Guest post by Steven Goddard
“April comes in like a lion, and stays that way.”
The University Of Colorado in Boulder and nearby Colorado State University are hotbeds of climate science activity. Famous climate names from both sides of the AGW aisle like NCAR, NSIDC, the Pielkes, Bill Gray and Chris Landsea are associated with these universities. Earlier this extended winter WUWT reported on one forecast by a CU geography professor :
University of Colorado-Boulder geography professor Mark Williams said Monday that the resorts should be in fairly good shape the next 25 years, but after that there will be less snowpack – or no snow at all – at the base areas
No doubt that a geography professor would have the correct skill set to be making ski forecasts 25 years in the future, and that 25 years from now the climate will make a radical switch. It appears that Dr. Williams forecast is correct so far, as Colorado is getting lots of snow.
Wolf Creek Ski Area has received more than 11 metres of snow this winter, and has 118 inches of snow on the ground. (That would be 2.9972 metres deep, using the Catlin tape measure.) Unfortunately, people may be unable to get to most of the ski areas because Interstate 70 is shut down – due to too much snow.
Ahead of the current storm, all of the snowtel sites in Colorado were reporting normal snowpack.
| RIVER BASIN | PERCENT OF AVERAGE | ||
| Snow Water | Accum | ||
| GUNNISON RIVER BASIN | 109 | 108 | |
| UPPER COLORADO RIVER BASIN | 112 | 109 | |
| SOUTH PLATTE RIVER BASIN | 98 | 97 | |
| LARAMIE AND NORTH PLATTE RIVER BASINS | 103 | 105 | |
| YAMPA AND WHITE RIVER BASINS | 113 | 109 | |
| ARKANSAS RIVER BASIN | 107 | 99 | |
| UPPER RIO GRANDE BASIN | 104 | 107 | |
| SAN MIGUEL, DOLORES, ANIMAS & SAN JUAN | 95 | 10 | |
One popular AGW theory of convenience is that warming temperatures bring more snow. As can be seen below, this might not be an adequate explanation.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/hprcc/MonthTDeptHPRCC.png
Of course, weather is not climate and the earth has a 50/50 chance of “tipping” in the future – due to reaching some mythical CO2 threshold.
On a more urgent note, a US Navy researcher from told the Beeb that projections of an ice free Arctic by 2013 may be “too conservative.”
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
(This California based researcher did not accompany the Catlin expedition on their -40C Arctic camping trip this spring.)
Polar Bear pondering how cap-and-trade may brighten it’s future?
If you want to save the ski industry and the polar bears, you might want to consider sending Al Gore some money – and please quit producing so much of that dangerous pollutant CO2. However, absolutely do not try to apologize to the bears in person. Skiing is much more fun and generally safer than swimming with polar bears, as this woman visiting the Berlin Zoo found out.
PHOTO: WWW.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
I just don’t know how to get to any ski areas without making lots of CO2.
Hmmm I wonder if her last name was Doolittle…
We would converse in polar bear and python,
And we could curse in fluent kangaroo.
If people asked us, can you speak in rhinoceros,
We’d say, “Of courserous, can’t you?”
If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages
Think of all the things we could discuss
If we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals,
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals,
And they could squeak and squawk and speak and talk to us.
E.M.Smith,
I’m afraid your knowledge of fractals needs a little work.
Although indeed the length of a coastline around an island depends very strongly on the length of the yardstick used, both its area and average height do not. The simple thought experiment of bringing in bulldozers to level the whole island to a constant height should show why this is the case.
A global average temperature is a physically well-defined property. Determining it certainly requires a lot of work, but if you’re worried about the accuracy why don’t you take it up with Roy Spencer, the leader of the science team which produces the UAH satellite dataset.
Steven Goddard – if you believe anything you read in the Mirror, I pity you. If you think it’s fun to show gratuitous pictures of suicide attempts, I pity you more.
REPLY: RW give it a rest, we care not for your judgments, your labels, nor your accusations. – Anthony
Tom P. (10:42)
I thought about it, but I have to disagree. Without a reason why temperatures over the last 30 years should increase linearly, there is no reason to fit them to a straight line. If the reason is that C02 has increased linearly over that time, I’d have to say it is not a good reason or that the correlation is pretty weak. Historically there have been periods when CO2 has increased but not temp (1940 to 1970).
But, if the straight line is the best we can do, why not wait a bit and see what the temps do compared to the line over the next 2 to 5 years?
Let’s show some real empathy and put out ourselves in the bear’s place! There you are in your bear-jammies, taking a little mid-day nap. Some German woman scales the security wall designed to keep out the riff-raff and swims the moat designed to idiot-proof the whole affair. You get grumpy. You’re SUPPOSED to get grumpy! You’re a bear! Then you read that some schmuck feels sorry for the German woman who caused this whole mess in the first place! How’re you gonna’ feel?
Just Want Truth…
“…if you want to have a better data set to work with mathematically let’s go back 1000’s of years to the Holocene Optimum. Let’s see what temperatures have done since then. Let’s see how quickly temps have risen and fallen through those 1000’s of years.”
The Holocene Optimum, 8000 years ago, was about 0.5 degC warmer than the more recent climate, giving a trend of 0.006 degC per century to date.
“Good idea isn’t it?”
Yes, but probably not in the way you intended.
Tom P: I didn’t miss the point about the GISS article at all. I wasn’t saying you can’t say there seems to be cooling or warming. Just that you can’t pin down the actual temperature. That is a fact, which GISS elucidates surprisingly honestly. What’s your beef?
And again with asking me “what would cause concern for you?” Uh, once again, do we or do we not agree that the ~observed~ changes are, in and of themselves, alarming? Why do you keep trying to make me sound absurd? I said quite clearly that ~still~ (which most people would interpret as “even up to now” not, “now and forever” small compared to seasonal variations. This is not to say that a change which you might call “small” compared to seasonal variation (say, 10 degrees F) is not potentially harmful. However, somewhere between 10 degrees and 1 degree is were I draw the “huge” threshold. Where exactly? I don’t know, it depends. 1 degree compared to twenty is small, 10 compared to twenty is not, nor is nine or eight or seven-but just how far down to go? Maybe five? No, that probably isn’t good enough for you, so I’ll go lower. So fine, its stupid but: 3 is my arbitrary threshold at which 20 is no longer “huge” by comparison. Happy now?
Tom P 10:42:53
Naw, I didn’t say his work ‘proves’ there is no connection between CO2 and climate. I’m the one who says the disconnect between the CO2 curve and the temperature curve proves that CO2’s role in climate has been exaggerated. You cannot use degenerate rhetoric, by that I mean misrepresenting what I say, to show anything. Try again.
=============================================
His speed rail as antidote to AGW?
Here comes hi-speed Amtrak with concomitant costs and losses.
Tom P 11:13:10
The bottom line is that the correlation between temperatures and the coupling and decoupling of natural cycles is a lot better than the correlation between temperatures and CO2 concentrations. All your sophistry won’t change that simple fact, nor will it change the meaning of today’s falling temperatures.
But keep trying; it’s just exposing your foolishness and pitiful rhetoric.
=================================================
RW
Assuming that by AGW you mean climate models, the temperatures back in the epochs of very high CO2 concentrations were indeed what climate models have hindcast. What makes you think otherwise?
What utter tosh! The GCMs have hindcast precisely nothing. They have been retrofitted so that their outputs coincide with periods of the past (though not, interestingly, with the MWP, LIA, Younger Dryas, Holocene Optimum etc. etc), but they most definitely do not explain any of the climatic epochs. After all, how could they, when they take little to no account of oceanic and atmospheric cycles? The GCMs are designed to assume CO2/positive water vapour feedback exists and then project into the future based on various CO2 concentrations.
Tom P (11:13:10) :
Your data is not correct.
Speaking of intentions–what are yours?
Heh, Tom P, let’s say we’ve both read Tsonis’s work. Would you agree that he shows a close correlation between the coupling and the uncoupling of natural cycles and the temperature curve for the last century? Now, who’s represented his work that way, and who’s dodged all around the topic.
[snip]
==================================
“Tom P (11:13:10) : giving a trend of 0.006 degC per century to date”
Bizarre! We entered the Twilight Zone?!
Are you really saying there has been a warming trend since the Holocene Optimum? I wasn’t aware that the Holocene Optimum had been added to the Principia Mannomatica.
Tom P (08:44:02) :
Here we go again, Tom :).
We are coming out of the little ice age, and, yes, there has been warming definitely since then.
The question is not whether there has been warming, but whether the tiny anthropogenic contribution of CO2 is responsible for the warming.
The stasis and cooling trend after 2000 is a bonus, because it allows us to decouple any possibility that the merrily rising CO2 anthropogenic contribution can affect the temperatures drastically. The PDO is cooling and will do so for another 20 years, and the rising CO2 cannot offset it. That is the conclusion. If it could have it would have.
If CO2 does not drastically affect the temperature, there is no need for drastic economic decisions. That is the crux of the problem, the witch hunt of CO2 and the demand by enviromentalists that the west commits hara kiri over bogus claims.
Now to go back to the question, look at the ice core record. http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Vostok_Plot_png . Look at the Holocene peak, there are +/- 1C variations over the 10.000 years. Are we still going up? Who knows, we still have a few degrees to go to reach the height of the roman times or the middle ages. Though I am afraid that the Holocene peak seems to be declining towards the only true prophecy : an ice age is coming. Maybe in 100 years , maybe in 1000, but coming it is, and that is what humanity should be worrying about and studying, how to face or even geoengineer against an ice age threat.
RW,
This concept appears to be tricky for you, but the point of using the picture (obviously) was to highlight that Polar bears are extremely dangerous creatures – not the cute cuddly cartoons of the Global Warming movement.
Like I said, every school child should see that picture after being brainwashed by Al Gore’s animated bears.
The Mirror is no less reliable than many AGW press releases. At least they don’t pretend to be scientists.
Tom P (10:15:03) :
“Q. What do I do if I need absolute SATs, not anomalies?
A. In 99.9% of the cases you’ll find that anomalies are exactly what you need, not absolute temperatures.”
It’s the anomalies that tell us the warming or cooling trends.
The anomalies are a complete and utter fabrication based on a fiction repeatedly applied. I’ve read the code and it fabricates numbers based on other fantasy numbers that it then mangles into other fabrications that it then homogenizes into “anomalies”. The reason he wants you to look at anomalies, IMHO, is because they are the most cooked output. The raw data might actually still contain some truth… Wether this is done from malice or a devout belief in his errors I can not say. See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/gistemp/
for the exposition of the many ways the data are cooked in GIStemp.
BTW, the coastline of the USA can be anywhere from about 12,000 miles to about 90,000 miles, depending on your ruler… but we’ve measured it, accurately, as both…
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001801.html
NOAA thinks it’s about 95,000 miles:
http://shoreline.noaa.gov/faqs.html
There is a subtile shift from ‘coastline’ for rulers with big tick marks to ‘shoreline’ for rulers with small tick marks; but the bottom line is that the length of the place where the dirt meets the water has at least an order of magnitude dependence on your ruler graduation… and a theoretically near infinite length if we could measure finely enough.
What does this have to do with temperatures? Well, you want the average temperature of the day. Is that measured at one point in the day? Two? Continuous series? They all give a different answer.
You want the average for the month? Same problem only worse. Now we choose to average the daily averages from 2 semi-random data points unweighted for daily, weekly, or even monthly profiles. This we call the average for the month for that place.
Then we average those averages over a large geographic area, but we don’t have thermometers smoothly distributed. We have more in New York than in all the Antarctic. So what do we do? We might just average them, but GIStemp uses “nearby” thermometers 1500 km away to just create “temperatures” out of nothing. Take a line 1500 km north from NY. How close are you? How about 1500 miles East? South? Do the same using Phoenix and what happens?
By now we’ve entered into a complete fiction. The notion that the number means anything anymore. Want to cure “global warming”? Easy. Put a new temperature sensor on the top of every mountain in America. That’s all it takes given the GIStemp methodology.
Those cold mountain tops will now, via the “reference station method” change the temperatures for up to 1500 km around. Not only that, they will change the temperatures in the past as well. And then they will change the anomalies, which will be used to ‘adjust’ “nearby” anomalies up to 1200 km away. From:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/gistemp-step5-the-process/
SBBXotoBX.f
C*********************************************************************
C *** PROGRAM READS NCAR FILES
C *** Input argument: Rland (0-1200km) radius of influence of station
C *** Input file: 10,11 subbox.data (land, ocean based)
Just so you can see that it really is in the code.
Oh, and many of those anomaly blocks used for adjustment come from the polar regions which are based on OTHER anomalies (in 1 degree ( latitude / longitude ) calculated from interpolations of simulations based on estimates of ice extent. Now you know why they are so fixated on getting the ice estimates to drop.
See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/illudium/
I’d rather see the data basis for your trend rather than an uncorroborated assertion.
I’d love to see the ‘data basis’ for any AGW trend. There isn’t one. There are only anomaly fictions. Anomalies are not data and have precious little connection to data once GIStemp is done creating them.
Timbrom,
No accreditation needed… I stole it from somebody. I think he was a standup comic. Just adding a little levity…
Mike
RW,
Let me get this straight. You bring up the idea that it was a suicide attempt, in spite of the fact that she left no suicide note and obviously did not want to die.
Then you accuse me of showing “gratuitous pictures of suicide attempts.” Suicide was your theory, not mine. Do you realize how completely irrational your non sequitur argument is? Why should I take anything else you say seriously?
E.M.Smith (09:39:45) :
Inspired, I’m going to dig out my 100% charCOAL briquette BBQ. (Yes, charcoal has real coal in it! Along with some char…) and I’m even going to burn some 10:1 feed ratio BEEF on it…
I used to work for the norwegian DNV until last year, but got fed up partly because they started with “emissions trading”
http://www.dnv.com/services/certification/climate_change/emissions_trading/index.asp
I have a charcoal BBQ, and the BBQ charcoal we buy here has DNVs logo all over it as DNV issues certificates that certain product/process norms are fulfilled, but the message received is one of hypocrisy. In one way it is amusing, thay are into carbon trade in more ways than they care to consider:
http://arnholm.org/tmp/dnv_carbon_trade.jpg
I will continue using my charcoal BBQ 🙂
Btw., November last year DNV was suspended by the UN
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article5375493.ece
“Norway’s DNV, which claims to have approved half of the world’s carbon-credit ventures, had its accreditation suspended last month after it was unable to prove that its agents had properly vetted projects that it then approved for the carbon-trading scheme. “
Kim,
“Would you agree that he shows a close correlation between the coupling and the uncoupling of natural cycles and the temperature curve for the last century?”
No. Look at figure 1 of Tsonis and Swanson: “A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts.” GRL 34, 2007. Their predictions are at the top, the actual temperatures underneath covering the last century:
http://img382.imageshack.us/img382/7557/tsonis.png
Although their approach can explain decadal cycles in the climate, it can’t produce a long-term warming trend as is seen in the data. Their network can store and distribute energy, not produce it.
“Flanagan (10:48:24) :
So, what about the record or equal-to-record maximum temperatures in California just rightnow? Los Angeles, San francisco, San Diego, … ?
Weather or climate?
it is weather and climate!!LOL. With PDO negative, cold pacific sea, I told you before, does not evaporate enough, so it´s cloudless sunny.
“the cute cuddly cartoons of the Global Warming movement”
That is what is known as a straw man.
You yourself gave the google link showing that it was widely reported that the woman was suicidally depressed. I don’t find it amusing in the slightest to see photos of failed suicide attempts, but perhaps you do. Well OK, let’s just agree to differ on that.
timbrom: “The GCMs are designed to assume CO2/positive water vapour feedback exists and then project into the future based on various CO2 concentrations.”
Incorrect. Where do you get such ideas from? It’s certainly not from reading the literature.
I don’t know if this has already been posted. I have just got back from 10 days in France and although the temperature in Strasbourg was 25C most of the time, caused by a Foehn wind I think. There was snow in the Pyrenees and Alps (above 1000/1500 metres) and even in the Massif Central I think. The TV news had nightly reports of excellent skiing conditions in virtually all resorts for the Easter Holiday.
This avalanche (sorry can’t find it in anything other than French) made all the news programs as it crossed two pistes and no one was hurt!
RW,
I don’t find it amusing to see great industrial civilizations committing suicide over nonsensical blather, but let us just agree to differ on that.