Two Stories for you, one about the snow itself, and the other about climate law being debated and passed in the middle of the unusual snow.- Anthony
London has first October snow in over 70 years
From the Guardian
Cold snap causes flight cancellations while a motorway accident kills one driver and causes severe disruption
Parts of south-east England had more than an inch of snow last night while London experienced its first October snowfall in more than 70 years as winter conditions arrived early.
Snow settled on the ground in parts of the capital last night as temperatures dipped below zero. A Met Office spokeswoman said it was London’s first October snow since 1934.
For greater south-east of England it was the first October snow since 1974. High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire had 3cm (1.2 inches). One of the coldest temperatures recorded was -4.1C in Benson, Oxfordshire.
“It is unusual to have snow this early,” the Met spokeswoman said. “In October 2003 sleet and snow was recorded in Northern Ireland, Wales, south-west, north-west and north-east England and the Midlands, but it was mainly over higher ground.”
read the entire story here
How Parliament passed the Climate Bill (in spite of the weather)
Posted in Government, 29th October 2008 12:35 GMT
Excerpt: Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday – the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. The Mother of Parliaments was discussing the Mother of All Bills for the last time, in a marathon six hour session.
In order to combat a projected two degree centigrade rise in global temperature, the Climate Change Bill pledges the UK to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. The bill was receiving a third reading, which means both the last chance for both democratic scrutiny and consent.
The bill creates an enormous bureaucratic apparatus for monitoring and reporting, which was expanded at the last minute. Amendments by the Government threw emissions from shipping and aviation into the monitoring program, and also included a revision of the Companies Act (c. 46) “requiring the directors’ report of a company to contain such information as may be specified in the regulations about emissions of greenhouse gases from activities for which the company is responsible” by 2012.
Recently the American media has begun to notice the odd incongruity of saturation media coverage here which insists that global warming is both man-made and urgent, and a British public which increasingly doubts either to be true. 60 per cent of the British population now doubt the influence of humans on climate change, and more people than not think Global Warming won’t be as bad “as people say”.
Read the rest of the story at the Register, here
[…] A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Global Warming Debate But it’s probably just a coincidence. […]
‘Blog reading nobodies’ is a terrible defamation of people. Does that poster expect that all of these ‘nobodies’ should place any post-nominal letters each time they blog? For what purpose? It is the content of their thoughts not their titles that should be considerd!
Graeme Rodaughan (21:51:16) said
“While I feel very sorry for the people of the UK, and I would not be suprised to hear of people freezing to death this winter, the silver lining is as follows”
I’m sorry but a 3 day cold snap cannot be extrapolated like that. All that has happened is that we have had a short burst or air coming down from the arctic, the UK gets them all the time over winter. We also get easterlies from Russia that does the same thing. But the prevailing weather is warmer maritime westerlies and south westerlies. Indeed the cold snap is already on it’s way out and by Sunday temps will be up to normal again. It’s hardly snowball Britain.
WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE and certainly this does not show one way or another about the valiity of AGW. Why is it being reported here? Seems to be filtering going on in regards to topic selection when talking about the weather, ie cold ? then post…
Outlook for this years UK winter weather is mild again.
Regards
Andy
Hi Andyw35,
I’m not extrapolating from a 3 day cold snap.
I actually think that it will be a very cold winter for the NH this year.
PDO flip to cold for one, fast arctic freeze for two, no faith in AGW science for three.
As a consequence I think that current political actions are out of step with reality – however the future will absolutely demonstrate whether the NH is in for a cold winter or not.
Pfew, too many posts to follow. Just wanna say I’m also a blog-reading nobody. The reason why stratosphere should be cooling is explained in IPCC report chapters 2 and 4.
Did any of you read the new Geophysical Review Letters paper on polar temperatures being very far from what natural variability can account for?
I almost forgot to say: it’s tropospheric relative humidity which is supposed to remain constant, not specific humidity
http://members.shaw.ca/sch25/FOS/GlobalRelativeHumidity.jpg
Flanagan (07:29:47) on 10/30. If you’re a blog reading somebody, will you please explain to this nobody how you think Solar Cycle 24 starting up is going to warm up the earth, as you seemed to claim on another thread? When I challenged this assertion by your somebodiness, you failed to answer, which makes me feel like a nobody. So you get a chance to flesh out your somebodiness here. How about it?
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The UK has been lashed by rain, hail and snow over the last few days. Check out the photos from today’s Daily Mail 0f a town in Devon that was BURIED beneath 6 feet of hail in a few hours.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081758/Hailstorm-swamps-small-town-6ft-drifts–October.html
It looks like this new ‘proof’ from the Hadley Centre is just a recycled version of something that’s been around for some time. It’s not science. In fact, to call it ‘pseudo science’ would do it too much justice. I think a better description might be ‘confidence trick’.
This is how I would play the confidence trick. I would build a climate model (a computer program) with all the good and not-so-good stuff. Because I’m a passionate AGW believer I would of course include AGW at the core of the model. Of course, initially the model would fail to accurately predict past climate, so I would carry on adjusting and tweaking until it finally accurately reproduces past climate. I would plot a graph showing my model’s output and real historical climate, showing how wonderfully accurate the model is.
I would then remove the AGW component and then show a second graph, which would – as if by magic – show that the model no longer accurately reproduces past climate.
It’s a confidence trick for this reason: irrespective of whether the first version was honest or not, taking out the AGW component is guaranteed to make a big difference. If the version with AGW was tweaked and falsified to make it give the right answer, then taking out AGW is bound to make it wrong.
To mis-quote the M&S advertisement: This is not just science. This is junk science.
Chris
Phillip Bratby
Sure, I know that their advisers are all clones of David King but surely our politicians read articles by, for example, Christopher Brooker, and they must read some of the letters they receive from sceptical scientists. In which case only fools would dismiss these completely and even if they thought there might be a 2% possibility that the sceptics could be right, surely a sensible politician would leave some room for manoeuvre. That is just sound politics.
In other words, it is the first time in history that politicians have answered straight questions with a answers, without caveats. The questions. Is AGW real? Their straight answer: yes. Are the alarmists right? The straight answer: again yes.
Andyw35 said: “WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE and certainly this does not show one way or another about the valiity of AGW. Why is it being reported here? Seems to be filtering going on in regards to topic selection when talking about the weather, ie cold ? then post…
Outlook for this years UK winter weather is mild again. ”
And mild is somehow bad…
But climate is weather, averaged over time. And why do we always hear about heat waves or record hot days here and there as evidence of AGW?
Can somene tell me how ‘Snow blankets London’ when in fact it only ‘settled in parts’.
Me thinks a weatherman has been at Fox a little too long! What’s their motto now? Something like ‘Fair and balanced’!
Speaking of snow.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=02&fd=27&fy=1997&sm=02&sd=28&sy=2006
Apparently, when the fjords on the east coast of Greenland are covered with snow, they are no longer “sea ice”. The same is true for inlets on the north coast of Greenland. In this comparison as you follow the coast line around the entire perimeter of the sea ice you will notice that many bays and inlets have been “whited out”. There have also been a few ice islands added. I wonder if this was the adjustment that I’ve heard about. Has anyone else seen that graph with the adjustment? Did the adjustment occur concurrent with the addition of the snow to the pictures?
You know 100,000 sq kms, here and there can add up to a below average Arctic Sea Ice Extent. I don’t know what the real number is but it would not surprise me if it is app 300,000 sq km.
In a real bit of irony, the expanding ice shelves, covered with snow, could reduce the reported sea ice area, extent, volume and anomalies, even as Arctic temperatures plummet.
What really irks me is that this could also affect the outcome of the brownie bet.
andyw35,
“WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE”
Of course it is! Climate is aggregated average weather. If average weather patterns change then, over time, that becomes a climate change.
Hi kim,
well temperatures are correlated to the sun activity, no?
Flanagan:
In your 02:39:11 post above, you linked this graph, purportedly taken from this site, in your attempt to prove that global relative humidity has remained unchanged.
But that is not the graph from the site. Your graph has been altered, to show almost no change in relative humidity. The actual graph from the site is here: click. Note that the unaltered graph shows a significant decline in R.H. Why did you alter the graph you posted?
Furthermore, the site you linked to states:
[In fact, the site your altered graph purportedly came from is well worth checking out. It effectively refutes AGW, and the computer models used by the UN/IPCC to predict global warming.]
The question remains: why did you change the relative humidity graph from the site you linked to?
Finally, further evidence of declining relative humidity can be seen in this chart.
Global cooling will be much, much worse than global warming would have ever been…
Flanagan,
Either you are a naughty boy or you have been had.
I shouldn’t really be so surprised by this, but of all the hundreds of MPs who voted this week only a handful of them – for instance, Conservative back-bencher Peter Lilley – appear to have raised a fuss over the appalling cost of the whole exercise. (The opposition to this stupid Bill has come from the back benches – not one party leader appears to have given the matter much critical thought.) Given that the government has just blown 37 billion pounds sterling of our money on bailing out the banks, you’d think that they’d be a little less enthusiastic over tossing yet more of our prosperity down the drain, but there we are. And make no mistake, the 80% emissions cut is nothing but a pointless and self-defeating gesture. The UK emits less than 2% of the world’s manmade CO2, and that percentage will be ever smaller, as China’s and India’s share grows. Even if AGW was a real issue, Britain going completely “carbon neutral” would be a drop in the ocean.
And there’s next to nothing about it in the news. The headlines this week have been mostly about two BBC presenters in trouble over making a prank phone call, a matter upon which political party leaders have made it their business to comment (as opposed to the presumably trivial prospect of long-term economic hardship resulting from the Climate Change Bill.)
Flanagan (08:48:17) You’d have to convince Leif Svalgaard that temperatures are linked to the sun before you convince me. I believe, not know, that the sun directs climate in several unknown ways, but I’m convinced that there is a poor correlation between what we know of past temperature and what we know of the sun’s past activity, as measured by sunspots. Leif hasn’t been flapping his fingertips completely in vain. So why don’t you be a big boy, and give it up? Sun Cycle 24 ramping up isn’t going to bring global temperature up by itself.
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Smokey (09:08:33) The graphs are different, and the scale is different, but the 300mb and 700mb on each show the same thing, so I don’t believe Flanagan manipulated the graph. However, both graphs refute his point; relative humidity has dropped.
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Another problem with CT from CA:
379
tty:
October 31st, 2008 at 11:50 am
Actually it’s wrong both ways. If you compare the two images in the link above and look at the russian coast from the White Sea east to Taimyr you will notice that in the older map the ice comes well inland. The Kanin Peninsula and Vaygach are more-or less obliterated. On the other hand the younger map, while less distorted is definitely a bit “snowed-over”, for example the whole Taz estuary which is about 250 km long and 40 km wide has disappeared completely.
Also there is another error I’ve mentioned before. From the 80’s and up to about 2003 the maps definitely shows ice in areas where there isn’t any. This is easily seen as “ice” in the Baltic in summer, where there never is any. Probably the ice in the Arctic is also exaggerated. Look at this for example:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=07&fd=01&fy=1990&sm=07&sd=01&sy=2006
There is positively never ever any ice in the Baltic in July!
It seems like both extra snow and extra heat are being added in locations where no one lives to check it out.
Flanagan (08:48:17) Then again, see Steve Hempell’s comment on 10/31 at 10:12:35 on the Hard Lessons thread. Integrated cycle length and strength do seem to correlate with historical temperatures, a contention that Leif disagrees with. There are warring integrations, update at ten.
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