Temperatures dropped to a record low in Prince Edward Island overnight Tuesday, with reports of frost throughout the province.
An official record low of 3.8 C was set early Wednesday morning at Charlottetown airport.
The previous record for that date was 5.1 C, set in 2005.
Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said that to his knowledge, frost has never been reported before in July in P.E.I.
“That 3.8 we got last night kind of sticks out as being lower than some of the other records for anytime in early July,” Robichaud told CBC News on Wednesday.
“So we’re looking at a significant event,” he said.
Environment Canada has issued a frost risk warning in low-lying areas of the province for Wednesday night. The temperature is expected to dip to 4 C.
The forecast for Thursday, however, calls for sunny skies and a temperature of 22 C for the province.
Highlander said: “.
Third: Since the oceans —or any other body of water— do not ’store’ heat, but instead release energy once the external source is removed, any external body (air for instance) adjacent will commence to absorb that released energy, and itself release energy in like fashion upon saturation of imparted energy.”
I’m puzzled as to how this energy is “released” if it hasn’t previously been retained, held, kept or stored. In English, a capacitor holds a charge and a battery stores a charge and, sometimes, vice versa.
” IN NO CASE does the atmosphere of the Earth act as a so-called ‘greenhouse’ inasmuch that once the Sun’s energy ceases impinging upon the atmosphere and surface, there is no longer a SOURCE of energy to sustain any such effect.
.
Since greenhouses are in fact sustained by internal heating elements which produce heat in the absence of Sun light, then whole theory is but a contrived bit nonsense.”
I have a greenhouse; not a so-called greenhouse, but a greenhouse. It is made mostly of glass in order to permit the light to come in. In the summer, it gets muct too hot, (even this summer, which has been pretty cool) if I don’t allow for a good air exchange. I do not reduce the sunlight striking the leaves or floor.
At night, in the summer, the air inside the greenhouse remains warmer than outside without additional heating.
In the winter, the purpose of the greenhouse is to protect from freezing plants that would die if left outside. Only occasionally do I add heat inside; on the coldest nights. Most gardeners would recognize that elements of the atmosphere do, indeed, appear to have a similar effect; cloudy nights often prevent freezing.
Sun? Who needs a Sun? We don’t need no Sun. The oceans will provide all the variations themselves. We will build a Warp Drive Engine in the Earth, and go off visiting other Solar Systems. Think of the benefits: No more pesky Sunglasses to wear, weeds to pull, leaves to rake or those horrible fossil fuels we burn. No more sunblock products to buy, think of the $$ you’ll save.
John W. (06:28:07) :
Q: Being a simple minded engineering type, incapable of grasping the nuanced principles of AGW, could someone explain to me which of the following applies to the mystical property of “stored heat?”
A: None of the above.
The concept of “stored heat” a.k.a. “heat in the pipeline” is a concept I struggled with myself for a while, until I finally understood the patient explanations by its proponents in the blogosphere. The basic idea is this:
The presence of CO2 will cause increased temperature in the atmosphere. This is evident from “basic radiative principles”. This effect is pretty much immediate.
After some time (the time constant is unknown) some of the heat in the atmosphere will be redirected from the atmosphere into the oceans. The mechanism for this is yet unknown, but conceptually this is explained as the “pipeline”. In other words, heat is transferred through an imaginary pipeline from the atmosphere through the sea surface, through the water column and down to the bottom of the oceans, where it is “stored” for an unknown length of time in the said “pipeline”.
Then, after a very long time (some say centuries, others millennia) the heat decides to resurface again.
The real magic of this concept though is that after resurfacing from the deep oceans, the stored heat has multiplied almost infinitely, so that an undetectable amount of heat taken out of the atmosphere, after going through the pipeline and being stored for a century or longer, now contains enough energy to increase the average temperature of the world’s atmosphere by several degrees C. This comes over and above the “transient” temperature response to the increased CO2 in the atmosphere, and thus creates the modeled “equilibrium” temperatures of several degrees C per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Quite simple, really, if you can accept that the “pipeline” can take an immeasurable amount of thermal energy and transform it into an almost infinite amount of thermal energy, simply by passing it through the sea surface without being detected, and then storing it in the deep oceans again without being detected, then passing it back into the atmosphere to be finally detected, the thermal energy now being infinitely larger than the energy entering into the “pipeline” centuries earlier.
Rhyl Dearden (22:13:59) :
Basil 20:10:54
Wonder what the hotspot was on eastern Hudson Bay shore? Anyone know?
Prevailing winds blew the still full fuel storage containers remaining from the Catlin expedition onto shore where they scraped rock and exploded.
TonyB (09:35:39) :
Ron de Haan
I have noticed the date and can confirm that here in the South West I was driving my convertible with the roof down and we had not a drop of rain . The cricket started on time yesterday in Cardiff and they had a full day. By Great Britain they presumably mean a part of GB where all the media are located.
Tonyb
Bloody Alarmists?
I must say that the pictures in the article were quite convincing.
Must have been caused by the occasional “local weather”.
JAN (10:42:09) :
The concept of “stored heat” a.k.a. “heat in the pipeline” is a concept I struggled with myself for a while, until I finally understood the patient explanations by its proponents in the blogosphere. The basic idea is this:
So it works a bit like the NASA designed IPCC approved oven then?
http://1.2.3.10/bmi/cache.backpackinglight.com/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1225544577_08198.png
🙂
Damn, munged URL should be:
http://cache.backpackinglight.com/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1225544577_08198.png
🙂
I think this situation is really important and we need to focus on weather
Pamela,
i may be oversimplifying things here, but it seems to me that all the energy that drives the weather and climate on our planet comes from the sun. Without the suns energy, we wouldbe a block of Ice.
I am a believer in the sun being the driver of all climate. The energy we receive is constantly changing due to solr amx and minimum, solar wind and cosmic rays, cloud formations, and even the orbit around the sun and the changing distances. All of these and manyother things factor into the energy we receive from the sun.
Climate, trade winds, PDA and ADO, jet stream, they are all a result of an energy imbalance. I think we are all on the same side here saying basically that “it’s the sun” stupid, and not CO2.
I’m not a climate scientist, just an engineer who has followed the AGW for many years.
Cheers.
The high in Rockford, Illinois yesterday was 63 deg. F. It was the lowest high for that day on record.
Ron De Haan
I think what the story illuistrates is that journos get over excited-especially when the event happens on their doorstep and involves the Queen and the other royaklty-the stars of Harry Potter.
It also surely illustrates the difficulty in gluing together a weather record for one small country let alone a global record. AS you know, in reality climate consists of thousands of consecutive weather events, each of which may differ considerably in nature according to the micro climate it occured in. GIss uses a 1200km square for global temperatures and bases it on a tiny number of weather stations from 1880 most of which have since moved or become inconsistent for a variety of reasons.
Even the UK-which has very good records- has highly sporadic ones. For example we have rainfall records back to 1766 but only for a few areas. Back to 1850 for rather more, but it is only from 1931 that we could say with certainty that a rainfall record was broken as that was when national records began.
Even that is patchy in our part of the world (Devon) where we have many steep valleys and the weather/climate in one may be captured by a weather station but the adjacent valley isn’t.
Tonyb
TJA, the lower temps were predicted
By whom? Not the models included in the IPCC ensemble. Some of the models were corrected in the last year or two to include the PDO. But the PDO was discovered in 1997. That is a rather long scientific pipeline.
Matt – I don’t think you’re oversimplifying at all. The sun’s energy – more specifically, the uneven distribution of the sun’s energy on Earth – drives the weather on our planet. Any and all explanations of weather and climate phenomenon can probably be reduced to the uneven distribution of the sun’s energy across our planet. When you get involved in very specific scientific research, it’s really easy to lose the big picture perspective. Unfortunately, I think that happens to many scientists – including myself.
Cheers,
Steve
That’s a very odd statement. Wouldn’t that mean it was a record low? If not, seems a meaningless thing to report.
Repeat after me…very quick:
Warmer than normal, global warming…ALARM BELLS!!!
Cooler than normal, just weather nothing to worry about…oh and it was probably caused by AGW anyway.
I put climate change denial on the same plane as Holocaust denialism.
REPLY: And we put lack of scientific curiosity or willingness to look at what is actually happening now on the same level as lemmingism.
First: Water does NOT ’store’ heat, and neither does any other substance known to man. Rather what ~does~ happen is that the substance heats to maximum level of whatever external source of energy imparts to it.
Uh I’m as much a “greenhouse gas” sceptic as any. So pray tell what is all this 1 kcal per kg per deg. C stuff?
Jeff Alberts (13:13:05) :
Nope. It means exactly what it says. It was the lowest high for that day ever recorded. We did not have a record low (below 43 deg F) because the low was 60F IIRC.
tallbloke (11:42:00) : Thanks. That oven proves beyond doubt the “green”-house effect- and its multiple “positive feedbacks”
James (14:05:27) :
I put climate change denial on the same plane as Holocaust denialism.
You can’t pigeon hole me with that one. Climate changes. Has for millions of years. As to the cause and extent. Well that is under investigation.
Chicago, coldest day in 118 years!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/weather/chi-wx-weathersummary0709jul09,0,786739.story
Jeff Alberts (13:13:05) :
M. Simon (12:18:57)
The high in Rockford, Illinois yesterday was 63 deg. F. It was the lowest high for that day on record.
That’s a very odd statement. Wouldn’t that mean it was a record low? If not, seems a meaningless thing to report?
No, a record low would indicate that the nightime (min) temp was the lowest on record. He is saying that the daytime (max) temperature was the lowest recorded.
tallbloke (11:42:00) :
Damn, munged URL should be:
http://cache.backpackinglight.com/backpackinglight/user_uploads/1225544577_08198.png
Tallbloke, indeed the same principle as the one behind the NASA/IPCC Energy Free Oven. The bird in the oven seems very small though, is that the same kind of bird sometimes referred to as a Chicken Little?
Take that info Al Gore!! The greatest hoax on the world -global warmng -just isn’t happening!!
Sunspots are only one proxy for a quiet sun. Currently many other solar activity indicators are also low. The make-up of the suns radiance has also change and it is pumping out a higher proportion of UV.
Because both earth and sun are both non-linear systems, I think it unlikely we wil find a one to one correlation between temperature and sun spot number, for example.
We need to look at a broad perspective of potential mechanisms by which the sun can effect out climate before we can hope to find the real drivers. To complicate matters further, it could turn out to be many small effects which combine in a synergistic way to cause a big effect.
Only weather I know, but down here in sunny Sussex the day before yesterday it was 71F early afternoon in my garden, but at seven o’clock the next morning it was down to 39F. Is this a record???