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.
The CAGW crowd really has created a perfect storm of illogical reasoning. You start with a tautology:
AGW causes increasing intensity of weather, both warming and cooling, both precipitation and lack of precipitation
Then sprinkle in a dash of “Summer of the Sharks” by running around highlighting abnormal bits of weather even when, as in this case, they’re not really abnormal at all.
To finish it all of mischaracterize the research of people who study extreme weather and claim it agrees with you.
Before you know it, you have made Consensus Salad… a theory that is impossible to falsify (because anything that disagrees with it is just weather, but everything that supports it is a sign of the climate), and gains popular support because, repeated often enough, people will start to see Global Warming behind every corner.
It’s a good thing reason and logic aren’t completely lost arts – I raise my coffee cup to the sincere wish that cool-headed, quality science and truth will prevail in the end!
I have been trying to get Suzuki to look at the research I have accumlating for years now. Nope. Solid physical actual changes. Nope.
Must have really ticked him off that Pres. Obama recieved the next peace prize and not him while IPCC and Gore recieved theirs.
Last year our gardens were terrible all across the region in my area in Ontario, Canada for growing as it was fairly cool all summer. Good September was it for the year.
The Olympic organizers knew there would be little snow in Vancouver and had always planned to either make snow or haul it in for the “popular” events they are staging close to the city (things like snow-cross, snowboard etc.). This was so that they could use facilities built in Vancouver as improvements to the city after 2010. A purely financial decision and one which will work fine once everyone has got forgotten about flying snow in with helicopters.
The “real” snow events (alpine and nordic skiing – showing my bias as a semi-Norwegian) are taking place in the the mountains where there is snow, but has suffered from some fog which has delayed practice on some slopes.
Can’t wait to see Bjoerndalen cement his place as the best ever (Winter) Olympian with more gold in the biathlon. Now that is a real sport – ski your lungs out and then shoot straight, fabulous!
Anthony/Charles you may want to see this. http://bushynews.com/?p=73
Another illogical pattern: Folks commonly refer to the Great Lakes having a snow affect on the surrounding areas and think nothing of attributing this phenomenon to natural parameters, as they should. But Gawd Forbid that we consider the hugely huge ponds we have on both sides of the Americas and propose that they are also capable of producing an extreme snow affect. Nope. It’s okay to call it “lake affects” in and around the Great Lakes, but the extreme amounts of snow we are getting further south is all because of man-made CO2 emissions. Has nothing to do with those little ponds. They are innocent. Ignore the ponds. It’s C02 what done it. And it’s even been peer reviewed.
Oh ! the horror of snow melting, too bad Marlon Brando isnt alive, he could play a sweating David Suzuki in Apocalypse No
It’s funny. The CBC has quit talking about this probably because the Great Lakes (includes the political center of Canada, Toronto) are not having a balmy year. It probably receives an onslaught from its viewers every time it makes a AGW – Olympics connection.
The fact is metro Vancouver has always been like this. The only way that it wouldn’t be is for us to get one of those Arctic Highs parked above me giving then one of those periods of ‘Arctic outflow’ over the coast. Something that has happened once a year in the past couple of years but is not really that common.
The Wet Coast has their contingencies for Cypress Mountain and I don’t see why I should wish for miserable weather just so the only temperate few acres of Canada can get a chill.
Steve
OK… I didn’t see it didn’t get coverage in the MSM until July. But, as the recession was already happening in April, I stand by my theory that it was economic forecsating rather than weather forecasting that drove the prediction.
RockyRoad
You really are dragging everybody into the conspiracy theory if you think that the Winter Olympics organising “powers that be” are all AGW activists! Could be a completely different set of people.
DirkH (06:49:00) :Look Dirk, I live in the El Nino 1+2 area, when there is a real Nino there is a temperature anomaly along the northern coasts of Peru, where the El Nino was precisely given its name by the fishermen, and when that happens the El Nino current runs from the equator southwards warming the coastal waters, which is not the case right now, instead you see those blue areas which indicate that the antagonist and most permanent current, the cold Humbolt´s current it is running from south to north, btw activated by the pacific anticyclone winds which run counterclockwise. When there is a real Nino it rains, really floods, along the northern coasts and there are drought conditions in the south east (high andean plateau in the Puno region, next to Bolivia), however now it is flooding in both places and, from the 12 degrees latitude to 18 °S the coast is dry as usual but now most days covered with low clouds. You see, instead of being warmer the pacific ocean along the equator is a bit warmer in the El Nino 3+4 area and at the central south pacific, in this case you see these warm waters surrounded by cold ones which follow the pacific anticyclone. So this is a different phenomenon due to the “interesting times” we are living in.
Well, the BBC news mentioned ‘Pineapple express’… first time I’ve heard of it, but seems it’s a non-AGW event. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_Express
But it’s heart warming to know this was going to be blamed on global warming anyway. After all, if a weather average isn’t being met it has to be because of our evil carbon dioxide.
The record snows on the east coast and the lack of snow elsewhere prove nothing for nor against AGW.
However, January 2010 saw record global warmth…and that’s the thing about GLOBAL warming…it doesn’t matter what it was doing in your neighborhood. Also, while freakish snow in one area and freakish warmth in another prove nothing for certain, they are not inconsistent in the least with AGW models. Those of you who don’t get this, don’t understand the models and are simply mouthing something you heard some pundit spew out…
Olberman and Bill Nye form the twin side of Limbaugh and Beck. They all get some things right but their really stupid mistakes fall into the same category of being able to “…see Russia from my house”. I wouldn’t trust any of them to explain how to boil water.
Algore and facebook friend Barney Frank did NOT qualify for the 2 man bobsled. They of course have gravity on their side.
Yeah. Woke up yesterday to six inches of “slight chance of mixed precipitation with no chance of significant accumulation” in my Dallas area yard.
9 am weather predicted “no additional accumulations expected.”
By 7 pm I had a total of 10 inches of “no additional accumulation” in the yard.
I haven’t seen this much snow since I was a kid maybe…uhm…35 years ago?
On the plus side…it’s GREAT heavy, wet packing snow!
By all means conserve the environment, but don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s acid rain.
Captain fruit fly is a prat. I can’t believe that I used to watch his show. having lived in Vancouver for a number of years, I can attest to the fact that during el Ninio years, there is very little snow on the lower slopes of Cypress and Grouse. this is not new, this has been going on for the last 50 years at least. Whistler is having great snow, the hills in the interior and the Okanagan are having fantastic years, best in years actually.
Don’t worry. I doubt they will get much media attentioin for this argument. It will be drowned out by the loud chorus of sceptics who are claining the snow storms in DC is proof that AGW is false. This group has become the new experts at using isoltaed weather events to push their views. Many sceptics are no better than the so called “warmists/alarmists/trolls etc..” that they so much despise. If you want proof, just look back on this blog for the last few weeks.
OT but relevant, in the weather not climate department:
“.. Greatest all-time calendar day snow on record set at Dallas Fort
Worth..”.
“Record daily maximum snowfall for February 11th set at Dallas
Fort Worth…”
“… Greatest all-time 24-hour snowfall total set at Dallas Fort
Worth…”
Well if what is just happened in Dallas is just weather….umm, then so is what is going on in Vancouver!
They can’t have it both ways.
Oh that’s right, in their doublespeak world, they can!
AGW causes less snow.
AGW causes more snow.
AGW causes the Winter Olympics to be located in places they don’t want to.
AGW is the reason I drink too much.
Etc….ad nauseum.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Sunspot 1046 produces M8.3 Flare – Out of nowhere Sunspot 1046 produced a strong M8.3 Solar flare Friday morning which is now the largest flare of Cycle 24.
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
This, following Piers Corbyn’ s idea, would produce a “Solar Weather Impact Periods (SWIPs)”, in about 5 1/2 days according to the current solar wind velocity:300 km/seg.
Any Canadian knows that the lower mainland of BC is a mild and temperate climate – otherwise why would almost everyone retire there!!! At the higher levels of the coastal mountains snow falls but it has been variable for many years. When Vancouver bid on the games many years ago – snow on the mountains was identified as a possible problem and that they should prepare for it. So what is new??? Nothing.
The only reason I sometimes watch Keith Olbermann is in the hope it just might be the moment when his head explodes!! So far no such luck. I am an hour from Vancouver. This is normal Feb weather. I predict a big dump of snow on Cypress late this weekend and everything will be fine.
GO CANADA GO
David suzuki
On another blog there is some robust attack of people that do not have a degree such as PHD climate Science
DSc. Doctorate Scientology, Climate.
I notice Suzuki joins Algore and being climate science irrelevant
David suzuki has a biology degree specializing in fruit flies
Drosophila melanogaster
Suzuki is an outsider. Imposter.
Not worthy of reading a rain guage for Anthony Watts.
OOPS, Something was missed in this story…
They had a massive amount of rain in the region.
If it was Goreflakes….a different story.
Time Magazine weighs in…see ICECAP for commentary
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962294,00.html
Among my favorites…
“the two major storms that hit Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., this winter — in December and during the first weekend of February — are already among the 10 heaviest snowfalls those cities have ever recorded. The chance of that happening in the same winter is incredibly unlikely.” Um, DC and Baltimore are 45 miles from each other.
And…
“As global temperatures have risen, the winter ice cover over the Great Lakes has shrunk, which has led to even more moisture in the atmosphere and more snow in the already hard-hit Great Lakes region, according to a 2003 study in the Journal of Climate.” Um, it’s 2010.
Also amusing, an article from the Vancouver Sun from last summer quoting NOAA’s prediction that El Nino (no mention of AGW) would result in less snow this winter in the Pacific Northwest.
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/2010+alert+Here+comes+Nino/1777894/story.html