From the “weather is not climate department. Oh the weather outside is frightful….
Prisoners used to shovel snow-bound US capitol
Here’s the roundup of cold and snow records for the past 7 days. While there is a handful of new high temp records, it is clear where the bulk of the statistics is. Note the new record lows in Florida.
Here’s a few other recent news stories:
Maryland Reports 4 Cold Weather Deaths
Cold weather kills scores in India
Dublin airport suspends flights after heavy snowfall, cold weather
Once in generation cold snap forecast for North Carolina
Record low blows into Siouxland
Recent global cool-down challenges validity of climate change models
National Weather Highlight for 12 / 29 / 09: Record snow falls in Dallas / Fort Worth area
Recent global cool-down challenges validity of climate change models
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This is just more of the natural cyclic variability in action. The Lunar declination was at it’s 18.6 year Mn cycle peak culmination back in 2005, when we had the record surge of Hurricanes, due to the turbulence in the atmosphere, of the turning of the tides.
Now the declination angle is decreasing back towards the Minimum, and the air mass that was moved toward the poles, is now out washing towards the Equator again. we will be in a trend of colder air surges during the winter, with lower jet stream positions, for the next couple of years.
Dryer summers, wetter falls, and colder snowier winters can be expected, in the USA and Europe for a couple more years yet, before milder times return (beginning in 2013) when the Lunar declination reaches it’s minimum, and starts to return again in 2014 / 2015.
Sorry, here is the Met Office surface pressure map I intended to post – showing the slack low pressure systems we have at present over N Europe.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/surface_pressure.html
.
How can global temperature anomalies continue to be reported as positive when it is so obvious that temperature anomalies overall globally are so negative as seen first hand with one record low temperature posted after the other?
And it’s not about to get warmer any time soon, at least for the eastern half of the US.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp1.html
I think the main point being missed is this question.
What will transpire should this cold become longer term. What will happen to the US & European crops?? At what point in the Northern calendar is it not worthwhile planting?? Will the soil be too wet to seed anyway??
With food stocks at low historical levels this could get interesting.
regards
“…..Too many think global warming means monotonic relentless warming everywhere year after year. It does not happen that way…..” so says Kevin Trenberth (Recent global cool-down challenges validity of climate change models).
According to the IPCC, the overwhelming climate forcing factors for the past 60 years have been and remain human caused GHGs, most notably CO2.
The rate of rise in CO2, as measured at Mauna Loa Observatory since 1958, is monotonic — constant.
The only countervailing factors, according to the dogma, are aerosols.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Radiative-forcings.svg
So, for the past decade or so (if logical consistency is still of any value in the increasingly Alice-in-Wonderland world of climate science), aerosols must have overridden the effect of CO2 — no other explanation is possible.
John H
That’s why I way “Forget the Met, Go to Joe”.
– Joe Bastardi of Accuwaether.
Indeed nature is turning the Met into the Mother of Laughing Stocks.
In excess of one third of the population of Ireland are estimated to have died during two cold and rainy winters (1740/41) towards the end of the LIA. Summary noted in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Famine_%281740%E2%80%931741%29
Following a 2009 ‘record breaking’ wet summer and autumn, and with snow on the ground for the last three week in parts of the UK, some of the descriptions from 1740 don’t sound too dissimilar to the current conditions being experienced. Tucked up in air-tight centrally heated homes makes the effects seem less severe. However, the Wiki story summarises;
“The story of the Irish Great Frost of 1740-1741 holds lessons for human social behavior in response to climate-induced limitations in energy, food, and housing.”
This may become more apparent and relevant as the next natural cycle of climate cooling wrong-foots our policy-makers suicidally bent on increasing our energy costs through misplaced and failed de-carbonisation policies. It is -6c this morning in Wales and none of the dozens of wind turbines in this region are operating due to static high pressure. The Met Office, Hadley, CRU, NASA, GISS and cohorts should hang their heads in shame for their conduct and misguidance in this unfolding farce.
Shiver me Timbers. It hasn’t been terribly cold here in NW Ca, but it’s rained a lot and dusted snow all over. Even when the storms are over, the clouds hug the ground in patches as they move east. I know it’s a lot worse soon as the storms leave the West Coast.
crosspatch, you can’t blame the councils if they get caught out, as they rely on the Met Office entirely. All of them are linked to the Met Office and get severe weather warnings sent to them direct. As much as I hate my local council, they rely on advice from the Met Office. Perhaps it should come from Piers Corbyn instead?
Jesse Ventura Conspiracy Theory on global warming.
Timothy Ball, Richard Lindzen, and Lord Monckton are in the show.
The show talks about Al Gore’s and Maurice Strong’s business connections to global warming.
There’s an interview with Ben Santer.
It’s a melodramatic presentation. But it makes good points
nevket240 (01:53:19) :
With food stocks at low historical levels this could get interesting.
Bio-fuels complicate that too.
I just cannot contain my Schadenfreude.
Coldest UK winter in 100 years.
The Met Office deserves the label of “Mother of Laughing Stocks”.
They departed from science and opted to zealously pursue a save-the-world ideology – ridiculing, alienating and insulting many of the best along the way.
Well, them chickens now coming home to roost!
The MetOffice and CRU have to get rid of these sophomoric brats, these charlatans, and fast.
Wind farms at virtual standstill.
There needs to be an urgent investigation into wind turbine output for the past two weeks as static high pressure persists as mentioned by the previous poster and others. At the coldest time of the year and when needed the most there have been observances of wind farms across the UK & Ireland at a complete standstill. As we begin to rely more and more on this form of power generation the shortcomings need to be documented to prevent black outs as our reliance increases.
It’s pretty obvious why the Met Office keeps forecasting warmer conditions and getting it wrong. Here is an axtract of what the Chief Scientist at the Met Office says in response to public questions:
“As Chief Scientist of the Met Office, I’m delighted to have the opportunity to respond to your questions that you, the public, have sent in around the science of climate change………
There’s been a lot of questions about carbon dioxide and whether it’s generally responsible for climate change, and so the first question would really be, how do we know that carbon dioxide is responsible for the climate change that we have seen and can we prove it?……….
What carbon dioxide is doing now is enhancing that greenhouse gas effect. So we understand the basic physics of that. It’s enhancing that greenhouse effect and leading to an increase in temperature, so we’re trapping more energy into the planet because of increasing levels of carbon dioxide………
And if we know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, it’s hard to believe that if you increase it by 40% you’re not going to do something to the temperature of the planet.”
So there we have it. No evidence. It’s all based on belief.
You can read it all if you have a strong stomach) at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/in-depth/ask/julia-slingo.pdf
-7C in the maritime SW of England this morning.
AlanG (01:05:12) :
This may be what you were looking for
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/125f6be6-f70a-11de-9fb5-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1
In spite of all this record cold, the IPCC will still claim that 2009 was the __’th warmest year on record, and that the arctic sea is filled with rotten ice on December 31. (use you imagination and fill in the blank).
E.M.Smith (00:53:57) :
You are correct to describe the jet stream as “loopy.” If you notice the red spots in New England, it is because we were on the warm side of that huge Christmas blizzard that extended from Maine to Montana. It drove cold air clear down to Dallas, while sucking warm air up to New Hampshire. It reached 47F in Concord NH on the 27th, which was +14 of normal, but not near the record of 58F set in 1949.
Concord was also in milder air on the 15th, when it was 44, +14 of normal but not near the record of 60F set just last year.
The only record Concord set was on the 3rd, when it was a balmy 65, which was +22 of normal.
Despite those warm spells, when the jet stream looped north of us, it looped south enough to give us days of vicious northwest winds, and the month of December averaged out 0.7 BELOW normal in Concord, NH. The coldest was 0F on the 19th.
I’m glad we haven’t had record cold, because up here that can be as low as -24F. (December 20, 1875) In 1933 it got down to -21F on the 27th, 28th and 29th. That is too cold.
The snow cover has never melted away, and the wind has been ferocious at times, so the ice on lakes is thicker than usual. This may spoil a sourse of amusement and income for locals, which is to watch a “flatlander” drive a car out onto a lake and fall through. If the cold persists, it will soon take a Winnabago. (Don’t laugh; they do drive Winnabagos out onto the lakes, on colder winters.)
Similar observation of jetstream shift is also observed in the East Asia Monsoon Area in this winter. The jetstream is used to be above mainland Japan at this moment of the year over the last 5 years or so, it is now south of Japan.
And the result is obvious – much of East Asia Monsoon Area get a -‘ve abnormalty in Dec. Appearantly Hong Kong ( where I live ) got a Dec monthly average temp of 17.2/17.3 ( official number to be announced by HKO tomorrow ), which is -0.6/-0.5 to the 1971-2000 average.
Given the forecasts given by ECMWF, I would expect monsoon to be stronger than average at least in the first half of Jan. Would like to see if Hong Kong get a min temp lower than 7.5C, a temperature unseen for 5 years. ( What can you expect to happen at 22.5N? )
New to here, and wish all a Happy New Year!
Crosspatch:”Sounds to me like the councils haven’t budgeted enough for snow mitigation. ”
The councils are responsible for spending public money and should take care it is spent with care. To that extent they have to plan their spend against the best available information, the Met Office. Clearly the Met Office forecasting a mild winter leads to councils preparing themselves to mitigate the effects of a mild winter.
My Greenie friends thought it was OK to for the Met Office to read the “barbecue summer” wrong until I pointed out to them that many businesses would have based their summer plans on this forecast.
Slowly there is a rising public awareness of the politisation of the BBC and the Met Office, and it will lead to the next government severely curbing their activities. The Met Office seemingly puts out forecast simply to drive home the AGW agenda, while the BBC, and indeed much of the MSM ignore its continual failure to predict the weather much more than two days in advance.
Perhaps if the scientists at the Met Office became less interested in pushing an agenda and more interested in their job things would improve. I sent them a simple FOIA request asking who had approved the money to poll the 1700 scientists for agreement on AGW and they replied with this:
“It should be noted that the signatures referred to above were collected on behalf of the UKScience Community to show support for the statement below, not in support of the Met Office.
We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities. The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.
The science of climate change draws on fundamental research from an increasing number of disciplines, many of which are represented here. As professional scientists, from students to senior professors, we uphold the findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which concludes that ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ and that ‘Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
I have made clear that my question didn’t refer to motivation but to how they had the authority to spend public resources on activities other than forecasting and researching the weather. They appear to have totally lost the plot.
Friends:
Please remember the important sub-heading of this item; i.e.
“From the ‘weather is not climate department.’ ”
It is very important.
And it raises the important issue of how it can be decided what is an effect of weather and what is an effect of climate. Any atmospheric effect lasting less than a year is weather.
This cold snap is a weather event and tells nothing about how climate is changing. However, alarmists trumpeted the 1998 hot El Nino year as a ‘sign of things to come’ at the time, but that hot year was also a weather event and told nothing about how climate is changing.
Climate is the integral of weather so warm and hot extremes occur around the ‘climate normal’ temperature. When a climate is warming there will still be times with temperature well below the climate normal. And when a climate is cooling there will still be times with temperature well above the climate normal.
Also, the ranges of weather events are as important as their means because an increase to the ranges of weather events would be a climate change when their mean stayed constant.
There is no agreed minimum period for determination of a climate normal condition.
During the International Geophysical Year (1958) it was agreed that reference periods of 30 years duration would be adopted for comparisons to assess climate change. But this was an arbitrary decision based on what was then considered to be the earliest ‘reliable’ global climate data (data from before 30 years earlier was considered unreliable). The arbitrary (pragmatic?) nature of this decision can be demonstrated in several ways: for example, 30 years is not a multiple of the 11-year solar cycle. So, 30 years was adopted as the standard climate period for use when comparing climate data.
It is sometimes wrongly asserted that the 30 years of the standard climate period means that any atmospheric event of less than 30 years is weather. But this is not true. There is no agreed period for how long weather must be monitored as a climate indicator of climate change. Periods of single years, decades, centuries and millennia are all used in climate assessments published in refereed literature For example, the 1994 IPCC Report uses 5-year periods as an indicator of climate change when considering if the frequency of hurricanes is changing.
Indeed, a weather event (such as the present cold snap) can be assessed to the average temperature and the range of temperatures of previous winter months. This would be a climate assessment because the range of weather events is one parameter that could change to alter climate.
And climate has always changed everywhere on Earth. Climate change is normal.
Some climate changes seem to be cyclic. And two of these cycles seem to be very significant to present climate change.
There is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP).
And overlaid on that ~900 year is an apparent ~60 cycle. This gave cooling from ~880 to ~1910, warming from ~1910 to ~1940, cooling from ~1940 to ~1970, warming from ~1970 to 1998, and cooling since.
So, if the pattern of thee two cycles were to continue then it could be anticipated that cooling will continue for another ~20 years. After that then either
(a) warming will resume for ~30 years as rise toward temperatures of the MWP continues
or
(b) cooling will continue back towards temperatures of the LIA.
In either case, it is an extreme risk to assume that AGW will overwhelm this pattern of past global climate change and, on the basis of that assumption, to only prepare for warming and not cooling.
The present cold weather is a reminder of the severity of that risk.
Richard
E.M.Smith (00:53:57) :
FWIW, I speculate that the land can cool off faster than the oceans (since a shallow depth of soil cools, then acts as an insulator, whereas water moves) thus we get the new cold regimin showing up over land first. THEN I’d expect the “lava lamp” effect to have the warm air preferentially heading to the poles over the oceans and the cold air preferentially heading away from the poles over the (now colder) land.
Thus we get the ‘loopy jet stream’ and all the various air oscillators…
THAT then amplifies the land cooling and the whole thing slowly ’spins up’ to these Arctic Express winds whacking straight down the center of N. America and into the heart of Eurasia.
Yes. This is what I’ve been going on about with my comments about the modoki el nino in progress. Rather than a big el nino like ’98 being concentrated in the east Pacific blowing hot air all over the land we have global SST anomaly which is nearly as high as ’98, but it’s due to energy leaving the ocean everywhere at once. This doesn’t set up any particularly strong air currents, and since the air isn’t massively humid over a localised big El nino like ’98, a lot of the energy escapes straight to space or drifts polewards over the oceans as you say.
JohnH (00:58:53) : “Ahhh MET office UK Winter forecast in tatters”
Maybe not, rumors have it that MET office has a new advisor, B. Clinton, and he has informed his client that as long as they don’t define what a ‘cold’ or ‘warm’ winter IS, their predictions will always be on the money, the cold that the ‘warm skeptics’ feel is an illusion and the UK is truly having a very warm winter this year.
(Some cheer for my dear and truly cold friends in London)
>>>There needs to be an urgent investigation into wind turbine
>>>output for the past two weeks as static high pressure persists
>>>as mentioned by the previous poster and others.
But it was so obvious that wind energy would collapse just when you needed it most – in the coldest of periods. Any farmer, aviator or sailor could have told us that. Take a look at this WUWT article.
Renewable Energy, Our Downfall.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/renewable-energy-–-our-downfall
And yet our most eminent scientists and media experts could not see the results of their drive for renewables. This calls into question the competence and viability of everyone in positions of authority, from government to so-called scientists to the media (especially the BBC).
And if they can get the basic fundamentals of renewables so wrong, then what other ‘global’ policies of the last two decades have our politicians got seriously wrong??
About time for a revolution?? Tanks on Parliament Square??
.
My count of unfortunate deaths keeps going up, and is near 300: http://ecotretas.blogspot.com/2009/12/december-2009-cold-death-toll.html
It starts getting complicated in the USA, as I try not to count same death more than once; most probably, the numbers are much, much bigger…
Ecotretas