From the Anchorage Daily News, some anecdotal evidence that we may not see an ice-free arctic this summer. I had previously blogged on the lateness of a 70 degree plus day in Anchorage, and now it looks like this may be one of the coolest summers on record there. A friend of mine that I have morning coffee with who is pilot that flew to Alaska’s western side to do some fishing told me a couple of days ago that the season is the “worst ever” and he’s an Alaskan native.
Gloomy summer headed toward infamy
CHILLY: Anchorage could hit 65 degrees for fewest days on record.
gbryson@adn.com
(07/24/08 00:10:35)
So if the cold and drizzle are going to continue anyway, why not shoot for a record? The mark is well within reach, Albanese said:
MEASURING THE MISERY
In terms of “coldest summer ever,” however, a better measure might be the number of days Anchorage fails to even reach 60. There too, 2008 is a contender, having so far notched only 35 such days — far below the summer-long average of 88.
Unless we get 10 more days of 60-degree or warmer temperatures, we’re going to break the dismal 1971 record of only 46 such days, a possibility too awful to contemplate.
Still, according to a series of charts cobbled together Tuesday evening by a night-shift meteorologist in the weather service’s Anchorage office, the current summer clearly has broken company with the record-setting warmth of recent years. Consider:
• 70-degree days. So far this summer there have been two. Usually there are 15. Last year there were 21. In 2004 there were 49.
• 75-degree days. So far this summer there’ve been zero. Usually there are four. It may be hard to remember, but last year there were 21. In 2004 there were 23.
So are all bets off on global warming? Hardly, scientists say. Climate change is a function of long-term trends, not single summers or individual hurricanes.
Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that it’s “unequivocal” the world is warming, considering how 11 of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past 13 years.
LA NINA
Federal meteorologists trace a lot of the cool weather to ocean temperatures in the South Pacific. When the seas off the coast of Peru are 2 to 4 degrees cooler than normal, a La Nina weather pattern develops, which brings cooler-than- normal weather to Alaska.
For most of the past year, La Nina (the opposite of El Nino, in which warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures occur off Peru) has prevailed. But that’s now beginning to change.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web site, water temperatures in the eastern South Pacific began to warm this summer — and the weather should eventually follow.
Ive been doing some thinking about the content of the ad.
IMO, the first step might be to show how the “consensus” is only apparent. A lot of it seems to stem from the IPCC 2500. Pielke’s oligarchy post might be a good candidate. Wouldn’t hurt to advertise the 30,000 opposers of Kyoto, too.
The con of this approach is the existence of pro-AGW statements by various groups. That probably does more to drive the appearance of consensus more than anything else.
OTOH, the Great Global Swindle documentary seems to have had a real effect in England. A lot, though, might be reaction to the pinch now being felt by the economics of AGW. Just presenting the conflicting science might be the best approach. One con: many people tend to go glassy-eyed when presented with the science unless it comes in bite-sized chucks.
OR, move the talk cost. If you really want to get a large audience show ’em where it’s going to hurt! The greenie “For The Children” is an application of this kind of approach. Seems to work for them.
The NYT and WaPo are such political papers a well funded ad might produce the Boxer effect; the blaming of Rush Limbaugh for being behind it to deflect interest in the actual information given. Perhaps USA Today would be better although I admit I do not read newspapers any longer so I am not even sure that is still in publication. I guess if we wanted to pull an Algore and use kids to funnel the message we should probably use some teen magazine or Highlights mag.
Don’t you guys get it? This is a sure sign of AGW. Hansen predicted it, or somebody, somewhere. Maybe it was a model. Yeah that’s it. One of the models predicted it. Sure that model predicts snow in Tahiti, but hey, it’s about the climate ya know not the weather.
I think your a load of you know what. The Planet has Phases. Inter Glacial periods then Ice Age periods. We have seem to run to the very edge with our latest Inter Glacial period. Any day could spark the start of an Ice age(Could have already started)
And by the way, why would you trust the UN or Government with predicting your Climate? WE cna even trust them on Politics!
Here’s an idea for a number of press releases – a “Rogues Gallery” of the worst offending USHCN reporting stations. Tap into that gold mine you have at surfacestations.org. This is why there’s warming being reported. A picture is worth a thousand words. Who knows, with a picture in a press release, maybe even the image-oriented broadcast media would pick up the story.
Well… a Polar shift has been occurring for years so that is increasing under water Volcanic Eruptions and that is what is heating our seas. Ocean Warming not Global Warming.
I have my own blog if anyone wants to look at it;
http://yourblog.name/climaticearth
“You got that right but the real purpose behind an ad is exposure. There will be an immediate web rebuttal that will help the exposure along. Just like that gratuitous caveat posted in the APS Forum on Policy and Science.”
Hmm… I would want to be clever with this, low key, and not at all up front. All carrot – very little stick. Amongst other things, that will differentiate us from the warmers. So I like the press release idea – that makes journalists lives a lot easier. Just show them a story and let them decide to bite. Don’t try and push things down their throat.
Another problem with a technical ad is that it will get a ‘technical’ rebuttal. You know the kind. “This paper is so full of errors I don’t know where to begin. For instance, he uses the wrong value for forcing – the IPCC clearly state the correct one…”. Signed, the Head of the Royal Society
How will an editor respond to that? He won’t do the maths himself. He will simply note that ‘clever climate scientists’ have ‘rebutted’ it. You can’t hold a technical argument in the press.
What you can do is draw a journalist into a ‘human interest’ type story. Journalists can’t be expected to consider Ice Extent data, but they can see an unfair debate at the APC. The ‘Kids being co-opted as spies’ piece is a good one to draw their attention to. If there’s going to be anything technical it has to be really simple – I suspect even ‘The world’s cooling!’ won’t be enough, because the warmists can simply say ‘Ah, yes, we expected that, and it’s in our models, but global warming is still a threat’, and I don’t suppose anyone will dig any deeper.
Luckily, the warmists will probably give us all the ammunition we need. I expect all sorts of shennanigans over FOI requests for data, failures to hold to archiving, altered data, all the things we are used to. These are the sort of thing we need to make journalists aware of, not the details of the technical argument. As I said before, if they were to behave like proper scientists they could avoid having this weakness – but I don’t think they can.
To return to topic briefly, it’s interesting that one of the clearest signs of the last major change in the PDO, from cool to warm, was a jump in temperatures in Alaska between 1976 and 1980. You can see it in most of the Alaskan GISS records. I wonder if this “coolest summer since 1971” is a confirmation that the phase is changing back.
Snow in Sydney Australia – first since 1836
http://3news.co.nz/News/InternationalNews/SnowmenseeninSydneysuburbs/tabid/417/articleID/64625/cat/61/Default.aspx
Coldest night in Adelaide Australia for 25 years
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,24087779-5006301,00.html
‘BRISBANE Australia could be frozen by record low temperatures this week – with the mercury expected to fall to around zero degrees Celsius on Wednesday overnight’. Brisbane is at the same latitude (south) as Tampa Florida.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,24085970-952,00.html
Count me in
Maybe the public would like to know about how “science works”.
NCPA STUDY No 308
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st308
The evidence shows that those forecasting long-term climate change have limited or no apparent knowledge of evidence-based forecasting methods; therefore, similar conclusions apply to the second two elements of the forecasting problem. Public policy makers owe it to the people who would be affected by their policies to base them on scientific forecasts. Advocates of policy changes have a similar obligation. Hopefully, climate scientists with diverse views will begin to embrace forecasting principles and will collaborate with forecasting experts in order to provide policy makers with scientific climate forecasts.
If you write & control the ad, Anthony, count me in for $five hundred.
NYT?!?!? Didn’t its circulation just do a nose dive? Does anyone outside of people looking for an affirmation of their liberal views really read it anymore? Do you think there is a segment size significant enough who would actually read the ad and think about changing his/her mind or at least investigating a counter point? Do you think posting one add, even a full page will generate enough momentum to alter the actions of more than a few? The reason newspaper circulation is going downhill is because of the web. People are getting more and more information off the web. I’ve had some experience with advertising/marketing and newspaper ads and unless there is a sustained campaign, they are pretty much useless for driving immediate action. Hence, we don’t use them anymore. The best thing one can do to drive the anti-tax, anti-control, proper science based policy and not quack interpretations actions most skeptics are looking for, is support Anthony’s and other websites like this. The best thing Anthony can do is continue to improve everyday as he does.
As an Anchorage resident who’s job requires him to travel all over the state I can state that this has been a miserable summer. It has been cold, cloudy and rainy. Summit Lake, (halfway between Fairbanks and Glennallon was half covered with ice on June 14, about a month later then I had seen in the 5 years I had been going past it. Looking at the mountains, (Alaska range and the Wrangles), and the snow on them I would think it was April not July. I work outside a great deal, and am optimistic about Oct – Dec being warmer than average, however up here warmer in the winter, and November is winter, means snow. So after a hard winter with some record breaking snow and a godawful summer if we get hit with another snowy winter can we declare Climate Change?
NASA is out of line on global warming
Anthony, I do not know if you have seen this – you get a mention along with Steve McIntyre.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/27/do2708.xml
I see it wasn’t snow but “soft hail” that fell in Sydney. Talk about Newspeak. In Sweden where it is rather common it is called “kornsnö” (grain snow) and it has certainly never been considered as anything but snow here.
REPLY: I investigated it, and saw pictures of the storm that rolled through. It appeared convective in nature, and the reports I read made the precip out to be more like melted hail. So I decided not to report it since the mechanisms seemed more related to thunderstorm activity. I at first though “newspeak” also, but after digging into it, decided that it was in fact not snow. – Anthony
It is obvious to us that the suface station data is worthless. What I would like to see is a large newspaper or magazine run a feature story as an expose of the surface stations or, better, a serise of stories. The pictures alone can fill up a paper. I understand that they typically have swallowed the hysteria but it’s a great story.
Anybody know of a source to look up this type of info for other US cities?
I live in Jackson, Michigan, and so far we have only had 1 day in the 90’s, which seems abnormal too me.
Is there a good source for looking up what typical records for individual cities, states, etc are?
Funny, just a few weeks ago I was looking at Accuweather’s long term forecast blog by Brett Anderson. Zonal flow for most of NA through December, followed by a building ridge of high pressure across the Northern Rockies extending into the Canadian Rockies. This pattern forecasted to hold through the middle of January 2009. This means strong Northwesterly flow aloft for the eastern 1/3 of NA.
If the ECN forecast model is accurate, this means that the cool weather now sitting over eastern Alaska/Northwest Territories will definitely get much colder. Could be a very frigid start to winter for 2009.
Though I like the ad idea I don’t think it would get the results you are looking for. The best idea is to counter the Al Gore movie with a movie of our own.
This is what gave the AGW the push it needed to turn the tide. We shouldn’t try to attack them head on. I always thought a movie on the AGW movement called Dark Climate would do the trick. Just as long as the nerd science is kept to a minimum.
The ad would be a waste of money. To make a significant inroads into public opinion with a minimum of cash, I suggest the following:
1) Build a definitive, multi-layered web site which lays out the scientific problems with the catastrophic AGW predictions. Something like Jim Peden’s explanation or Warren Meyer’s could serve as a bare bones outline. The home page would contain a brief, simple summary of the strongest arguments. Links would take the viewer to more detailed explanations of each point. Those pages would then have links to all scientific studies relied upon. Include sections on the economics, the human costs of Kyoto, the Lomborg arguments, inadequacies of “peer-review”, the faulty surface stations, the politics of the IPCC, the refusal to allow independent review, etc., etc. Maintain the site with links to news and daily developments on the web. Take no corporate donations to support the site. Rely solely on reader contributions.
2) Get some of the biggest names (with impressive resumes) in the skeptic community to sign on to the statements made on the site (e.g. Lindzen, Spencer, et al). Don’t make claims which are sketchy. Keep it solid. The site should be suitable for a science teacher to use with students. A one stop shop which makes the case in simple terms, yet provides deeper and deeper levels of support suitable for the education and sophistication levels of readers ranging from elementary school to science PhDs.
3) Use e-mail to notify potentially sympathetic talk radio hosts, national columnists, conservative bloggers, etc. of the web site. Keep them updated as the site is updated with news, new scientific studies, etc. (Rush, Hannity, Powerline, Instapundit, Krauthammer, Sowell, et al)
4) As buzz starts to build and web traffic takes off, then it is time to spend a few dollars on advertising in more traditional advertising media. Just a few well done ads on radio, cable TV, etc. The ads should make simple, declarative statements and refer to the web site. [E.g. “The founder of the Weather Channel says that the Global Warming scare is the biggest scientific hoax in history. Find out more at http://www…...” or “Al Gore has gotten fabulously wealthy scaring people about global warming. Yet, some of the world’s most prominent climate scientists say he is wrong. Find out more at http://www…….”]
5) Use the ads to serve as the basis of a PR type campaign whose goal is to get some major news media to cover the ads and web site as legit news.
6) Encourage web site readers to write their politicians asking that they read the site and look at the science. Ask the network of talk radio hosts and bloggers to do the same.
7) Anytime a prominent politician takes a supportive position, send out mass e-mails to the news media (and the supportive alternative media of talk shows, bloggers, etc) making that point that skepticism continues to grow.
8) Repeat as necessary.
I’d be willing to contribute to an ad, though I do agree with EW Matthews that a documentary would be the ultimate form of persuasion.
RE: ‘Snow’ in Sydney. Sure seems like an awful lot of ‘hail’ around that picture of the snowman. Looks like snow to me.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hansen_is_the_odd_one/
Anthony:
You’re referenced in Andrew Bolt’s blog. Keep of the good work. Efforts and resources into this will produce FAR more results than the proposed ad.
EW:
“Just as long as the nerd science is kept to a minimum.”
It’s unfortunate but you are sooo correct. The measure of communication isn’t style, it’s effect. If one generates the action intendened, one has successfully communicated.
The segment of population that truly understands the science is sooo small. I guarantee you, the people actively participating in this blog is an EXTREMELY small portion of population. Far below 1%. It isn’t a complete lack of intelligence alone mind you. One can’t expect Joe 6 Pack to have the time to research this. If one wants to sway the silent majority, one must apply the K.I.S. principle (Keep It Simple). On a big picture level, it isn’t that difficult to understand, If one trys to demonstrate using the Steve McIntyre level of analysis, one is going to lose 95% of his/her audience in a matter of seconds.