Breaking news! December can still be cold and snowy over parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Don’t look to the American media for much information about European weather; it’s about as foreign as driving on the wrong side of the road. But, in Britain, Italy, and the rest of Europe, the past several weeks have seen “the Arctic refrigerator door” swing wide-open. Here are some example headlines:
Arctic freeze to last another month as AA warns of ‘worst driving conditions imaginable’ for Christmas getaways: Mail Online: “With temperatures expected to fall to -15c (5f), the Met Office said this is ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest December since records began in 1910.”
Europe travel mayhem as arctic freeze strikes again: AFP: “In Italy, rare snowfall disrupted the tourist destinations of Pisa and Florence, forced both airports to close and severely disrupted traffic and the region’s rail network.”
Thankfully, Dr. James Hansen has this figured out: Europe is one-half Rossby wavelength downstream from a partially frozen Hudson Bay, which causes Europe to become colder, or something: from NASA’s government funded blog:
Back to the cold air in Europe: is it possible that reduced Arctic sea ice is affecting weather patterns? Because Hudson Bay (and Baffin Bay, west of Greenland) are at significantly lower latitudes than most of the Arctic Ocean, global warming may cause them to remain ice free into early winter after the Arctic Ocean has become frozen insulating the atmosphere from the ocean. The fixed location of the Hudson-Baffin heat source could plausibly affect weather patterns, in a deterministic way — Europe being half a Rossby wavelength downstream, thus producing a cold European anomaly in the trans-Atlantic seesaw. Several ideas about possible effects of the loss of Arctic sea ice on weather patterns are discussed in papers referenced by Overland, Wang and Walsh.
However, we note in our Reviews of Geophysics paper that the few years just prior to 2009-2010, with low Arctic sea ice, did not produce cold winters in Europe. The cold winter of 2009-2010 was associated with the most extreme Arctic Oscillation in the period of record. Figure 3, from our paper, shows that 7 of the last 10 European winters were warmer than the 1951-1980 average winter, and 10 of the past 10 summers were warmer than climatology. The average warming of European winters is at least as large as the average warming of summers, but it is less noticeable because of the much greater variability in winter.
This is the trap that statistical/data manipulators like Hansen have fallen into: in the past, they would freely say: “of course you cannot attribute one weather event to global warming, but the likelihood of that event has become higher because it’s the extremes that are going to increase the most”, or something like that. Now, there is no pretense to equivocate about what the atmosphere is doing: weather has become climate, and necessarily so for the continued narrative of global warming alarmism. The trap is that they do not understand the underlying meteorology or climatology from basic dynamics — instead giving hand-wavy explanations with some citations thrown in from their colleagues.
To adequately attribute an ongoing weather/short-term climate event to AGW, considerable data analysis and time must be invested into researching many different avenues. It is a disservice to those interested in climate variability for senior scientists to supply hand-wavy, reflexive out-of-their-behinds explanations to the media to further their obvious political agenda. This actually goes for both sides of the climate aisle.
In the meantime, Europe continues to enjoy the effects of global warming or the Arctic Oscillation or the North Atlantic Oscillation, or something. It’s hubris and arrogance to think you have the Winter of 2010-2011 all summed up before it even starts.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
/quote
it’s about as foreign as driving on the wrong side of the road.
/end quote
sorry – it’s you lot that drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road; we drive on the right side – on the left. Just little something left over from the French revolution. 🙂
[it’s a friday funny]
Very nice post.
Speaking for The Netherlands, summer has been very warm indeed, for about three weeks. Winter has been very cold and snowy now for more than three weeks. And so has last winter; I last wiped my garden path free from snow eight months ago, in March, and started to do again so three weeks ago.
Thanks Ryan but I’m frustrated about the continued government funded insanity. It makes you feel like you are fighting for the lemmings to think, and we all know lemmings don’t think.
“With temperatures expected to fall to -15c (5f), the Met Office said this is ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest December since records began in 1910.”
Surely they were recording temperatures prior to 1910, weren’t they?
What’s the frozen wind turbine count in Britain now?
The December 17 TELEGRAPH in UKreported
After three successive bad winters, Mr Hammond has also asked John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, to examine whether Britain’s transport planning should assume that this weather pattern will continue over the next 20 years.
They are finally starting to see the light. Global cooling has been real for some time now.
Hansen is “half a Rossby wave off” alright… we figured that one a while ago… LOL
i have just walked home from a sniffter with a friend, involving 2 miles over the top of the Surrey Downs. Not only is it very cold out there, but today’s snow has fallen on top of the snow from 10 days ago to make paths and roads very dangerous. I asked my old mum about this. She said the last time it was this bad was in ’47, but that was after Christmas. She says that snow on top of ice on top of snow before Christmas has not happened in her lifetime, and is fairly certain not that of her mother either – which takes us back to the 1890s. I know anecdote is not evidence, and up here on the Downs things are different to down there in the lowlands, but even so……
“Just little something left over from the French revolution. :-)”
H’mm. Thought it something to do with right-handed jousters of old.
We are at -4.0C (provisional, to the 16th) which is warmer than Dec 1890
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/tcet.dat
and it looks like we are in for some warmer westerlies from the 20th/21st
http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display_alt.cgi?a=natla_250
The BBC news this evening said that Northern Ireland is experiencing its worst snowfall for 25 years.
Peter@dtm: And I bet you still wear your swords on the left and draw them with your right hands. Which is where that left/right/right of way thing came from, didn’t it?
From one of the articles linked:
“Thousands of rural homes could be left without heating this winter as the worsening weather hits deliveries of oil.
Even if they get the oil they need to heat their homes and cook, many will have to cut back on how much they use because the price of the fuel has almost doubled in a month.
***
Michelle Mitchell, of Age UK, said: ‘Many older people have told us they would rather turn the heating off than risk a bill they can’t afford. Plummeting temperatures will once again spell misery, ill health and in some cases even death.’”
That is just terribly sad. I will save my usual snark re: How’s that alternative energy workin’ out for ya? for another time. How in the hell have my ancestors come to this? Tons of coal, but the oldest and the poorest freeze to death. Good lord, I hope we don’t end up in the same sorry state.
Just an in comment thought: this usage of the 1951-1980 base period, what is with this? While the average yearly temperature anomaly may not matter, the monthly distribution of anomalies between different base periods will change. The average January during 1951-1980 compared to July may be different than the similar value calculated from 1971-2000 or 1979-2008, etc.
Alas, it’s best for your numbers if you use the lowest point in your graph for linear trend analysis…
” since records began in 1910.”
Oh noes! Don’t say the MET have lost the CET as well!
Hansen has the difficult logical task of acknowledging that AGW is over and the planet is starting to cool, cooling climate change. The AGW conundrum is after years of stating the debate concerning the science is over, GCR increased and the planet starts to cool. What are you going to believe what I am telling you or your own eyes?
What is Hansen’s explanation for the large regions of blue on this map?
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2010/anomnight.12.16.2010.gif
Frozen fountains in Rome: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12022394
Historically, driving on the left has been the “correct” approach, as determined by cart tracks leading towards (light tracks) and away from (heavy tracks) a Roman-era quarry.
It is believed that as most cart drivers were right-handed, they used the dominant right arm to whip oncoming animals out of the way, as well as errant drivers!
Global warming (and consequent evaporation of the oceans) will inevitably increase precipitation of moisture from the atmosphere, which means more snow, sleet, hail, rain, continental coldliness, and teenage pregnancies. What don’t you Deniers understand about this simple fact?
Headlines tomorrow “Ahhh yes but this is exactly what we expected based on our models, and it is entirely consistent with CAGW.”
Here in Germany, it looks like the modern trains have been designed with a positive AO in mind… in other words, lots of failures. High speed trains need to go slower; trees fall on overhead lines, leaving electric locos stranded, in one case leading to a panic after the dark train cooled down and the driver refused to open doors to prevent people from running around on the tracks… People could be rescued, though, with no injuries reported. Point heating failures galore.
Even a green politician said “Trees have no business standing next to a railway line”, lo and behold – do they try to appear like reasonable people now? You don’t have that often here…
Here’s something for Doug Keenan, too.
Wenzhou China had a rare snowfall and temps dipped to 25 degrees.
Average December CET anoamly to December 16 was o.6C [-4.3 C below norm] The expected cold for the next month will bring this down significantly by year end .The nearest historical past December anomalies were
1981 0.3 C
1890 -0.8C
“It is a disservice to those interested in climate variability for senior scientists to supply hand-wavy, reflexive out-of-their-behinds explanations to the media to further their obvious political agenda. This actually goes for both sides of the climate aisle.”
Well said!
The biggest problem as I see it, is that everybody forgets that we have been observing weather and keeping records for precisely 1% of the current inter-glacial period. Just because we haven’t observed a particular set of weather conditions before, DOES NOT MEAN IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. Nobody seems to get this, especially on the warmist side.
Instead, they link weather conditions “which have never happened before” with something else that has never happened before- anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
In short, they are putting 2 and 2 together, and coming up with 736.
Any science which bases its’ conclusions on data from 1% of the relevant time scale is bad science. The fact that we remain in ignorance of the other 99% cannot be used as an excuse.
The GISS 51-80 baseline is still there because they don’t want to change. According to the WMO as each decade became complete the baseline was suppose to advance one decade with it, Hadley/CRU did that when 1990 became complete. They went from 51-80 to 61-90 but they didn’t want to switch to 71-2000 as was shown in one of the Climategate emails because of four reasons:
1. They caught flack when changing from 51-80.
2. Graph Impressions for the impressionable would reduce the perceived warming.
3. They didn’t want to have to go back and rework all their old stuff.
4. 2010 was just around the corner and the satellite datasets would finally have a 30 year baseline so why not wait until then.
Hopefully after the end of this year all of the datasets will go to the 81-2010 baseline and cut out some of the Graphmanship that goes on (Dr. Spencer has already stated they will be going to that baseline in the new year).