NOAA: U.S. breaks or ties 115 cold and sets 63 new snowfall records

Concerning chills and cold winds…
http://www.politico.com/playbook/

evanjones (12:15:31) :
If we have a spring.
A silent spring?
(Which, no doubt, will be blamed on the reintroduction of DDT.)
A silent spring along with a somewhat silent fall means a very long winter.
As I recall those birds were a lot more important than people dying from lack of DDT.

Easterbrook’s projected cooling will not be sufficient to stop the Green Insurgency.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EVIDENCEFORPREDICTINGGLOBALCOOLINGFORTHENEXTTHREEDECADES.doc

I am shocked that some professor claims that we will see global cooling for the next twenty years or so. Seems he says so here.
Why haven’t they revoked his license or PhD or whatever?

Hey Anthony,
Have you noticed that your little red and orange lines on the 2008/2007 great icecapades graph show that in 2007, the meltback stopped two weeks later than this year, so winter kicked in two weeks earlier to get a good start on the big freeze.
Also if one remembers back to the great rain soaking from the far north that hit the plains States back in the spring, and sent this year’s Iowa ethanol crop down the Mississippi to the gulf of Mexico; the Idaho farmers were saying that their Spring started two weeks late so they were two weeks late in planting, and were already counting their crop losses for the eyar, before they even got started.
Some ominous premonitions for a global food shortage coming up soon to a place near you. History (and good science) shows that energy input = food ouput; world wide from the most primitive to the most sophisticated food production. Only two places on earth deviate significantly from the world food for energy straight line graph; in the sense of growing more food per energy input than the global norm. They are New Zealand, as the most productive agriculture on earth, and France. Both are somewhat due to fortuitous weather /climate; in the case of NZ being totally surrounded by temperature waterws of the Pacific, and Tasman Sea.
When I came to USA from Aotearoa; the USA was importing about 200 agricultural scientists per year form NZ, and this on a total immigration quota of 100 persons per year; and with US citizen family members having front row seats (GI war bride effect). I got lucky and ended up on the British quota which was by far the largest (35,000 per year).
So as the world cools; those pesky Arab/Persiams/Nicaraguans, might want to rethink their oil strategy and the idea of choking off the USA. We don’t get the oil; the world ends up without the food, and don’t look to Canada/Siberia/ Eurasia for more food with the snow line moving south.
Hate to point out the obvious.
So Anthony; enquiring minds want to know; when are you going to do the cross town drive perpendicular to lap one, to see what the UHI is across the airport /mainstreet route; since didn’t you say the Reno Owl box was in front of the blast shield at the end of the main runway, where the jet effluent could asphyxiate the owls in the box !?
You’ve got our attention now.
George
REPLY: I’m planning a return visit to do a much more extensive test…patience. – Anthony

Then and now. Snow in Switzerland
Blaming global warming for no snow in 2007, but not mentioning it when they’re buried now.

Just as the US markets have stopped an end of week sell-off crashing on them like a wave from around the world several times lately, so do I think the American polity will stop this carbon encumbering catastrophe in its globe girdling tracks. Palin is a skeptic, as witnessed by her mention early of ‘natural cycles’, and once she and McCain win, it won’t take more than a couple of heartbeats for the skeptical position to become administration policy. So, breathe easier. The worst is over.
============================================

Easterbrook is predicting 30 years of cooling based on historic Pacific Decadal Oscilations (PDO). See:Global Cooling is Here! Evidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades, By Professor Don Easterbrook, Western Washington University, Oct 30, 2008 ICECAP.us
Cooling can cause critical reductions in food productivity, in the face of rising population. The “Little Ice Age” in Europe resulted in reduction in agricultural productivity resulting in massive increases in food prices. e.g. a tenfold increase in the price of wheat in Holland and the price of rye in Germany. See: The Little Ice Age in Europe, Scott A. Mandia.
CO2 is a necessary “food” for plants. Grain productivity increased 50% from 1972 to 2001. See: Spatiotemporal patterns of cropland area and net primary production in the central United States estimated from USDA agricultural information, Jeffrey A. Hicke & David B. Lobell GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 31, L20502
In Central U.S. Agricultural Productivity: 1972-2001, CO2Science notes: . . . . it would appear that if either of the twin evils of the climate-alarmist crowd had a negative impact on crop productivity – which is highly unlikely, considering Hicke and Lobell attribute some of the increase in NPP to a “more favorable climate” and that carbon dioxide is an effective aerial fertilizer that also increases plant water use efficiency – that negative impact was miniscule compared to the positive impacts of all of the other factors cited by Hicke and Lobell. Based on this experience, therefore, we may expect to see more of the same in the future, i.e., increased crop yields, even in the face of (and likely partly because of) continued increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and air temperatures.
Carbon sequestration will likely reduce possible agricultural productivity. With rising population in the face of cooling climate, it will be critically important to INCREASE CO2 emissions to continue to increase grain productivity to avoid massive starvation.
With the world approaching peaking of light oil, it is critical to provide alternative fuels as fast as possible. Carbon Sequestration would starve funds from providing alternative fuels and result in a major economic crash.
Those mandating carbon sequestration will have on their heads the lives of millions of poor starving needlessly.
The inadequacies of conventional global warming models are important to focus attention back on peaking oil and the critical need to develop alternative fuels and bring costs down so the developing world can afford to feed itself.

Anthony:
REPLY: Simple- because there seldom is a day like this when 115 record events occur.
Of how many stations?
A quick count reveals these records were set in around 15 different states. How about the other 35?
Ok – on a more serious note, weather and politics (a popular subject in another thread) I only discuss at the coffee machine.
I found this an interesting remark:
…we know that the data used to detect the faint climate signal (0.7-0.9 C) may very well be swamped by…
The skeptics have told me a 1000 times that we’re coming out of the little ice age and we had the medieval warm period before that. Now how come that we can be sure that those events that happened centuries ago, but we can not know for sure what is happening right now, while we’re in the middle of it?
How much climate signal do we need for it to be detectable?

It’s long been my view that numbers of new high/low (similar to stock metrics that track new highs versus new lows) is a (much) better metric of climate change than averages, because new record high/lows are less influenced (statistically) than averages by local and regional effects.
My proposal is for a new metric is the number of new monthly highs versus new monthly lows (although daily high/lows would work just as well) as a rolling 12 month number. Ie, the metric would give the integer number of new highs versus new lows for x locations. For example -57 would mean 57 more new lows than new highs over the rolling count period.
This would be a much more sensitive measure of short to medium term climate change than simple averages. And in particular it would clearly show when warming or cooling was accelerating or slowing over shortish periods (less than a year). It would also be a good ‘headline number’ to get peoples attention.
I thought about doing this myself, but couldn’t do from the publically available Australian data.
Others have mentioned this, but this is just one of a number of possible and better metrics than a simple daily average. Why we do not see these metrics is likely because they would not show (enough) warming or open up the question of when and how should we be seeing warming due to GHG; day versus night, summer versus winter, etc.

Speaking of the Weather Channel, I thought they were tracking record highs and lows in US for the year. I remember seeing that both on TV and on their web site, but when I saw this thread, I went over and couldn’t find it.
Anyone seen that metric overthere lately?
(I did, however, find rants against fructose and Halloween candy, and enough claims of nails in “denialist coffins” to corner the iron market.)