By Steve Goddard
As La Niña takes hold in South America, we are seeing something I’m not sure I have ever seen before. Temperatures in some parts of the Andes Mountains of Bolivia are forecast to average below -5C this week. The entire country of Bolivia is located inside the Tropic of Capricorn.
Closeup below :
Temperatures are 6-10C below normal in much of South America.
The image below shows Unisys SST anomalies combined with NCEP forecast anomalies. Note how sea surface temperatures affect the land temperatures.
Our friend Joe Romm is very focused on the Northeastern US, but there is a whole big world out there.
Cold Weather Proves Killer in Parts of South America (Source: Time newsfeed)
Strange but true: despite blazing hot temperatures, sometimes in the triple digits, sweeping across the United States, the opposite is true in much of South America where a cold front has actually claimed more than 400 lives in parts of Peru and Argentina. The temperatures, which have hovered in the upper 30s in the southern part of the continent qualify as a rather typical winter by North American standards. But in some places, like the Andes mountains the thermometer has dropped as low as -11 degrees F and decimated alpaca and cattle herds. The usually subtropical areas affected are particularly vulnerable because the populations are largely poor, live in conditions that are not equipped for cold weather and the governments do not have the infrastructure to handle winter conditions.
As La Niña develops, climate alarmists will soon be seeking shelter from the storm.
Sponsored IT training links:
We offer guaranteed path to 70-685 and SK0-003 exam. And also practice for next level NS0-502 exam.
Did you really mean -11F . That’s -24C?
Keep up the good work…
[that’s from the news article excerpt, not the post author ~mod]
Nice to see, parts of Russia are 7 degrees C too warm, and in parts of south America it’s 7 degrees C too cold. Our world keeps amazing us, and will be…
Seppie.
Unusually warm weather is caused by AGW. Unusually cold weather is caused by AGW. Unusually wet weather is caused by AGW. Unusually dry weather is caused by AGW.
Don’t forget that NYC froze in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.</i?
But that’s weather, it has nothing to do with climate…sarc off.
Not one word about the plight of those suffering from cold has been noted in the MSN of Australia, how odd. The BBC in England are talking up temperatures in Russia, curiouser and curiouser. Has the world gone mad?
Look closely at the SST anomoly map and notice the plume of VERY cold water off the coast of South America – it’s running 5C below average. The NINO 1-2 regions are already at -3C so we’re looking at possibly a very strong La Nina forming very quickly. It wasn’t long ago some forecasters were predicting a La Nina was unlikely. In fact I think I read it right here on WUWT!
Hmmm….. I wonder if this will make the front page of Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, like the `we are all going to fry’ story they ran yesterday. Or the ‘we are all going to fry’ story on our top news station in Maritime Canada, CTV.
Our main newspaper ran a two paragraph comment, placed about 20 pages into the paper, on the cold in South America.
I am amazed at the comments of `scientists’ who release results of studies that they have undertaken. Without exception, even when the research has extremely tenuous relations to anything climatic, they always link what they see to climate change. As a scientist my self it drives me crazy.
But then again. All my funding and work is focused or `sold’ based on climate change and ‘accelerating (?) rates of sea level rise’. I would add more on that topic but depending who read this I would need to fear for my job. Actually, I wouldn’t say even this much except that by the time the paper work and appeals were completed I would have taken early retirement anyway. I need to get out and make an honest living!
The indicators begin to stack up. The Antarctic Oscillation at a record high will not provide resistance to the equatorial trade winds that are essential for a strong La Nina. The North Atlantic Oscillation will most likely go neg and permit Arctic winds to flow south as the PDO gives strong backup…. get ready for a big one in the north this winter.
It is not only La Nina I think. My own thoughts based only on observations is that somehow, probably linked with this solar minimum, there is less “mixing” in the atmosphere making summers warmer and winters colder for the respective hemispheres but also inside the hemispheres. Hotspots like eastern VS the heart of Russia or the mediterranean tend to keep undisturbed hot for a long time and located close to the heart of summer. Vice versa for winter. South America as well as South Africa and Australia and New Zealand have a cool winter as well as we had in the Northern Hemisphere and I have few doubts we well get again this year.
The NOAA SST graph is maybe intentionally graded to train the mind towards heat. A 0.1 anomaly gives a hot yellow color. The Unisys example is more subjective.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom_inv.gif
Seppie says:
July 30, 2010 at 3:56 am (Edit)
Nice to see, parts of Russia are 7 degrees C too warm, and in parts of south America it’s 7 degrees C too cold. Our world keeps amazing us, and will be…
Interesting. Those locations are on diametrically opposite parts of the globe.
wayne Job: “Has the world gone mad?” No, just crooked.
I spent a few days in the Bolivian capital La Paz in 1998. It’s a beautiful place, at about 12-13000ft above sea level, with the clearest air I’ve ever seen. I then spent 4 weeks in a tent in primeval jungle in the foothills of the Andes. An incredible experience.
Record hheat and permanent droughts in the southwest according to Joe Romm in january 2009. We have pleasant record cold in southern California that save electric also. Why can’t that be reported on the biased blogs?
There is likely to be a significant La Nina. That is a fact. There was a La Nina in 2007/08. We get cooler conditons during a La Nina. None of this is in dispute.
However the question is – how much cooler will it get. Will the UAH temperatures drop to the same levels as during the 1980s or even 1990s. If not then the underlying trend is still likely to be positive. Just as far too much was made of the 2008 La Nina it looks as though we’re going to get the same extravagant claims about this one. I think it is possible that we’ve shifted to phase of more La Ninas/less El Ninos which will clearly dampen (or completely offset) any warming trend but these phases (if they exist) will end and a new warmer phase will begin.
I don’t know, what you are actually doing.
But I am preparing for another VERY cold winter ahead.
I’m going to try to preempt the “balance of energy” or other similar comments. There is no balance of energy except an equilibrium over the long run. If it gets ridiculously cold in South America it is not because energy disappeared there and magically reappeared in Russia. The only minor exception to this rule is that there are probably slightly warmer areas around Antarctica where this cold came from. Not balancing, but just part of a weather pattern that draws the colder air north.
Interesting too is that, I suppose because of the cold temps in the Southern Hemisphere, that the ASU Sat temperatures have been roughly .2-.25F below temperatures in July of 09 every day this month. In Jan – Jun the opposite was true.
In the first picture, it looks like there’s a second plume of cold water, running north-by-northeast at the Baja peninsula. According to this forecast, the western side of the peninsula is predicted to have temperatures some 30-40 degrees (Fahrenheit) lower than the eastern side (73 in Ensenada versus 112 in Mexicali or 102 in San Felipe). It also describes the coastal weather as “still darn chilly”.
I know, it’s weather, not climate. Still interesting, though.
“Has the world gone mad?”
In a way, yes, although what’s actually happened is worse than that, since it has been an intentional decision by the people responsible. Around the world the MSM allowed itself to become an appendage and a propaganda arm of the political left, and the political left has allowed itself to be hooked into the global warming narrative since they 1) find it attractive and 2) they need the money it would provide to finance a raft of social engineering dreams that can’t be financed any other way.
It’s not about the science – it has never been about the science. Which is why we are now at the stage where people who probably even know better themselves, like the BBC reporters, are intentionally slanting the news to favor their political narrative because they fear the loss of power and standing for the political forces they support that will ensue once this narrative falls apart.
They’re all now at the end stages of an “in for a dime, in for a dollar” bet. They have now accepted that they would rather burn the credibility of every institution they control rather than give in now, even if that means destroying their institutions in the process. In this way, this is just a reflection of the much wider crisis our society is in – virtually all of our major institutions are now controlled by true nihilists, people who would rather see everything they control destroyed, even entire countries, before they will accept political defeat. And somewhere deep they still hang onto the child’s hope that if they just wish for something hard enough, the world they dream will magically appear.
This is not a “sustainable” situation, we all sense that – there is a great reckoning coming. In fact it is almost upon us.
Not much has been said about it but the contrast in temperatures between hot summers in one part of the world and cold winters in the other is a negative feedback due to T to the fourth power in Planck’s radiation law. With the la Niña (regrettably) global temperatures may get below what we experienced after Mt. Pinatubo cooling event. This could become a very rude wakeup call for some activists I believe.
“As La Niña develops, climate alarmists will soon be seeking shelter from the storm.”
Why don’t you just stick with the phenomenon itself and leave this kind of stupid remarks away? I like to read critical thoughts about the so called AGW, but this kind of comments makes it hard to return to this blog… Generally I hate the division about “climate-alarmists” and “climate sceptics”. Like it’s black or white. I’ll stick to gray and look for both sides.
Thanks Steve,
Looks like it’s going to be a frigid winter this year!
I guess “Global Averaging” doesn’t have quite the scary tinge to it as “Global Warmimg”.
I can see that the predicted anomaly is well below average but the mountains in Bolivia do get very cold normally. -20 -> -25 degrees C can be normal compared to a daytime temperature of 15->20.
It is definitely one of those places where I wonder what is the point of an ‘average’ temperature when it can vary by about 5 degrees in an hour. The icy old nights at 4500m altitude do have fantastic stars though..