Better late than never, we got a little bit busy this week.
Image above from data supplied by Dr. John Christy and rendered by the San Francisco Chronicle from their story here. An excerpt:
John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.
The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.
“The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified,” said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “It looks like you’re going to have snow for the foreseeable future.”
Here’s the Press release from UAH:
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (Feb. 14, 2012) — During some winters a significant amount of snow falls on parts of California. During other winters — like this one (so far) — there is much less snow. But more than 130 years of snow data show that over time snowfall in California is neither increasing nor decreasing.
The analysis of snowfall data from as far back as 1878 found no long-term trend in how much snow falls in the state, especially in the critical western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, said John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.
“There isn’t a trend significantly different from zero for the whole period,” Christy said. “I also looked at just the past 50 years and there is no trend over this recent stretch either.”
Details of Christy’s research have been accepted for publication and released on-line by the American Meteorological Society’s “Journal of Hydrometeorology.”*
This line of research was spurred by recent concerns that snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains had decreased in recent years, perhaps due to man-made climate change, Christy said. Those worries, however, were not supported by credible, long-term data.
A native of Fresno, Christy wondered if the snow he remembered covering the Sierra Nevada’s peaks is actually disappearing. His preliminary investigation found a potentially useful set of data: Records of snow measurements at stations along the Southern Pacific Railroad.
“They took great care to measure snowfall because they had to know how much snow fell before sending trains through the mountain passes,” Christy said. “No one else had looked at this data in detail. The records are pretty thorough and the measuring tools — a device resembling a tall, sturdy yardstick — are easy to use and obviously don’t need power, so there aren’t many gaps in the record.”
There was, however, one catch: “They were good at measuring snow but the data they collected in written records had never been keyed in into a computer dataset. Before I could do the analysis I had to manually input 100,000 station-months of data.”
The railroad data was coupled with data from other sources, including hydro-power and regional water systems vitally interested in knowing how much water would be available from snow melt. Other data was collected from logging and mining companies, as well as National Weather Service stations and volunteers. That data had already been digitized by the National Climatic Data Center.
Christy divided the state into 18 regions, based on the amount of snow that falls and on the quality of the records for that region.
“There are six or seven regions with good, robust data going back to the late 1800s,” he said. “In each of those there are five to 15 stations with good records.”
Global warming theory says rising temperatures might reduce snowfall in some areas, while snow might increase in others. That sounds counterintuitive, but it does make sense: At lower, warmer elevations rising temperatures raise the altitude of the snow line, potentially reducing snow fall at lower elevations.
Warmer air also can hold more water vapor than cold air, so rising temperatures should increase the amount of water vapor available for snow and other precipitation.
In high elevation mountain regions where winter temperatures would be below freezing even if they rise two or three degrees, snow would still fall. Those still-cold temperatures combined with the extra water vapor suspended in the warmer air could increase snowfall at higher altitudes.
That’s the theory.
Looking at both the 130-year record and the most recent 50-year record — which includes the 1975 to 2000 period when global temperatures rose — the California data show no long-term changes in snowfall in any region.
“California has huge year-to-year variations and that’s expected to continue,” said Christy, a graduate of Fresno State University. “California is having a snow drought so far this winter, while last year the state had much heavier than normal snowfall. But over the long term, there just isn’t a trend up or down.
“Not to be a scaremonger, but if you go back and look at the paleoclimate reconstructions for the past thousand years, there have been some colossal droughts lasting 50 years or more,” he said. “Those have not been around since the 1400s, although nothing we know about climate science says they can’t come back — global warming or not.”
In earlier research, Christy also showed no long-term warming in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
— 30 —
Here’s the paper:
Searching for information in 133 years of California snowfall observations
| Abstract |
|---|
Monthly snowfall totals from over 500 stations in California, some of which date back to 1878, are examined. Most data were accessed through the NOAA archive, but several thousand station-months of data were separately keyed-in from image files of original documents. Over 26,000 of these entries were new relative to the NOAA archive, generally providing data prior to 1920.
The stations were then subdivided into 18 regions for the construction of representative time series of each area. There were problems with the basic data, the most difficult with which to deal was the increasing presence of “zero” totals which should have been recorded as “missing.” This and other issues reduce the confidence that the regional time series are representative of true variations and trends, especially for regions with few systematically reporting stations. Interpreting linear trends on time series with infrequent large anomalies of one sign (i.e. heavy snowfall years) and unresolved data issues should be done with caution. For those regions characterized by consistent monitoring and with the most robust statistical reproducibility, we find no statistically significant trends in their periods-of-record (up to 133 years) nor in the most recent 50 years. This result encompasses the main snowfall region of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
A study using real, measured accurate data show everything is perfectly fine.
Side note: It took a long time for John to get this paper published because of one reviewer who didn’t even understand how snow depth is measured…but who was obviously convinced Christy must be wrong because the results did not fit the AGW narrative. Journal editors MUST start becoming a little more discerning about whether a reviewer’s comments are justified based upon the content of a paper. Of course, that would require an editor to read and understand a paper, and I agree that’s a lot of work for someone who has volunteered their time to become a journal editor.
Warming causes more moisture in the air which leads to more extreme precipitation events. This includes more heavy snowstorms in regions where snowfall conditions are favourable. Far from contradicting global warming, record snowfall is predicted by climate models and consistent with our expectation of more extreme precipitation events.
A data base that can be reconstructed and cannot be manipulated for personal or political gain show everything is perfectly fine.
Well dang! What’s the SUPREME GORON got to say about this little detail?
How much did your employer pay for this article?
I just read you’re financed to the tune of 90,000/year to write this garbage.
Is SHILL the correct terminology?
I notice the SF Chronicle article could not just report that everything is normal but had to have someone question the data because it did not fit their expectations.
“Climate experts and water resources officials were immediately skeptical of the report, pointing out that it doesn’t come to a meaningful conclusion and uses data from a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.”
No significant change seems like a meaningful conclusion to me.
It’d be interesting to compare this graph, to one of temps in the area.
*A study using real, measured accurate data show everything is perfectly fine.*
Then the data needs some CRU-style quality control
This is yet more empirical data confirming that there has been no effect from carbon dioxide. Even the temperature records do in fact show the same once you understand that there is both a long term trend perhaps over 1,000 years which is still increasing since the Little Ice Age, but now only at a rate of 0.05 deg.C per decade, as well as a superimposed 60 year cycle which will now decrease for the 30 years from 1998 to 2028. The combined effect is level or very slightly declining trends for these 30 years. The maximum in the long term trend could occur within 200 years and should be less than 0.9 degrees C above the current trend line.
The point I want to emphasise is that it is not just a matter of low sensitivity to carbon dioxide levels. There is absolutely no warming effect whatsoever. There is however a small cooling effect due to the fact that carbon dioxide does absorb some incoming infra-red radiation from the Sun and send it back to space.
The physical reason why radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot slow the rate of cooling of a warmer surface is explained in my answer to this person (whose question I repeat) …
Comment from: Martin MasonApril 11th, 2011 at 1:31 pm *
Can anybody help me with a question on radiation? I instinctively believe that a cold body can’t transfer heat to a warmer body but it can radiate towads the warmer body. If the radiated wave back from GHGs in the atmosphere can’t be readsorbed and re-emitted by the surface, what does it do?
It resonates with the target molecule and is effectively re-emitted rather like being reflected at the speed of light. None of its energy is converted to thermal energy. I prefer to use the term “scattered” in order to avoid implying that it is either reflected (in the true sense of the word) or absorbed – which most people assume means it does some warming.
Now, when and why does it resonate? Well, the frequency distribution of a blackbody has a peak which is proportional to absolute temperature. Study carefully the first plot here http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/WiensDisplacementLaw.html and note that the plot for a warmer temperature always envelopes that for a cooler temperature. Hence radiation from a cooler source can only have frequencies which can resonate with those of a warmer body. So all such radiation never leaves thermal energy behind. In contrast, radiation from a warmer source will always have some frequencies (at the right) which cannot resonate with a cooler target. It is the energy in radiation with these frequencies which has to be retained and is thus converted to thermal energy. This is actually necessary for the Second Law of Thermodynamics to apply.
Hence spontaneous radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot add thermal energy to a warmer surface. Since it cannot add thermal energy it cannot either increase the rate of warming of the surface in the morning or slow the rate of cooling on the evening.
Herein lies the collapse of the atmospheric radiative greenhouse conjecture.
* Source: http://jennifermarohasy.com/2011/03/total-emissivity-of-the-earth-and-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/?cp=5
Once upon a time, people took measurements with devices that didn’t require battery back-up and stored the information on a system that is still readable today. We could still learn a lot from the old timers.
Thanks, to you or the Doc, for not drawing a straight line through the data. An of course because is is Dr. Christy it must be weaher. Sceptics can never rise to the level of talking about the climate.
CO2 is not a Greenhouse Gas that Raises Global temperature. Period!
by Dr. Tim Ball on February 15, 2012
http://drtimball.com/2012/co2-is-not-a-greenhouse-gas-that-raises-global-temperature-period/
But this is just western slope sierria snowfall, not global. So it can’t be a metric of man-made-global warming! Of course, whenever we have a regional drought, or just about any F5 tornado, the media wets their pants in anticipation of some CAGW hack publically spitting out the weather is due to man-made-global warming. Very funny world we live in.
Klas says:
February 18, 2012 at 3:27 am
Not that weather is climate, but this year has been very mild. And almost no snow. No heavy snowstorms, no record precipitation. Only unusually mild weather and no snow.
Robertvdl says:
February 18, 2012 at 4:49 am
CO2 is not a Greenhouse Gas that Raises Global temperature. Period!
by Dr. Tim Ball on February 15, 2012
http://drtimball.com/2012/co2-is-not-a-greenhouse-gas-that-raises-global-temperature-period/
I Like
I wonder what the newspapers looked like in 1933/4. It looked like the end of snow. Especially in the middle of the dust bowl. Does Gore have any tent show preachers in his ancestry? Mann could even create a downward snowfall hockey stick at 1934 with an upward temperature hockey stick to match – not that he would do so now and ruin his other hockey stick. But I bet you he could.
From Klas on February 18, 2012 at 3:27 am:
With your expectation?
Extreme precipitation events like never-ending drought in Australia that will require the building of many large and hugely expensive desalinization plants so the hapless Australians don’t start dying of thirst? Yup, that was predicted. The subsequent massive rainfall, flooding, lake refilling and aquifer recharging that has led to many large and expensive Australian desalinization plants being mothballed and abandoned, finished or unfinished? You and your people expected such an extreme precipitation event? And insisted on building those desal plants anyway?
Your expected reply is “But that was an extreme weather event, not climate!” To which my rejoinder would be “So what is a record snowfall event, weather or climate?”
Roy Spencer says:
February 18, 2012 at 3:18 am
“Side note: It took a long time for John to get this paper published because of one reviewer who didn’t even understand how snow depth is measured…but who was obviously convinced Christy must be wrong because the results did not fit the AGW narrative.”
This is pathetic, but sadly not unexpected from our academic climate elites…
Roy Spencer says:
February 18, 2012 at 3:18 am
////////////////////////
Interesting insight, depressing but not surprising.
Doug Cotton, can you explain the increase in measured downward radiation from clouds at night? For example: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0450%282002%29041%3C0734%3ATIOSVA%3E2.0.CO%3B2 in figure 3. If that measurement in that figure is accurate, wouldn’t that decrease the nighttime cooling potential (as explained in the rest of the paper)?
I wish more CAGW true believers, like Mr Schwab and Klas, would post comments here. Such erudition is normally found only at Comedy Central.
I don’t like the way the San Francisco Chronicle refers to Christy as “a climate change skeptic”. I doubt he’s one iota skeptical that climate changes, it should be “anthropogenic climate change skeptic” or maybe “catastrophic anthropogenic climate change skeptic”. I wonder if it’s just sloppy reporting or intentional subliminal messaging.
Isn’t the the temperature record for the US showing no warming and possible cooling?
That being the case, why would one expect that there would be significant changes in snowfall?
This study is consistent with the view that there is no such thing as GLOBAL warming. To the extent that there may be warming, It is entirely a regional/local phenomena raising regional/local issues which if problematic will requiring regional/local adaption..
The political establishment want to conceal this since it would then be impossible to claim that we are all in it together. If this fact were to be revealed, each country would consider its own interests.
Why would a country like Switzerland (which is land locked) be concerned by sea level rise?
A country like Canada will benefit from warming. It will increase crop production and will lessen the harshness of their winter and the costs of the fuel they consume in dealing with adverse winter conditions.
The UN could exercise no control, if countries started looking at what problems and what benefits so called ‘global’ warm would bring to it. There would be many winners to such a climate change and these countries would not therefore wish to castrate their industrial economy when climate change is actually very good for them.
Klas says: “consistent with”
OMG!
A half eaten cookie found on Christmas morning is consistent with having been visited by Santa Claus.
Can you name something that wouldn’t be “consistent with” the CAGW hypothesis?