I never said:
“Are you seriously suggesting that the warm anomolies in southern europe are caused by “warm arctic air” moving south and not by tropical air masses moving north?”
I never said such a thing.
I was talking about extremely warm anomalies ABOVE THE ARCTIC OCEAN.
We should talk after 6 months. I bet there will be highly warm ANOMALIES over the Artic. We will see. Only a BIG VOLCANO could make you “win”.
Of course that I inteded the case there was no big volcano, as it will obviously cool the Earth for a few years, as happened in 1992 with Pinatubo.
As for the comments about the 2009A/H1N1, I will not insist, as this is a Climate, not a Medicine blog.
But I am impressed how you ignore the dangers that arise in the world (and as a note: An influenza pandemic is a MAN-MADE disaster. If you put together people, pigs and birds then the virus will inevitably spread from one species to the other. And this occurs thank to bad farming practices that doesn’t prevent inter-species close contact.
But you could not even consider the possibility of a man-made disaster. Specially if it will cost a lot to Big Business do the things the right way.)
Only I give the reference: “Pneumonia and Respiratory Failure from 2009-A-H1N1 (Mexico)” that analize some cases of the earlier Mexico Outbreak in March-April 2009.
In Nature Magazine there are a lot more. Just search. My list of Nature articles about this virus is too long to list them.
Someone call me “Nonsense”. Nonsense is the ideology you follow and can be called:
“no problem, we will die some day anyway. Better die than pay taxes”
Your lack of respect for human life is astounding.
Of course there is a much better way to stop a Pandemic than elementary health care:
step 1)quarantine all the cities were there are outbreaks (as was not done in Mexico in West US in April).
step 2)Then ban all public meetings and stop traffic in those cities (as was done in Mexico City in April).
As the incubation period is roughly a week, in 15 days the Virus will disappear from circulation if the quarantines are applied everywhere there is an oubreak.
Of course that is unaceptable for you, because the economy (that will be temporarily stopped by the quarantines) is a more important thing than saving human lifes because “Death can’t be prevented, merely postponed”.
mistype. I said:
“step 1)quarantine all the cities were there are outbreaks (as was not done in Mexico in West US in April)”
I wanted to say: “step 1)quarantine all the cities were there are outbreaks (as was not done in Mexico *and* in West US in April)”
And a final comment:
If you are preparing to trash the GISSTEMP data about december, let’s do it right:
UPDATE THIS MAP TO SHOW THE SECOND HALF OF DECEMBER (that was anomausly warm in South Europe).
If you don’t have the updates, please don’t use this map to deny the December near-record warmth (worldwide).