While the squabbling continues on MSNBC (see Bill Nye here and Morano with the American Progress guy here, and by all means don’t miss this Olberman rant ) over whether the big Washington DC snow means anything, the venue of the argument is about to shift west. The argument may stop in Dallas, TX along the way west.
The Times reports: Too much snow forces Scottish resort to close
One of the low elevation Vancouver skiing venues (Cypress Mountain) is short on snow this year due to El Nino, and the Global Warming machine is soon going to saturate the news with this story. It has already started and is ramping up.
VANCOUVER, B.C. — One morning last week, environmentalist David Suzuki looked across English Bay from his Vancouver home to Cypress Mountain, usually covered in snow this time of year but now left all but bare by a warm winter.
“I’ve watched in horror as the snow has just melted away from Cypress Mountain,” Suzuki said, referring to the 2010 Olympic Games snowboarding and freestyle skiing venue. The view from Vancouver, Suzuki and others say, provides a glimpse into the future for the Winter Olympics.
Cypress Mountain (yellow insert) from NASA’s Earth Observatory
UPDATE: Image above and NASA Earth Observatory writes:
In early February 2010, organizers were putting the finishing touches on venues for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. Two months earlier, on December 6, 2009, the Thematic Mapper Plus on NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite captured a detailed image of the area where the games will be held.
The image on the left provides a view of the area from Vancouver northward to the Whistler skiing village. Areas outlined in yellow delineate close-up views on the right. The top close-up shows venues near the village of Whistler, where Nordic and alpine skiing events will be held. The bottom close-up shows Cypress Mountain, the planned venue for freestyle skiing and snowboarding, among other events.
Throughout the scene, snow blankets the highest peaks, and low-angled sunlight illuminates south-facing slopes while leaving north-facing slopes in shadow. Valleys and lower slopes are lush green. The venues near Whistler appear as patchworks of green forest interrupted by long, thin trails of snowy white. Just north of the city of Vancouver, Cypress Mountain also holds snowy ski trails, but overall has far less snow.
After unusually warm conditions in January 2010, snow remained scarce on Cypress Mountain. The Los Angeles Times reported that snow was being trucked to Cypress Mountain from higher elevations, and Vancouver Now reported that organizers had placed tubes filled with dry ice on courses to keep surrounding snow from breaking down. A surprise snowstorm struck on February 10, just two days before the games opened, boosting the snowpack. The snowstorm did not, however, change the short-term forecast for rain.
Never mind that most of the ski areas in the world are having excellent seasons, including other Olympic venues like Whistler – which has already received over 1,000 cm of snow this winter. Arizona Snowbowl has received 238 inches of snow this winter! You read that correctly – Arizona.
Squaw Valley, California (site of the 1960 Winter Olympics) is reporting at least 10 feet of snow on the ground. Ski conditions around Salt Lake City (site of the 2002 Olympics) are excellent. Wolf Creek, Colorado is reporting close to ten feet on the ground. European ski areas are reporting excellent snow. Pajarito Mountain, New Mexico is reporting one of their best ski seasons ever. North Carolina ski areas are reporting some of their best conditions ever. Scotland is reporting the best ski conditions in 50 years. Washington DC is shut down due to snow.
Most of the ski areas in British Columbia have excellent snow, but be assured that the press will highlight the one area which doesn’t – and will not provide a sensible explanation for the cause. They will blame it on global warming, and will intentionally ignore ski conditions in most of the globe.
The glass is 10% empty, not 90% full.
Climate change blamed for Olympic snow shortage
Winter snow season has been slowly shrinking in past 50 years, says researcher
This graphic might help some people understand the winter weather patterns in an El Nino year. Same thing happened in 1998. Note where Vancouver is: in the warm pattern.
Somebody should write a book!!! I bet there are 10+ in the mill.
Vancouver – a bit like Bing Crosby et al waiting for the snow in White Christmas. Altogether now, I’m dreaming of……
Don’t tell me they have picked the only ski resort in the world that won’t get snow this winter!!!
How did the AGW circus manage to guess that right?
We’ll never hear the end of this now….. every day and night of the Winter Olympics and for the rest of the winter, all we’ll hear is how bad AGW has affected the Snow fall….. and snow anywhere else is because extra moisture causes more snow… except where olympic games are being held of course….
It’s enough to make one sick.
Suzuki needs to keep raving and ranting as much as he can. Citizens at large already see through the bs and are even more put off by his climate change observations. The problem for Suzuki is that nowadays everything is recorded and their ignorance comes back to haunt them at some stage. “The science is settled” was the greatest sound bit ever for the warmists when marketing the global warming hoax and it worked brilliantly for awhile. But those very words are coming back to haunt them.
We need to encourage more Bill Nye on TV. The “misunderstood genius” of our time weighing in on global warming. It is unfortunate truth that he wears dicky bow’s to get his intellectual superiority across to us, the stupid masses. We get the picture all right.
Observations after weather events take place is the new science of the climate alarmists.
Slightly off topic, but there was a mention further up this comment thread of the UK’s “Barbecue Summer” so here’s the scoop.
We got to late July 2009 and the summer had been crap. At the same time, the credit crunch was hitting the UK hard and foreign tourists were not booking UK holidays in large numbers. The government had the bright idea that announcing that the August weather was going to be fabulous would induce British families (whose kids are off school in August) to holiday in the UK and give a much needed boost to the tourism industry.
The Met Office, which after all is staffed by civil servants and so is a branch of government, was asked to announce a “BBQ summer” for propaganda purposes. They duly did so, in order to stay in the good books of the government. The summer weather remained crap throughout.
Ask yourself – is a man like Suzuki up to hi ears in carbon credit derivatives and greentech stocks? And if not, why not?
It’s now 5:00 AM and it’s still a veritable “Winter Wonderland” outside! Very picturesque with snow covering and sticking to everything … snow is now JUST tapering off as a short expedition outside and RADAR verifies …
.
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In Toronto in Canada this winter,for almost the first time in recorded history there has been almost no snow, yet around 700 miles to the south in Washington, it is at record levels.
Of course, it is supposed to be the other way round. As the alarmists would say:” this is just another clear sign of man made global warming.”
At least most of the Canadian newspapers are blaming El Nino for the snow problems at the lower levels of the Whistler Olympic site – nevertheless, there are large amounts of snow on the upper levels..
What do the tongues call global warming today?
Snow, or no snow.
So let it snow, let it snow, and let it snow…
OT:
Is the Toyota Prius the future?
I, like a lot of car owners have to run an old banger.Even an electric window going wrong can be a major issue.
I then try to imagine owning a second hand, ten year old Prius.
The future for us proles is standing at bus stops watching the champagne socialists waft by.
The Olympics, both Summer & Winter, are allocated to regions of the planet 8 years in advance at least. Surely this just goes to show that one cannot predict weather so far in advance? Wasn’t the recent Greek Olympics somewhat hotter than the usual warmth in that region at the time?
O/T but relevent, (I think) I enjoyed my beer with my Met Office friend whom I sing with in the Church choir, I admire & respect him. Upshot, we agreed to dissagree, it was friendly of course & frank & honest, I think I did reasonably well. Degrees of uncertainty in the GCMs was an interesting case in point. He pointed out the warmth in Canada, I pointed out the extreme cold in much of the United States! He agreed that too much money & politics were involved in climate science. We discussed the Ice Ages, their likely causes. He made the point about the “rate of warming” being unusual, I made the point about the Younger Dryas cooling & then recovery & that rate of cooling & then sudden warming (up to 10°C in 10 yrs). I also made the point about political activism, the Club of Rome, Maurice Strong, et al, Greenpeace & WWF, the Marxist Sociliast desire for Global Governance, etc, & the “irony” about how the AGW solutions & the desire of the CoR, MS (both) & GG, were the same! The beer was good!
BTW you Canutts better watch out, we have a good woman for the bobsleigh & a cracking team for the curling (again)! As usual it seems we Brits leave the cold weather sports to the women.
Is this correct? Whistler – 1,000 cm of snow this winter. In Australia we would kill for 10% of this.
Just move the Olympics to Washington D.C. This solves two problems. 1) there is more than enough snow there and 2) the politicians will be so busy partying that they’ll not pass any more draconian laws.
Weather always aims for balance. Nature do so. We might be surprised by the fact that heat and cold appears at the same time not far away from each other. The warmer and the colder it is on either side, the worse is often the weather going to be. My self are living at high latitude (60), close to the Atlantic ocean which takes along huge amount of warm surface water. Western parts of Norway then can welcome between 3000 and 5000 mm of precipitation each year. Other parts of the country get only one tenth of this.
My point is that without a warm ocean and cold air, no precipitation. Spitsbergen /Svalbard now endure one of the warmest winters ever measured (1912). Same can be said about the sothern parts of Greenland and some parts of NW America.
We now know that our glaciers retracted over several years, but increased after the mild and wet years in the nineties. It always snows above 1000 meter asl.
Norway have had an significant temperaturerise since 1970, with some setbacks. Our areas from latitudes 60 to 80 have experienced up to 2 degrees Celcius rise in 40 years.
We have to realize that IPPC often use NH as an example of global warming and uprecedented in regard to the rise just mentioned.
The Hockey Stick Graph is correct if startpoint is 1900 and in regard to Norway alone…
We all know in Norway the Wikings experienced a mild climate for centuries towards the Great Plague (1349). So I don’t doubt the theory about even higher mean temperatures between 800 and 1200 AD in Norway than today.
What we do know for a fact is that cold climate is worse than the opposite for most living creatures.
MarkA (22:54:24) :
AGW is environmentalism’s Vietnam. The coverage of this story by MSM is equivalent to McCarthyism of the ’50s. You have it exactly right.
I won’t look back with embarrassment, just bemusement. I’m sure there will be some sort of other crisis the world will have to do something about.
Of course real problems with simple solutions, such as fixing broken sewer mains, will be overlooked.
PMH (23:03:47) Said:
“Everything from heat to cold, rain or snow to drought, and sun to shade can now be explained by The Theory of Global Warming.”
There’s a site listing them all:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Another climate model failure. I thought at least one of the how ever many climate models are out there would have predicted this. That none apparently did continues their sterling record; after all, if they can’t predict the past they can’t predict the future. David Suzuki and his ilk have failed again to show that they have the minimal brain capacity required to breathe air.
Thanx to Ray for the local knowledge that this is expected in an El Nino event. I guess David Suzuki doesn’t track local patterns.
I’m in the Seattle area, a mere three hours south of Vancouver. Yes, it’s confusing to go outside and feel like it should be March while the rest of the country is shoveling loads of global warming. I have also attributed it to a God who is blessing those who live below the Howard Hansen Dam – it is in serious danger of failing. Being fairly dry, without our typical winter storms and certainly NOT having a repeat of last winter (a number of snow storms where one is notable), does take the pressure off this earthen dam while it undergoes repair.
The graphic doesn’t explain why the Eastern Canadian Arctic temperatures have been well above normal this year.
Could it be possible that the north pole’s temperature is travelling south along with the jet stream to finally settle at the right coordinates of Al Baby´s house?
Well:
“Vancouver in 3rd place under the category of “Lowest Snowfall” among 100 major Canadian cities.”
And now there is apparently snow snow falling in the area. So perhaps they are actually striking lucky rather than sinking in ecological doom after all.
We have developed a generation of people and journalists who cry “wolf” every time the weather does not arrive on time. Pathetic.
as it turns out Bill Nye is kind of weird. besides not knowing data, he also wants to reduce the population.
[Reply: and he wears a bow tie. Über-weird. ~dbs]
The 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid had the same problem, very little snow that season. But fortunately, the region still had plenty of cold, so it was possible to manufacture snow in abundance. Snow-making equipment from all the Adirondacks was hauled to Whiteface. Just before the games commenced, snow to begin to fall, upsetting the organizers who had by then created perfectly groomed trails. Oh that Mother Gaia, such a sense of humor!
as long as far left political hacks like Keith Olbermann are pushing global warming you can be assured that the mainstream of the population will have doubts about it.
btw, few people watch his show. you’d have to add the numbers for 7 days of his viewers to equal 1 day of Glenn Beck’s viewers, and Glenn Beck isn’t even in prime time like Olberman is.
I liked two things particularly about the Morano interview. I liked the way Dan White walked right into Marc’s trap about falsifiability, and I liked the way this functionary of the Center for American Progress used George Bush to establish some credibility.
New name for ClimateGate—-HilarityGate.
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