Earlier I wrote about the Arctic Oscillation Index going strongly negative in December and what new cold to expect in January. From NASA’s Earth observatory, we have a high resolution temperature anomaly map that provides visualization of the effects. This image was taken while the Copenhagen Climate Conference was in progress.
A wave of frigid air spilled down over Europe and Russia from the Arctic in mid-December, creating a deadly cold snap. According to BBC.com, at least 90 people had died in Europe, including 79 people, mostly homeless, in Poland. In places, the bitter cold was accompanied by heavy snow, which halted rail and air traffic for several days during the week of Christmas.
This image shows the impact of the cold snap on land surface temperatures across the region from December 11–18, 2009, compared to the 2000–2008 average. The measurements were made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Places where temperatures were up to 20 degrees Celsius below average are blue, locations where temperatures were average are cream-colored, and places where temperatures were above average are red. Light gray patches show where clouds were so persistent during the week that MODIS could not make measurements of the land surface temperature. The biggest anomalies were in northern Russia, but a swath of below-average temperatures stretched across the countries around the Baltic Sea as well.
See also:
- Daily, 8-day, and monthly land surface temperature anomaly maps
- Animation of monthly global land surface temperature anomalies
h/t to WUWT reader “JT”
commonsense (18:04:01)
After reading the alarmist fraud redolent in the CRU emails & code, and after seeing how NOAA sites Stephons screens in this country (courtesy of Anthony Watts) I’m too suspicious of NOAA’S ground measurements to accept them as anything more than a curiousity. Want to convince someone of a scientific or engineering background? Show them data from satellites. Satellite data is fully transparent and open to the public. Satellite data isn’t cherry picked or have localized, unexplained, suspicious adjustments that change year to year.
Murray (08:15:09) :
Przemyslaw, thanks, for your observation. I heartily agree. I grew up in Winnipeg in the 1950’s, and the cold we are experiencing now is still mild relative to then.
And it’s not like it was when I were a boy ….
Incidentally, when Przemyslaw finds that his pension fund is worth jack due to some double dealing by it’s holders, perhaps I can suggest his last act – steal a few minutes on a net connection to tell us stage by stage all about Hypothermia. You-tube maybe? (no changing the video settings to make you look less blue though)
DirkH
Some people here talk about famine and doom and gloom scenarios by comparing to the LIA. This is just silly, folks. Back then people didn’t have fossil fuels or nuclear power or large scale hydropower. We have all of these and OF COURSE we will use all that when necessary and forget about that little CO2 thingy that allegedly had something to do with the warming.
“OF COURSE” the way things are going ATM you may get the chance to find out what happens when we all move to a “back then” culture [no fossil fuels]. It was, after all, so much better in the past, I just love history.
Cold is real, ice is real, crop volumes are real, famine is real, crops to bio fuel is real, hypothermia is real … and for everything else there’s always “2D, well mixed atmosphere CO2 theory”, eco-whack-jobs, the Cabal “hiding the decline” or Goldman Sachs and Shell attempting to fuel carbon markets and make a shed load of cash.
The eco-loon greens may well help us all to become the only species in Earth history to ever “vote” for it’s own extinction. Can we warm the Planet? if we could [v. doubtful] then we should. Our species has spent far too much time surviving the ice and cold, it is more than past time we had a party to celebrate the warmth [and abundance of food]. Though it’s a travesty that we should enjoy an interglacial and a travesty that we have one.
So on NYE 2009/10 I wish you all [even the drive-by idiots] a bountiful and warm new year. May you ignore the bull horns at the side of the road while you struggle home from work to your warm, well fed family. May it all continue for many years to come.
Anthony/mods – can we have a NYE thread for seasons greetings?
Mr Watts and other Commenters
I didn’t intend to touch THAT cord of human life. It seems to me every commenter, both you and me too, share his own part of the Truth of the debate.
But. The title of this post is Yours, not from NASA. You could conjured up a new one, more neutral but you decided to incorporate NASA’s title into your own one. So much for my “misplaced indignation”. Said that the question entails another one.
The interesting point in this line of thinking is the (in)famous language gap between a native speaker and a person to whom English is the second language. From my point of view you could use 1) the NASA title as an irony with “implicit context” (Roger Knights (11:06:02)) and/or as a sublime tool in this “climate discussion” or 2) you just published what you had just felt.
Did I make a bad assessment of your intentions? Really? If you publish globally, you must expect “global views” in return (it is from people with different cultural backgrounds).
Every year humanity as a whole pays horrendous “civilization dues” in the form of those killed in car accidents. “Paths of Life” someone could say. Why “cold” is elevated to “deadly cold” when it belong to the same category of “Man’s paths of Life” on this Globe?
Mr Watts, I really do appreciate what you do, but sometimes I see what does not belong to the mainstream topics on this weblog and you know that very well. Let’s say that it’s part of my inquisitive nature. 🙂
Best regards
Przemysław Pawełczyk
P.S.
On the other hand “something’s rotten in UK” as people in GREAT Britain dies at -1 degrees Celsius, isn’t it?
[REPLY – “Deadly cold” (or even “deathly cold”) as applied to weather is not an uncommon idiom in English. ~ Evan]
commonsense (18:04:01) :
Now in Europe the heat is on again.
commonsense (20:37:47) :
DirkH: at what elevation does your city stay?
You speak of elevation?
This afternoon I went for a walk on the Malvern Hills, and above 800ft. there is good snow cover; above 1200ft. it is quite crunchy still. Not much elevation there then?
Part way through my enterprise, I decided it was appropriate to do some research for my new crime novel Yellow Stains in the Snow. I was however, due to my reluctance, at this delicate stage of the project, to cause either alarm or hilarity (or arrest), obliged to desist, due to the large number of tourists in the area at the time. (And not wanting to give away the plot)
Many of the tourists were throwing handfuls of global warming at one another, in what I took to be a spontaneous expression of gratitude towards our glorious government for the caring way in which they have dealt with us during this heat wave.
Brian D
Doesn’t NASA automatically correct/ground truth the temperatures it measures using surface gauges that measure air temperatures? I would assume that NASA would do it as a matter of course and must have the computing power.
If not, can the NASA satellite data be trusted? Like all remotely sensed data, a little ground truthing will improve the estimates.
JDN and the Treeline
You’re joking, right? And what do you consider a tree? anything over 4 feet?
The arctic treeline isn’t just related to temperature otherwise you wouldn’t have trees just a few miles from Kugluktuk but would have trees 400 or 500 miles south at Rankin Inlet. That is like thinking that trees grow faster when temperatures are warming so trees in the desert would grow twice as fast as those in the mountains’ foothills.
Przemysław Pawełczyk (12:33:59) :
[REPLY – “Deadly cold” (or even “deathly cold”) as applied to weather is not an uncommon idiom in English. ~ Evan]
Thank you. You meant “terribly cold”? But this time “deadly cold” was explicitly connected with death tall.
Anyway thanks, idioms are true “tour de force” of learning foreign languages. 😉
Regards
Here’s a satellite nice view of our friends across the big pond as New
Year’s Eve approaches:
http://www.sat24.com/
Happy New Year from the States to one and all !
[quote] David L. Hagen (18:15:43) :
Chapter 2, The Great Famine, The Little Ice Age: how climate made history, 1300-1850 By Brian M. Fagan
The winter of 1215 in particular was exceptionally cold in eastern Europe and caused widespread famine.[/quote]
May I add to this note from David by mentioning “Arctic Ireland” IBSN1-870132-85-8 which describes famine in 1740-41 in Ireland, a famine more devastating than the famine of 1845-51 the “Potato Famine” of which many folks are aware
Piers Corbyn predicts that we’re in for bad weather in Europe; ferocious and dangerous in January and cold in February. http://climaterealists.com/attachments/database/WA10No1NewYearMessageFerociousWinterWeatherWarning.pdf
Happy new year to everybody from Italy,
a chilling wind is coming from the Tyrrenian sea, here in Naples…
Best regards!
savethesharks (21:55:29) “It is plainly obvious that “Big Oil” has jumped on the AGW Train […]”
Unless I’m misinformed, the most shrieking alarmist force in Canada is funded by BO. Elites will make money (& gain political leverage to control balance-tilt) with AGW (whether left- or right- wingers). It is the common people (of both wings) who stand to suffer the most from the infowar (war pigs theme). The elite can use engineered “control issues” like this to blow boom-&-bust bubbles and tweak the odds of what party will be in office. Depending on the transient short-horizon agenda, there can be more opportunity for strategic change & profit with one wing or another in office. It’s all about engineering elite-steering via controllable issues. The rest of us, whether left- or right- leaning: pawns. It seems that one feasible way to avoid being a pawn is to choose to be sensibly-balanced. (Becoming elite – not so easy, by contrast.)
–
Bob Tisdale, I posted some notes near the bottom of…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/28/the-arctic-oscillation-index-goes-strongly-negative/
…that give some insight into the El Nino step-changes you investigate.
In particular, note the connection between the upward jog here…
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/CumuSumAO70.png
…, the ~’88-’98 phase-concordance here…
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/GLAAM_LOD_AO_NAO.png
…, & a picture well-known to you:
http://i42.tinypic.com/2hfukjm.jpg
Extremes of global circulation coincided with extremes in acceleration of NH dynamics (including ice melt/blow) – hence the step changes.
Any strategic comments you might offer could be helpful in my plans to develop new methods & software to probe further.
Best Regards.
continuing from above …
In other words, the NH, caught in a global spin, blew its continental lid off and became more maritime.
Paul Vaughn: Why use cumulative AO (or NAO) when you could smooth it and invert it? The resulting curve would probably give you the shift you desired in terms that aren’t difficult to explain:
http://i37.tinypic.com/33c85c2.png
The comparison curve of the four variables to me illustrates the similarities between the NOA and AO, and between GLAAM and LOD. I see no relationship between the four, other than a random match one might expect with oscilllations.
And I can’t see where the TLT Hovmoller fits with the others. Would you be better off plotting TLT anomalies in a graph instead of using the Hovmoller? That way you can plot them with the other datasets in one graph. Visually, I have trouble comparing multiple graphs side by side. I’d much prefer to see comparisons on one graph. When I read papers and see two graphs aligned with each other, that’s a cue for me, indicating the datasets don’t really correlate.
Regards
Bob
My dear deniers…
DirkH: you said:
” “commonsense (09:20:14) :
And don’t forget that there is a INFLUENZA PANDEMIC underway, and with the cold, it spreads like fire ”
Wait commonsense – didn’t you just say it’s very WARM outside? Because of the very WARM anomaly? Caughtya! You’re a troll that just jumps on any bandwagon he can find. Happy new year :-)”
When I talk about warming I talk about ANOMALIES, so DirkH, finding a contradiction in my words really show that or you don’t think, or cannot understand the difference between ANOMALIES and the actual temperature values.
It is also easy to say that the 2009A/H1N1 is mild saying that a lot of people recovered… let’s do a little math:
Let’s assume a moderately high mortality: 0,5%
And an Attack Rate of 25%
Over a population of 200 million
RESULT: 250 000 DEATHS!
Now do it over the world population: 6000 million:
RESULT: 7 500 000 DEATHS!
Even the Mega-Killer 1918A/H1N1 had a mortality near 3%, and 50 to 100 millions died. Worse even than WWII.
What this one will turn to be?
Nobody knows.
Healthcare AVAIVABLE TO ALL INMEDIATELY is vital. Most deaths can be prevented by opportune attention.
For the ones that doesn’t know, WHO-PAHO said that PRIMARY VIRAL PNEUMONIA(an auto-inmunitary reaction that ocurrs in people with strong immune system i.e. young people) is the main killer mechanism (unlike seasonal flu, that kills by SECONDARY bacterial pneumonia in people with weak immune systems).
Search information and think.
THINK.
commonsense (20:25:14) :
Most deaths can be prevented by opportune attention.
Ok, if I may be permitted, I dispute this notion. There is a simple fact of life. This fact is as certain as taxes. Life will end. There is a point at which you are extending a life which otherwise would have ended, and must either support this life at great cost, or end this life. In effect, having only one payer ends up putting an upper bound on life simply because there is only one assessor of the cost versus benefit analysis that involves these decisions. This is one of the primary factors of health care costs being so high. Effectively, the government health care plan seeks to distribute the costs of expensive and highly technical procedures to people such as myself who have only been to the doctor in the past ten years but thrice.
Or, as you call yourself “commonsense”, everything done in the medical world is only a stall, not a cure for death.
Bob Tisdale (17:09:15) :
The resulting curve would probably give you the shift you desired…
Careful there. Why would the curves match is a more important question.
Nonsense would be a more accurate identifier.
So just making up numbers is how you do medical science? Earlier I gave you the links to both the CDC and WHO that give the confirmed numbers. No need to make crap up to hype your lame arguments.
FACT: Per the two links I gave you earlier, laboratory confirmed mortality from the current H1N1 strain is roughly 12,200 out of a global population of 6 BILLION and the infection rate is declining, not increasing. It’s possible that this may change again, but for now that is what is happening.
ASSUMPTION: Both the CDC and WHO ASSUME that the mortality figures are understated. Probably a good assumption, but both agencies agree they have no idea by how much. They also agree that we don’t know what the real infection rate is either, precisely because so many people seem to recover without seeking medical attention and many who do recieve medical attention are not tested for H1N1.
If we assume that the fatalities are understated by 1000% that still only makes 122000, or .002% of the population.
It isn’t “a lot” of people recover, it’s MOST people recover. BIG difference.
More making stuff up. According to the CDC the numbers are 20 – 50 million (that’s still a pretty wide error-band) which was more than WWI NOT WWII. And that is an estimate based on the latest CDC reconstruction of the 1918 pandemic.
No, basic health education and understanding how the virus spreads are the most cost-effective and effective means to prevent infection in the first place. Death can’t be prevented, merely postponed.
Think — something you aren’t really doing. Searching for information is just part of it. You also need to understand what you are reading.
So in addition to making up stuff and not understanding what you may be reading on the WHO web site, English grammar is not your strong suit either.
Earlier you said it was fulminant viral pneumonia that was the fatal mechanism, now you are saying primary viral pneumonia and never once have you offered a link to the reference. Both pneumonia types can be triggered by other viruses including other influenza strains.
Both links I provided earlier also point out that MOST fatalities due to H1N1 are still from high-risk groups that have underlying medical conditions like asthma or other lung ailments.
commonsense (20:25:14) :
I assume you switched the subject to health care because you became aware that people at this site know far more about climate change than you do, and you were getting intellectually thrashed.
I know far less about health care, but I suspect that if the 2000 page bill is anything like GISS data, the facts are fudged.
My own attitude towards health care was best expressed by the late, great Jimi Hendrix, who no one ever accused of being a conservative:
“I’m the one who’s gonna die
When it’s time for me to die,
So let me live my own life
The way I want to.”
commonsense (09:20:14,
“Someone asked where the Arctic heat comes from: it comes FROM THE ARCTIC OCEAN, that is releasing the heat accumulated during the Artic Summer. With the now THIN ICE, this heat in the waters is no longer isolated from the Atmosphere above. This is ARCTIC AMPLIFICATION.
For anyone interested, google the paper “The emergence of ocean-based Artic Amplification”. It is a recent paper.”
Perhaps you should read your own citations before quoting them. The abstract reads:
“Abstract. Rises in surface and lower troposphere air temperatures through the 21st century are projected to be especially pronounced over the Arctic Ocean during the cold season. This Arctic amplification is largely driven by loss of the sea ice cover, allowing for strong heat transfers from the ocean to the atmosphere.”
Not the key point: Rises in air temperature are projected to occur during the 21st century. In other words, this is a model projection for the future – it is not happening now.
So I look at my meteorology book and read that arctic polar air masses cause colder weather and tropical or tropical maritime air masses cause warming. This is perfectly understandable because the air temperatures over the arctic in winter are freezing cold. Are you seriously suggesting that the warm anomolies in southern europe are caused by “warm arctic air” moving south and not by tropical air masses moving north?
This sounds more like magic than science to me.
Caleb (20:20:58) :
“….Conclusion: My wild guess is that less total energy might create a warm El Nino sending warmth north, at the exact same time less total energy sends the hounds of winter south from the poles. When these two forses meet they brew up super storms. Once again less makes more, as less energy creates more energetic storms.
I will prove my ideas are true, if you will figure out how I can get ten million or so of stimulous money, and a couple of genius geeks who are good at creating computer models.”
Sounds like you maybe onto something but you forgot to mention Glaciation is caused when wet winters are followed by cool summers and not by extremely cold winters. The layman always focuses on the temperature when it is the AMOUNT of snow accumulated and a cool summer that is key.
Why don’t you hit up the Rockefeller or Tide foundations for a grant?
TerryBixler (22:10:44) :
Michael (21:15:36) :
So BO up to his armpits CarbonGate. Chicago carbon exchange, your money or your ….who would have guessed and Al was there too.”
Do not forget the father of Global warming Maurice Strong, is also a partner. He started all this crap back in 1972 at the first earth summit.
Al Gore and Maurice Strong are members of the Club of Rome of course.
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill … All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
— in The First Global Revolution, pp.104-105 by Alexander King, founder of the Club of Rome and Bertrand Schneider, secretary of the Club of Rome
kadaka (22:12:04) :
Steve Oregon (20:55:51) :
“OT
According to NOAA sea rise has been only 2-3 inches per century….
Could a statistically significant part of that ocean rise per century, be because new water is being added to the oceans?”
You forgot all the silt washed into the oceans. Commercial farming methods cause a major increase in erosion. The 1940’s soil survey for my farm showed over two feet of loam, thirty years later when I bought it the soil tested 98% clay. Then there is the 3 million underwater volcanoes… 30000 are thought to be active.
Any geologist will tell you a lake will eventually become a swamp then a water meadow and then dry land as silt is deposited. Heck my pastures are filled with fist sized round rocks embedded in clay and I am 100ft above the river on a ridge.
I love how AGW uses selected evidence and never bothers to tell the whole story.
Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
Commonsense has His day and he’s… right!….
One Commenter sensibly explained the present Europe’s weather – the South is warmer, and the North is colder. The border lies on NW to SE line. Here in Poland too, as in Germany, the upper part of my country is gripped by cold (mild cold), with the south being showered with rain day after day. But that doesn’t prove neither WARMING nor COOLING….”
Remember two things. This is a discussion about the current weather in the Europe and we know the “official data” gets “corrected” The raw temperatures in my area (rural North Carolina) seem to be adjusted up by 4 F the next day on Wunderground
Second we like to have a reality check by those on the ground. Scotland, Germany… are saying it is cold and snowy, Austraila said it is hot and southern Europe seems to be average/ warmer.
Here in NC we expect four days of 36F/18F (2C/-8C) instead of the normal 50F/30F (10C/-1C) That is cold and means I have to deal with frozen hoses and livestock water tanks -YUCK – frozen fingers fishing the ice out of over a dozen tanks.