Here is a weather curiosity. We’ve been hearing a lot about snowfall in the northern hemisphere this year. In Oslo, they have given up on trying to pile it up so they have resorted to dumping it in the sea. If this happened in Seattle they’d probably get into a tizzy for polluting Puget Sound with fresh water snow. And it is not just Oslo, the problem seems widespread. Here are some other news stories in London, OT Geneva, Ohio Chardon, OH Wasatch, UT Chicopee, MA and Rochester, NY where they say the piles are making driving dangerous. In Wenatchee, WA they want to spray warm sewage water on the snow to melt it. I know they could use the USHCN temperature sensor at the sewage treatment plant there to check the temperature to make sure conditions are right. Yeah, that’s the ticket! – Anthony
From Reuters Environment Blog by Alister Doyle
It looks more like an Ice Age than global warming.
There is so much snow in Oslo, where I live, that the city authorities are resorting to dumping truckloads of it in the sea because the usual storage sites on land are full.
That is angering environmentalists who say the snow is far too dirty – scraped up from polluted roads — to be added to the fjord. The story even made it to the front page of the local paper (’Dumpes i sjøen’: ‘Dumped in the sea’).
In many places around the capital there’s about a metre of snow, the most since 2006 when it was last dumped in the sea. Extra snow usually gets trucked to sites on land, where most of the polluted dirt is left after the thaw. Those stores are now full — in some the snow isn’t expected to melt before September.
But are these mountains of snow a sign that global warming isn’t happening?
Unfortunately, more snow might fit projections by the U.N. Climate Panel, which says that northern Europe is likely to get wetter and the south drier as temperatures rise this century.
“By the 2070s, hydropower potential for the whole of Europe is expected to decline by 6 percent, with strong regional variations from a 20 to 50 percent decrease in the Mediterranean region to a 15 to 30 increase in northern and eastern Europe.” it said in a 2007 report (page 60 of this link).
So people in northern Europe may have to buy more snow shovels than parasols to cope with global warming?
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I have a question. If the snow is too dirty to place in the fjord, where does rain and melt water go? To be specific, where does the storm drain system terminate?
It seems to me that all that dirt might end up in the fjord anyway when snowfall changes to rainfall.
Ron de Haan… it was hilarious… I loved it!
I can just see the environmentalists… coming home from walking to the store, unloading groceries from their $2 cloth bag, and trying to put their soy-milk ice cream into the freezer… saying “DOH!” because all this snow was in there…
Maybe eventually they’d run it down the sink after all…
So, just so I have this straight, NONE of the meltwater (complete with oil and salt) ever washes back to the sea? Is that it? Dumping it into the water is fundamentally different from letting it melt into the water? Sure… yep.
No, they had a tizzy because they felt the salt on the roads would be rinsed into the freshwater streams and rivers and disrupt the freshwater species there. There is some merit to the claim, but I’d prefer to see some sort study verifying that it has or can have a measurable effect.
Ben Lawson (21:21:53) :
The snow will eventualy melt and end up in the sea anyway. If it is allowed to melt, it will take with it the oil from the streets. So dumping plowed snow is acctualy better for the sea in the end.
I guess the rain in the summer will wash the oil into the sea, so it is probably a wash. It is not going to dilute the sea, or the other way around. The volume of water in the sea is much too large. This is why it does not freeze in the winter.
We gonna have a whole lot more come sunup! Already 10 inches on the ground here @ur momisugly -5. Should dip to -8 come morning, and who knows how much more snow. I just uncovered the gardens from the last dump! I am rubbing it in everywhere I go.
Ben Lawson:
I don’t know which is more likely or if either would actually be significant, but on this technical point I’d rather “keep my mouth shut and be thought an idiot than open my mouth and confirm it”.
Then why didn’t you follow your own rule instead of trying to diss the whole blog?
[snip- please tone this down and then repost it – Anthony]
I’m definitly not an environmentalist, but snow from the street can be very dirty. I’ve grown up next to a storage site for snow, there is a lot of dirt in the snow, believe me, sometimes it is almost black. The storage site was on a stream, so the dirt ended up in the stream, but most of it is washed into the streams and rivers anyway, also if you dump it somewhere else. The alternative is not, that someone “cleans” the snow.
Rather than looking at the amount of snow ( which tells you far more about the amount of moisture than cold ) you can look at the artic to see how this winter has faired in the northern hemisphere.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Looks an average year to me up to now. It will be interesting to see if next summer does return more to the norm as skeptics wish for or not. I’m not confident it will ….
Regards
Andy
Mike McMillan (20:16:01) :
Where did that sunspot go?
It’s SC24 stage shield failed to detach and it fell back down.
You see, man isn’t the only one to put a lot of effort into launching and then have a simple thing go wrong. Imagine how bad the Solarians must feel. It was supposed to measure the photosphere for thier Galactic Minimum study.
Pamela Gray:
NobAl Dumpus MaxiGoregus… After all Oslo is the center of whirled peas.
Actually, this winter here in Oslo is now normal, i.e. the way I remember it in the 60s and early 70s. Dumping snow in the Oslo Fjord used to be common, but it was stopped due to local pollution issues. The Oslo fjord has only a small passage to the open sea.
Here is a picture of why they are dumping snow in the sea. The snow depots are full
http://www.vg.no/bil-og-motor/artikkel.php?artid=548393
Snow is precipitation by another name? Not so? If those snow storms had been rain storms the water would be in the sea already. So how would anything change?
And don’t forget all that yellow snow. You can’t put that in the water without a permit
That report is from London Ontario…So this who piece is based on reports from one area of the N. American continent…
Here in the UK the weather has been fairly mild in the second half of February and the snow is long gone.
REPLY: Fixed, thanks
More rubbish courtesy of the BBC and Dr David Carlson http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7906539.stm “We have enough to say the whole ice/ocean/atmosphere system in both hemispheres is changing faster than we thought…the whole Arctic system is in a fundamentally different state than 12 months before.”
“I’m definitly not an environmentalist, but snow from the street can be very dirty. I’ve grown up next to a storage site for snow, there is a lot of dirt in the snow, believe me, sometimes it is almost black.”
Snow collects particles/dust/carbon from the atmosphere and outside our atmosphere, just like rain. You can’t stop it, there’s local everyday pollutants and then the natural debris that rains down on us continuously.
We wouldn’t have rain if not for the dirty nuclei (minerals)/salts, plus carbon, ozone, O3, NO2 are being created in the ionosphere through natural electrochemical process’s from the sun.
.
There’s a lot of snow in the Alpes as well. In the last years, they were trying to put covers on glaciers in summer, to preserve them for future generations. I think that this winter there is a lot of mass added.
Also I’ve seen in the news that whole villages in Austrian Alpes have to be evacuated due to menacing snowslides and firemen were called to shovel down the heavy layers of snow from the rooftops to prevent their collapse.
“DJA (20:58:50) :
JimB (19:00:46)
Where did the EPA think the salt came from in the first place?”
Exactly. Every year, there is a “salt cycle”. Salt gets applied to the roads, scooped up with plows, moved somewhere for “storage” and then eventually, thanks to seasonal warming caused by natural climate variations , it melts, and as pointed out before, it runs into the streams/rivers/oceans, aside from whatever gets absorbed locally.
Ben,
“Aside from the possible toxic components, dumping the snow could either locally dilute or over-concentrate seawater, both could an adverse impact on marine life.”
I’d encourage you to go sit beside the ocean in any of the northern areas that experience this amount of snow. There are a couple of great spots along the Piscatiqua River in Portsmouth, N.H., where we experience 8-11ft tides, twice every 25hrs, with river currents running about 6kts. Then travel upriver to the Great Bay estuary and contemplate the amount of water that gets exchanged twice every 25hrs. The impact on salinity from dumping snow in the water would be miniscule compare to what happens when we get 1 good rain.
You can taste the difference in the water caused by 1 good rain, but you have to do it quickly, before the next tide comes in and replaces all that water.
JimB
“Ray (22:16:18) :
Oh My God!!! they are cooling the ocean and they will rise the ocean levels by dumping snow there. Quick, someone must tell Gore to sell his sea-side summer house.”
But this achieves a perfect balance. We’re ADDING volume, but because we’re COOLING the ocean, it contracts 😉
Noharminus, nofoulimus.
JimB
Bulaman (20:32:40)
New Zealands entry into the global sweepstakes is top news! Al Gore has gone down on his knees to thank ‘ his god ‘ for doubling his income.
Seriously, I was under the impression that New Zealand apart from being one of the worlds wonders (perfect climate,) it is I believe 1/3 covered in trees the other 2/3 are a sheep and cattle’s dream come true. Has it not the worlds largest forest planted by man? And I think that when you place the entire population around the coast line they are more than 1 km apart. All the Kiwis that I have been most fortunate to meet in my travels, have always been level headed and sane, what I ask has your immigration policy done to the famous Kiwi ? It seems that what you imply has ‘outside influence’
As cool weather indicates climate change and warm weather indicates climate change, it begs the question,,…. “What would you expect to see if there is no climate change?” I think the AGW people should be made to say what would they expect to see if there was no climate change. Surely any scientist must look at all possibilities. Any theory should have predictions. This situation where warm or cool indicates climate change is a nonsense in terms of predictions. In what sense is that testable? As for the climate modelling… is there no humility and an appreciation that they could be wrong? They just change the data!
AGW protagonists should say what would be happening if there was no climate change.
And this just in:
“The president will also propose, in the 10-year budget he is to release Thursday, to use revenues from the centerpiece of his environmental policy — a plan under which companies must buy permits to exceed pollution emission caps — to pay for an extension of a two-year tax credit that benefits low-wage and middle-income people.”
“The budget will show the government beginning by 2012 to collect billions of dollars in revenues from selling permits to businesses that emit the polluting gases, assuming the president’s energy initiative becomes law as soon as this year, officials said.”
Dumpus Maximus Crapus.
JimB
jorgekafkazar (20:38:15) :
“No, no, you don’t understand. Global warming was when the science was settled. Now the science is really, really settled, and ha-ha, silly us: it’s global cooling! As proof that the science is really, really settled, we’re going to spend $400,000,000.00 of stimulus money on more models. Then the science will be really, really, really, really settled. Don’t pay any attention to those Japanese and Russian scientists. They didn’t invent the car and the Internet.”
I like the comment, but can we please institute an abbreviation axiom:
(line 2) we could have “really×2,” and for (line 5) “really×4,” and etc.
I feel this is long overdue. Some speakers spend hours repeating this word, and others even fall asleep having forgotten their original point.
And to think that the English language has such a really×10,000 rich vocabulary.
ian (22:32:46) :
“While I really appreciate the humour and lightheartedness often displayed at WUWT (as opposed to the viciousness often displayed at blogs such as RC and DeSmog) I don’t think that attacks on ‘greenies’ and ‘lefties’ assists those of the aforementioned who are earnestly querying the AGW hypothesis.”
But the greenies contradict themselves, chase their own tails, shoot themselves in the foot, etc.
There’s such a lot of good fun to be had. Which is why the greenie blogs need to get nasty.
AM (UK ex-leftie) (not a humourless post, I hope!)
Think of the salt as an analogy.
1.) We take oil and coal, which were previously in the atmosphere, and release their carbon dioxide back into atmosphere. Bad!
2.) We take salt from salt mines (which was previously in the ancient oceans) and put it back into the ocean.
If 1.) is bad then 2.) must be bad, right? [sarcasm on] Of course! Anything man does is bad and unnatural apriori [sarcasm off]