Northeast Siberia braces for extreme cold of -60C

~snip~
lol

2008 ONE OF HOTTEST EVER!!!
Analysis from David Whitehouse:
h/T Dirk Maxeiner
“One would have thought that any dispassionate and scientifically rigorous look at the general temperature standstill since 2001, and now a slight fall in the average annual global temperature record would provide pause for thought about what is really going on, and, whatever side of the fence you sit, perhaps a humble appreciation that we do not by any means know as much about the complexities of the climate as some say we do.
And so it happened. The headline in the Guardian said;
“2008 will be coolest year of the decade; Global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, but cooler temperature is not evidence that global warming is slowing, say climate scientists” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather
If I may quote from the article;
“Prof Myles Allen at Oxford University who runs the climateprediction.net website, said he feared climate sceptics would overinterpret the figure. ‘You can bet your life there will be a lot of fuss about what a cold year it is. Actually no, its not been that cold a year, but the human memory is not very long, we are used to warm years,’ he said, ‘Even in the 80s [this year] would have felt like a warm year.’
And 2008 would have been a scorcher in Charles Dickens’s time – without human-induced warming there would have been a one in a hundred chance of getting a year this hot. ‘For Dickens this would have been an extremely warm year,’ he said. On the flip side, in the current climate there is a roughly one in 10chance of having a year this cool.”
Overinterpret? Is that a new way of saying don’t look at all the relevant data because it might be inconvenient?
As I pointed out, this is not telling the whole story, nor even putting it into a proper context. The important point evaded is not that 2008 would have been hot for Dickens but how hot is it with respect to the current warming spell. Nobody is arguing that the past decade is not warmer than previous ones and that the world¹s glaciers and ecosystems are not reacting to it. If 2008 is the coldest year since 2001 and the global average temperature didn’t change at all between 2001 2007 one should ask why! Talking about 2008 on its own and comparing it to Victorian times is misleading.
Then a few days later in the Guardian the environmental campaigner George Monbiot wrote, in response to the first article that “In the physical world global warming appears to be spilling over into runaway feedback.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/09/climate-change-science-environment
Really? What a load of nonsense. It’s statements like these that make me wonder if I am either living in the same physical world and if we need real world data at all?
It is said in that article that it’s all right because the Met Office predicted that 2008 would be cool because of the la Nina effect. What it didn’t say is that the previous year was predicted by the Met Office to be the warmest ever and it wasn¹t. la Ninas come along regularly and it’s no great scientific achievement to say that when one occurs the world will cool. A failed prediction of warming however is highly significant especially given the faith put in computer modelling.
Also this supposed explanation is not in itself adequate. If the predicted cooling by la Nina had not occurred then 2008 would probably have been the same temperature (given the uncertainties) as every year since 2001 and that in itself would require explanation.
Later on in the Monbiot article we have, as I predicted, the tired old cliché about “professional deniers employed by fossil fuel companies.” Where I wonder are their counterparts, the professional campaigners whose vested interests make them see a runaway warming world despite what the real world the data says?
I am broadly in favour of the global warming CO2 hypothesis but I know it is just that, a hypothesis – and that needs testing against real observations in the physical world. If it isn’t, then it’s not science.”

Well Pierre,
Just what would constitute real world testing that would convince you that the CO2 global warming hypothesis is something to be broadly in favor of ?
Would it influence your decision, if someone were to present data that showed a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 leading to a SUBSEQUENT significant increase in global surface temperature; or a significant decrease in atmospheric CO2 leading to a SUBSEQUENT significant decrease in global surface temperature ?
Because that sort of data might convince me in a real hurry.
The only problem, that I have, is that so far we have NO SUCH DATA; not ever; but we do have oodles of data showing the exact reverse situation.
So I am going to wait for data that so far at least the last 3/4 million years of data have failed to turn up ?
I don’t think so; but I’ll become a believer if and when such data does show up; well if I live that long of course. Meanwhile I have other more important things to do.

“” B Kerr (12:47:31) :
This is a fascinating question and I have been waiting for someone to explain how it is actually done.
paminator (08:58:13) :
>deletions<
Would someone please be kind enough to explain how low temperatures are measured, and how they were measured in the 1800’s without the use of modern electronics. “”
Well the short answer for the 1800s is “they weren’t”.
For most of that period, I would think that various types of “liquid” thermometers would be used, but maybe electrical resistance thermometers might have been in experimental stages.
If I ever knew when the Platinum Resistance Thermometer was devised, I certainly don’t remember now; but it would have been sometime after Ohm’s law was discovered (which doesn’t say anything like 99.99 % of electronics engineers say it says.)
In principle, today, you can use semiconductor junction thermometers (Bandgap devices) to measure as low a temperature as the semiconductor packaging can survive in.
The forward Voltage difference between two semiconductor diodes operating at a fixed current density ratio, is a function of the semiconductor Bandgap Voltage, and a linear function of the absolute temperature, and that Voltage goes to zero at absolute zero, so it can make a pretty good and very linear thermometer; in principle down to zero K.
HP once made (maybe Agilent Technologies still does) a quartz crystal thermometer. HP discovered a particular linear temperature coefficient of frequency quartz oscillator cut; I believe out of all the possible ways of cutting a single crystal of pure quartz, there is only one possible orientation, and mode of oscilation that provides a constant temperature coefficient of frequency; but I imagine that practically that only persists over a limited temperature range, before some secondary packaging phenomena introduce non linearities. But over its operating range it is a pretty nifty thermometer; but far too expensive to put up in a barn owl box in Siberia.
To get into the very cold technology era, you have to dig up stuff on Kammerling-Onnes; who has to be the all time low temperature guru; and I have to apologise to our Scandahoovian friends, that I don’t exactly remember his species. Something tells me his friendly handle was Heike or something like that, and maybe that is Finnish; but someone in Norway/Denmark/Swededn can straighten me out if I got that wrong. Certainly early thermometry was (and maybe still is) one of the problem areas of Physics.
Photometry takes the cake for the most screwed up part of physics; there being almost as many standard units of photometry as there are languages on planet earth; and most of them don’t make any more sense that the rod/stone/fortnight system, that now only the USA uses.

Well officially it was his low temperature studies that won him the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics; but he did discover superconductivity in 1911.
I would think, that the Kammerlingh-Onnes (its modern name ) lab in Leyden, along with the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the Cavendish, and the Rutherford labortatories, would have been great places to got oschool in the early parts of this century.
Rutherford by the way was Kiwi, no matter what those Limeys say.

Thank you George E. Smith for taking the time to answer my question.
I still have concerns about past temperature records.
I read in an article where cold temperatures were estimated to be -83F.
Fine I’m happy with that I can understand the need to estimate. Months later the temperature was calibrated to -81.3F
The estimate is now accurate to one decimal place.
The same is true with early CET temperatures.
Temperatures in 1600’s are to the nearest degree C and then to the nearest half degree C.
Yet averages are given correct to two decimal places.
Mind you these temperatures would have been measured in degrees Fahrenheit then converted and rounded to C.

“Oymyakon is known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold, because on January 26, 1926, a temperature of −71.2 ℃ (−96.2 ℉) was recorded there (however, this fact is arguable because the temperature was not directly measured but obtained by extrapolation). ”
-attributed to wikipedia (missed putting on the front end of the quotation marks)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon

Here in central MN we set an all-time record for a low pn evening/morning of Dec. 15-16 at a balmy -23F, overturning that of 1963 of -21.
In my memory this is early by 10 days for the coldest snap of the winter, so we can expect lower.

I received a letter in November from a man living more or less on the Equator in Kenya. He said “There was a funny snow cloud which fell near to Lake Ol’Bolosat and covered about 200 hectares, but no one died for the area is not settled by people.” This area is about 7000 feet above sea level, and my family lived there for fifty years, like my friend I had never heard of such a thing.
Susan Duke

Seems as though the cold air is rolling off the top of the world and landing in lower elevations. It’s been colder in Minnesota than Barrow, AK – very strange. Hence, no sea ice buildup and brutal winter conditions in upper North America and Siberia.