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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Ben Lawson (09:37:56)
I only stuck my nose in here to highlight the frenzied ignorance, knee-jerk responses and adolescent behavior that characterizes this “science blog”.
The only thing you’ve highlighted, actually, is your own ignorance and arrogance. It’s classic, typical trollish behavior. Go stick your nose someplace else.
Ben Lawson
I only stuck my nose in here to highlight the frenzied ignorance, knee-jerk responses and adolescent behavior that characterizes this “science blog”. There ARE legitimate points of contention over AGW, but they have to be made honestly and with discipline.
Well, then, Ben, why don’t you set about with honesty and discipline to actually prove your stereotyping characterization of “this ‘science blog'”. It’s your contention, so you are the one who should actually prove it. Please show your work and definitions of terms, such as the ones you have used above.
Otherwise, you might find that you have just fallen prey to your own criticisms, which, btw, so far also sound more emotionally based to me than scientifically based.
Ben Lawson:
For years, what we’ve had rammed down our throats ad nauseam by the media, greens and government agencies, is that every above-average warm/wet/dry day we have is, “further mounting evidence of catastrophic climate change”.
Now you guys don’t seem to like it when the boot’s on the other foot.
Ben:
“I only stuck my nose in here to highlight the frenzied ignorance, knee-jerk responses and adolescent behavior that characterizes this “science blog”. There ARE legitimate points of contention over AGW, but they have to be made honestly and with discipline.”
So what you’re saying is you came here with no intention of participating in a debate at all, you came here to “highlight frenzied ignorance…”. So now you can return from whence you came feeling completely justified in your presupposed idea of what WUWT is all about and all’s well. Skepticism shown for it’s true idiocy, eh?
Before you leap to that conclusion, you may wish to hang around and poke at a few of the posts here and pay attention to some of the real debate that takes place, rather than taking a post that people were obviously having some fun with as your sole-source of opinion of those that linger here.
JimB
@April E. Coggins (20:17:17) :
“Here in Washington state, we are no longer allowed to dump excess snow into the creeks and rivers. Instead, we must pile the excess snow next to the creeks and rivers. Somehow, that difference makes it all better. Oh, and we also a have a stormwater runoff tax. We are being taxed for the rain and snow that falls out the sky on to our property. If we retain the stormwater, we are stealing from the state. If we allow it to runoff, we are polluting. Plus we pay a small fee for the smart people to administer the law.”
Sounds like Washington State is close to perfecting a perpetual motion (tax) machine.
hmmm… a BIG, BIG umbrella over ones property might be a loophole in the laws ;o)
murcurior,
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money!”
I forget who said it, but a great quote.
Interesting thing about Captain Puget’s body of water (Puget Sound) It gets some good tides going frequently lots of water mixing there. Deep too!
Mike
Ben Lawson (21:21:53) : a moment to actually think about the environmental results of dumping this kind of snow?
Math challenged? Take size of dump truck. Divide by size of ocean. Count number of digits to the right of the decimal place (feel free to use groups of tens…)
Aside from the possible[..] could […] both could […]. I don’t know […] or if either would actually be significant […] I’d rather “keep my mouth shut and be thought an idiot than open my mouth and confirm it”.
Maybe a bit late for that, I fear…
A brief lesson in storm drains:
Storm drains do not go through the water treatment plant (they would wash all the poo out before it had time to ferment). Storm drains drain into the natural drainage.
Natural drainage takes the storm run off to the ocean.
When snow melts, it goes into the storm drains and thus, into the ocean.
All the dumping does is slightly change the time when it happens and reduces the size of the pulse during the spring melt. To the extent some is dumped early, the risk of local peak concentration effects is reduced. (They don’t vacuum the land free of snow to dump it, they only dump the tiny bit from roads that is beyond what they have space to store.)
Per salt: Salt is put on roads to melt the snow. It creates saline runoff, that goes to the ocean. If the salt was all staying in the snow, then by definition it would not be doing it’s job of melting the snow. Adding the snow that did not melt (and so has a lower salt content) to the saline runoff will result in less salt concentration at ocean, not more. (Assuming the snow is dumped somewhere near the natural drainage point).
It is simply ludicrous to think that any additional bad thing is going to happen from moving the snow from the storage area to the place where the melt will end up anyway.
Bruce Cobb (06:43:22) : They could just get just get one of these. Airports, and some cities now are using them, including Manchester, NH which has a river, the Merrimack, but they can’t dump snow in the river anymore, of course. […] It burns about 170 gallons of diesel per hour,
Bruce, you’ve given me an idea! Why not a ‘water heated’ snow melter? Just pump river water (or ocean water) under the snow in a set of pipes. Snow melts and drains ‘away’. River or ocean water returned to point of origin so ‘nothing happened’ to it… Since the ‘heater’ water is isolated from the ‘melt path’ it would be hard to show any bad thing happening… It would take a lot of river volume at 2c to melt snow, though…
If anyone builds one, all I ask in payment is that it be called “The Smith Natural Snow Melter” 😉
Tom (06:46:14) : I love this site, but weather is not climate.
Oh, but it is! The common definition used in the AGW circles is 30 years of weather is the baseline climate. Now I’m much more in line with Pamela on holding that your climate only changes if you move a mountain range or change your latitude or… So I’ve taken to talking about 30 year weather and 200 year weather rather than using the word ‘climate’. I reserve that for things like “Mediterranean Climate exists in California” where the geographic tie is clear. So while I’d like to think that “weather is not climate” as commonly used, 30 year weather is defined as climate… at least to the modelers.
AnonyMoose (07:36:07) :
We take salt from salt mines (which was previously in the ancient oceans) and put it back into the ocean.
We’re just helping to restore the natural balance of the Jurrasic. And we’re releasing the salt in a much more diluted fashion than what would have happened when erosion exposed the salt deposit.
We used to take the salt from the ocean in large evaporation pans in the south end of the San Francisco bay. They were closed down for environmental reasons… (They wanted to ‘restore the wetland’).
Love this picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Salt_ponds_SF_Bay_(dro!d).jpg
Excuse me, But isn’t the ocean ‘salt water”? were is the problem with a little extra salt?
Is it even measurable? Except maybe at the dumping site? Jeeeesssssss!!!!!!!!!
Benmaximus Lawsonus nosius highlightus frenzius ingnoramius.
I like this new pig latin.
Seattle Update:
The City reversed its decision and announced that it will use salt in the future to facilitate snow removal. This decision is based upon a study that concluded adding salt to Puget Sound waters will offset some of the reduced salinity resulting from massive infusions of fresh water from winter flooding.
Salt
If salt is a bad thing to dump in the ocean, in the form of salty snow, then shouldn’t all the poop-processing-plant (P3) effluent water also be kept out?
The salt that people eat, and consume in beverages, does not just build up and up and up in our bodies (we would die if it did). It is part of the (gotta be polite here) excreta both liquid and otherwise.
The P3 does not remove salts from the in-flowing material. The salts pass through the P3 and exit with the treated water. That treated water then flows into the ocean, at least it does in many places in Southern California. For many years, the P3 effluent water from the big Hyperion P3 plant for Los Angeles was pumped through a pipeline about a mile offshore and released near the ocean floor. Apparently, Flipper and Shamu never much noticed…
Shhhhh….don’t tell the Environmentalists…they might have a hissy over this one….
Pamela: you are having WAY too much fun…please share
We use to dump city snow in the Boardman river, but the eco-terrorist stopped it!
http://www.record-eagle.com/local/local_story_057120808.html
http://www.record-eagle.com/statenews/local_story_057095803.html
more cold and snow for 09-10, I said so!!!!
LOL
The original source for that quote was from Senator Everett Dirksen From Illinois who was for many years one of the most quotable Senators. He had a deep resonant voice and a wonder style of expression that often capsulized problems in a very usable sound bite as above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Dirksen
Salt and snow melt issues have led to some interesting ecological/political outcomes. Here in Colorado we used mostly sand on the roads to aid snow melt and traction in cold weather until about the 1970’s. At that time, they noticed that our brown cloud was especially bad a couple days after a snow storm and found that the combination of pulverized road sand and our winter temperature inversions in the Denver Basin resulted in a muddy brown haze that noticeably lowered solar heating in the metro area compared to near by areas, and was a major problem for air quality. They first shifted to lighter sand applications and an aggressive program to use street sweepers after the storm to pickup the sand and recycle it. They also began to increase the salt blended in with the sand to reduce the amount of sand put down.
Some years later the environmentalists discovered that the road salt was building up on the road shoulders over time and then would be washed into the local streams and lakes in a pulse when the spring thaws and rains came so they encouraged the communities to reduce salt usage. This led to problems when we had cold snaps and icy road accidents jumped. Starting a few years ago again in an effort to reduce environmental impact they shifted to Magnesium Chloride blends which were supposedly more benign to the environment and they sprayed them as a liquid on the roads before the storm came in so the road never iced up in the first place.
The result if this was everyone’s car was immersed in a salty mist for weeks on end during the snowy months, and we suddenly started to have problems with mufflers and exhaust systems rusting out, and major visibility problems as the low concentration brine formed by the mag chloride and melt water produced a back spray from traffic that would dry to an impenetrable haze on the windshield unless drivers used their windshield washers constantly. In years gone by I could go a whole winter season on a single fill or two of the windshield washer reservoir on my car. After the introduction of Mag Chloride de-icer spraying I have been known to use up 1/2 gallon of windshield washer fluid in a single day of driving in heavy traffic conditions. So now we are dumping thousands of gallons of water/methanol mixture with traces of detergent into the environment every time we have a snow storm.
Since Methanol is a known skin and lung absorbed poison, I am waiting for some ecological group to point this out and ban methanol based de-icing windshield washing solutions.
Larry
“We used to take the salt from the ocean in large evaporation pans in the south end of the San Francisco bay. ”
The salt operations still thrive. Some old ponds that were in sore need of repair were “reclaimed” but I work right next to a large salt operation a little further North on the West side of the bay.
FYI … “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
Everett Dirksen American Senator, 1896-1969
It is great… but soon to be a “trillion here a trillion there…” ☺
Clive
There’s already salt in rain water/snow, it has to have it to form and it’s also found in ice core samples and glaciers.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/j4321x78070j3v47/
I’m convinced that Washington state has ran out of ways to tax and that is why they are now trying to tax us for the weather.
Roger, I just can’t help it. It kinda leaks out. I am a strange contrast of serious and off the wall posts. It must be because of the pioneer stock I come from. Great great great (or something like that – can’t remember how many greats) grandfather fought in the American Revolution. Great great grandfathers and great uncles on both sides fought in the Civil War, on both sides. Great grandfather traveled the Oregon Trail and was one of the pioneers of Wallowa County. Actually bought the land that was the last camp site of the Nez Pierce in Wallowa Valley. Grandparents worked in the entertainment industry (silent movies, vaudeville, etc). And then I came along to try to top that. I am the proud parent of three children, one of whom became a juvenile delinquent! Ergo the contrast.
Or it could be that I am Irish, having children is a crap shoot, and none of the above matters a tinker’s dam.
BTW, I checked out our local weather station. Everything looked like it should. It was the typical vented white box on a pole, faces north, is well away from a government building that is rurally located. No trees or barbecues nearby. The only thing that bothers me is that the data of this station is very spotty and appears to be not included in the overall data. Yet I know that the government employees in charge of that station are collecting their pay every day.
Pamela:
As an Irishman meself, I totally understand. While my ancestry is nothing to match yours, one of my ancestors is a Hero of the Alamo. I can just imagine him standing there, steely-eyed, when Travis drew the line in the sand with his sword and said, “Everyone who is staying with me to fight, step over to this side of the line.” And he stepped over. My family still has two pistols from the Battle of the Alamo.
On the other hand, another ancestor was hanged for robbing trains in Arizona, in the non-Hollywood version of the Wild West. Go figure.
And for what it is worth, speaking a version of “pig-latin” actually came in pretty handy for me years ago. A business colleague and I were in Italy, finalizing a deal in a meeting where the Italians spoke very good English, but our Italian was horrible. They had the advantage when they began speaking Italian with each other and we sat there silent. It would have been too rude for us to leave the room to confer privately, but we needed to do something.
So, I fell back on my roots and began speaking in a slow Southern drawl, complete with home-spun sayings, to my colleague, who was from Louisiana. He got the idea, and we worked out our closing strategy that way, in full view and full earshot of the Italians. They stopped chattering and listened to us, but could not understand a word! We got our way in the deal, too.
Ballsius Maximus Primus, Ya’ll
Putting snow contaminated with SALT into the sea— How mindless! But the real looming disaster everyone is missing is that adding all this water to the sea will inevitably cause ocean levels to rise. Now that is truly unforgiveable.
Geoff A.
“Putting snow contaminated with SALT into the sea— How mindless! But the real looming disaster everyone is missing is that adding all this water to the sea will inevitably cause ocean levels to rise. Now that is truly unforgiveable”
(errm…Is your post being sarcastic?!)
Snow melts and feeds the streams, lakes and oceans…..aaah?..it’s been doing this for over a few MILLION years.
Salt going in the ocean could cause problems?!
It’s where most of said salt comes from…..the salt would make the fresh water/snow more saline at melt and improve mixing. Less fresh water impact on the ocean.
Cause we all know how fresh rain/snow water can be so poisons to the environment.
LMAO!
I feel like I live in bizarro world these days.