Guest post by Steven Goddard
As we have been discussing on WUWT, three of the last four months have seen top ten Northern Hemisphere snow extents and the decadal trend has been towards increasing (and above normal) snow extent during the autumn and winter. It appears that this month will achieve snow extent among the top two Februaries on record.
As you can see in the Rutgers University maps below for mid-February, the excess snow cover is necessarily found at lower latitudes. Snow cover radiates out from the pole, so the only place where snow extent can increase is towards the south.
The implication of the observed trend towards increasing snow extent is that the Northern Hemisphere autumn/winter snow line is moving southwards over the last ten to twenty years.
Daily Departure – February 13, 2010 (Day 44)
Source : Rutgers University Global Climate Lab
Daily Snow – February 13, 2010 (Day 44)
Source : Rutgers University Global Climate Lab
We see southern snow cover this year in places like Greece, Northern China, and Alabama that are not normally covered with snow in mid-February. The map below shows the “normal” snow extent measured since 1966.
Daily Climatology – February 13 (Day 44)
Source : Rutgers University Global Climate Lab
Some people have been claiming that the anomalous snow this winter is due to warming temperatures. The New York Times reports on the record snow :
Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense that warming temperatures would cause the snow line to move south. Lower latitudes normally receive rain rather than snow, because the air is already too warm for snow. Further warming would be expected to move the snow line north – not south – and that is exactly what the climate models predict. Indeed, Time Magazine claims that this has already happened: “large-scale cold-weather storm systems have gradually tracked to the north in the U.S. over the past 50 years.”
As far as snow depth goes, Washington D.C. recently broke their 1899 snow record of 54.4 inches and now has a new record of 54.9 inches. We are told that the new record is due to “extreme weather” caused by “global warming.” If so, what caused the nearly identical “extreme weather” over a century ago? Alarmists tell us that heavy snow used to be caused by cold, but now is caused by warmth. The 1899 record was set long before the hockey stick brought temperatures to “unprecedented levels.”
Now lets take their poor logic one step further. Ice ages occur when the snow line moves very far south. If “most climate scientists” are claiming that global warming is causing the snow line to move south, then the logical corollary is that ice ages are caused by further warming temperatures. Clearly that is not true.
Wikipedia map of the last ice age
Furthermore, Hansen correctly tells us that as the snow line moves south, the earth’s albedo increases causing further cooling.
The sensible theory is that the snow line moves south when the climate is cold, and north when the climate is warm. And the record snow we are seeing this winter is due to cold, not warm temperatures.
Today’s NBA All-Star game in Dallas is covered with snow. Last time I checked, Texas was in the South.
As glaciers expand, will sealevels drop, thus providing more land for we Northerners to move South too? I am making friends in Venezuela, so we might have a warm place to go (once they chuck Chavez into the dumpster.)
Has Al Gore been dug out of the snow yet?
THE TROUBLE is that people have been so focused on proving or disproving warming that as a whole they are largely COMPLETELY UNPREPARED for a very severe prolonged COOLING TREND. Google “The Year Summer Never Came”. Late 1700s, I think, During the lifetime of the author of Frankenstein, who documented this as well. It was like a plague. It became very very cold. Millions died, in Europe and in North America, and there were vast crop failures. Are we wasting valuable time now?
[REPLY – 1816. Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death. The Tambora eruption (inter alia). ~ Evan]
Rotten snow!!!
Well, every religion must have it`s miracles!
That albedo thing can be a real problem for calculating radiative equilibrium.
It snowed in Rome over the weekend, the first time in a generation?
Sorry that’s weather not climate?
OT: Anthony gets yet another front page citation, this time from Telegraph Online
on poorly sited temp stations
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7236011/UN-global-warming-data-skewed-by-heat-from-planes-and-buildings.html
As far as snow depth goes, Washington D.C. recently broke their 1899 snow record of 54.4 inches and now has a new record of 54.9 inches. We are told that the new record is due to “extreme weather” caused by “global warming.” If so, what caused the nearly identical “extreme weather” over a century ago?
=================================================
Important question.
Watch OUT! Soon the glaciers will start growing again and it’ll be panic stations, they’ll be engulfing towns.
I would have thought glaciers receding is good, more land!
more snow is in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow in the ‘Deep South’ of the US:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100214/D9DS1MSO0.html
And it looks like it’s headed toward Washington where they’ve already had record snow:
http://www.intelliweather.com/popup/nat_rad_popup.htm
“Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.”
Who are these climate scientists? Did the NYT reporter, John Broden, actually conduct some sort of informal survey of climate scientists from around the world in order to arrive at that conclusion? Or did he just email his pals over at RealClimate and use their opinions as a proxy for the opinions of “most climate scientists”? Broden has so expertly mastered the art of crap-alarmist-junk-journalism that I suspect he’s being groomed to take Andy Revkin’s place.
1816 also became know as the Poverty Year. The following poem from Eileen Marguet summed up the year:
It didn’t matter whether your farm was large or small.
It didn’t matter if you had a farm at all.
Cause everyone was affected when water didn’t run.
The snow and frost continued without the warming sun.
One day in June it got real hot and leaves began to show.
But after that it snowed again and wind and cold did blow.
The cows and horses had no grass, no grain to feed the chicks.
No hay to put aside that time, just dry and shriveled sticks.
The sheep were cold and hungry and many starved to death,
Still waiting for the warming sun to save their labored breath.
The kids were disappointed, no swimming, such a shame.
It was in 1816 that summer never came.
http://www.history-magazine.com/volcanoes.html
The Year Without a Summer
The eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora on 5 April 1815 was one of the largest eruptions in history. Tambora spewed sulphur-rich gases that rose to a height of 28 miles and created a giant sun filter in the northern hemisphere that caused the spring and summer of 1816 to be extremely cold across Europe and North America. Snowfalls and frost occurred in June, July and August and all but the hardiest grains were destroyed. Destruction of the corn crop caused farmers to slaughter their livestock. Soup kitchens were opened to feed the hungry. Sea ice formed in the Atlantic shipping lanes and glaciers advanced down mountain slopes to exceptionally low levels. Hundreds of thousands died of starvation as crops failed, touching off a wave of migration to the American South and Midwest. Farmers repeatedly tried to get a crop in the ground, but each time a killer frost withered the tender roots. Corn and grain prices shot up to $5 and $10 per bushel and oats that had been 12 cents a bushel rose to 92 cents. Riots erupted in Britain and France as starving citizens broke into grain warehouses and left them empty. Violence was even worse in Switzerland where the government declared a national emergency and grain purchases from Russia were intercepted at the border and confiscated by hungry citizens.
This looks serious. Thank heaven I still have IPCC to keep me worried about Global Warming.
OT.
Some feedback from the Australian ABC regarding questions posed about their somewhat biased climate timeline.
Attention is drawn to the Ordovician Ice age, Roman Warm Period and NIPCC that remain missing in action, The Medieval Warm Period that remains poorly referenced, and Al Gore’s movie that remains un-corrected by a British judge. Information about the Northern sea passages remain uncertain.
If anyone has further suggestions please feel free to leave a comment.
http://abcnewswatch.blogspot.com/2010/02/climate-time-line-or-time-lie-response.html
So we can infer that as the globe gets warmer, then there should be an increase in precipitation. Yet, as the EPA data shows, warmer does not equal wetter.
Doesn’t a US Govt department publish frost lines? I believe it’s important for the integrity of buildings and structures etc as well as agriculture.
Would be interesting to see if the frost line has also shifted south.
Quite right, Mia Nony. All our great leaders are looking in the wrong direction. The Great Polar Bear, in the meantime, may be sneaking up behind us and will catch us unawares.
As David Archibald says in his excellent book ‘Solar Cycle 24’ when discussing interglacials, ‘Relative to the last four interglacials, we may be somewhere near the end of the current interglacial. The end of the Holocene will be a brutal time for humanity.’
But then we must not be alarmist. We’ve paid enough for that kind of thing already.
‘But then we must not be alarmist’. Perfectly true, but it may be time to raise the concern flag.
Perhaps its got something to do with the movement of the magnetic north pole…
Just one small point:
This logic is faulty. If A implies C and B implies C, then this does not mean that A and B are the same.
Taking the (ridiculous) statement of global warming is causing the snow line to move south as a given, and that in ice ages, the snow line moved south, that doesn’t mean that global warming = ice age. All it means is that the result (snow line moving south) can be achieved by more than one mechanism.
Having said that, I could possible accept an argument that global warming has altered ‘traditional’ weather patterns, and has resulted in severe winters in part of the globe, but even with that argument I’m yet to be convinced. I’d need more evidence (as shown by long term altered wind patterns, for example) before I’d accept it.
I think there must be some context to the ‘warming temperatures produce more snow’ etc.
It’s pretty clear to me that the following is true:
Snowfall is MOST EXTREME when the temperature is around ZERO.
If it’s minus twenty it’s too cold to snow enormous amounts. Plus six and it’s rain instead.
So my take is this:
Places with cold, cold winters will get more snow if the temperature is a bit warmer.
Places with winters around zero may get less snow and more rain if the temperature is a bit warmer.
So the net effect of warming might be:
Higher snowfall in the upper mountains, thereby replenishing glaciers at the top end. Higher snowfall in interior Siberia, China, interior Alaska/Canada and the Antarctic.
Lower snowfall at the margins, in Alpine lowlands, at the southern extremes of mountain ranges like the Rockies, the Italian Apennines, Lebanon etc.
The net effect of cooling might be: greater snowfall further south in the midwestern plains of the US, more snow in Spain, more snow in North Africa, more snow in Australia and more snow in South Africa.
Of course, with the complex climate we know about, you might get a mixture of the two – warmer arctic temperatures and cooler interior temperatures. That might produce more snow both in the polar regions AND on the southern extremities of the winter snowline.
And for those who accept the data of ice cores etc, you will see that prior to each ice age is a rapid rise in temperatures followed by a big, rapid drop.
Is the polar warming/interior cooling option a possible way to trigger an ice age??
“The sensible theory is that the snow line moves south when the climate is cold, and north when the climate is warm.”
“Sensible” being the operative word.
Steven Goddard,
Looking at the Rutgers seasonal data there is no significant trend in the fall and winter snow extents for the northern hemisphere. As for spring and summer, the trend is significantly down over the last few decades.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=3
Your post should have been titled: “The Snow Line is Moving North.”
True? Hell’s teeth, I hope Global Warming will make it cooler here in Oz. Bloody hot here right now, but don’t panic, it always is in Summer! Damn it’s got to come a long way down for it to snow here, though.
Please – I’m joking!
I don’t think the AGW Leviathan has died yet, but I’m hoping the silver bullet will hit it’s tiny brain soon and stop this farce. We can only hope that a lesson in caution on behalf of our populace and politicians is learn’t this time…
Tom P (01:43:18) :
Steven Goddard,
Your post should have been titled: “The Snow Line is Moving North.”
By the time you two settle this my hairline will have moved north and my waistline will have moved south.
I noticed that in the chart of where the ice sheets were during the last ice age, that North America seemed to have a disproportionately large amount of ice compared to Asia, particularly in Siberia. Also, why no ice in Northern Alaska? Are there any explanations for this counterintuitive distribution of glaciers?
‘At least I had the satisfaction of pointing out that while the House was voting for a bill based on the assumption the world is getting warmer, it was snowing in London in October for the first time in 74 years. I was told, “extreme cold is a symptom of man made global warming.” ‘
Peter Lilley MP in
http://www.peterlilley.co.uk/article.aspx?id=14&ref=1511
Anthony and team, hope you can also monitor if the southward movement of snowline is also happening on the other side of the globe, in Asia. I have read about the “worst winter” in Korea, north China, Mongolia, etc in January. I wonder if the trend continued until this month.
Here in Metro Manila and surrounding provinces, El Nino is kicking rather hard. It can be cloudy on some days but the clouds don’t fall even as light showers.
OT
[sorry but this comment on the BBC site IMHO sums up climate scientists.]
laughingdevil wrote:
Moderator – please feel free to snip
Two important points to remember here:
1. Increased snowfall is a direct result of AGW.
2. Decreased snowfall is a direct result of AGW.
The snow line is moving in phase with the solar cycles activity, further South now that it is at a minimum, and was further North with more warming when it was much more active for the 50 years before this cycle…….
How hard can it be to figure out???
sun+- changes in climate
CO2+ still changes with the sun???
http://www.climatechange.umaine.edu/Research/projects/laurentide.html
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/laurentide_deglaciation.html
What I remember finding some time back was a stated tendency for high-pressure systems to sit over Ice Sheets. As it was described, the present day effect of high pressure over the West running storms up into B.C. didn’t happen during the Laurentide. The storms went predominately West-East and the desert Southwest was a fertile grasslands/deciduous forest.
How it (Laurentide) got started I can’t find much on.
Why an ice-free Alaska? Must be some sort of predominant low and ocean current/wind pattern thing got set up. Who knows.
@D. Ch.
“North America seemed to have a disproportionately large amount of ice compared to Asia, particularly in Siberia. Also, why no ice in Northern Alaska? Are there any explanations for this counterintuitive distribution of glaciers?”
The unglaciated area of the Alaskan interior formed part of the “Beringia Corridor” which extended west into Siberia. That area was ice-free because most of the moisture in the air had been depleted by the mountain ranges to the South and North of the corridor. Hence, very little precipitation fell on Alaska’s interior lowland and arctic coastal plain. You can read more about it on Wikipedia which gives a decent explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beringia
Also see here for a more thorough history:
http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/research/alaska/alaskaC.html
So if Global Warming causes Global Cooling, then Global Cooling causes Global Warming.
Global Warming, therefore, caused the LIA, and Global Cooling stopped the glaciers in the Swiss Alps, not the cardinal. Froze that puppy in it’s tracks.
That’s got to be it. Global Warming gets so cold that ice stops moving and melts. Yeah.
And Global Cooling gets so hot at the Poles that it shoves the Polar Caps south. Makes ice move so fast it cannot melt, and the centrifugal force slings the Arctic Cap out over N.A. and Siberia in 2 giant halves.
Only trouble is, with logic that bad and ice that fast, how’s a feller supposed to figure out which one’s going on at any given time?
Global warming causes global cooling is one really messed up theory.
Stars are not condensed out of galactic stuff: They are black holes in the opposite universe pumping matter into this universe.
Warning: This kind of thinking can lead to excessive drinking.
I have been looking at this myself, and something quite odd is going on.
The winter Northern Hemisphere snow cover has been increasing since about 1998, having been declining for some time before that. But at the same time, summer snow cover has been decreasing – quite drastically.
The whole point about an ice age is not the winter snow cover, but the summer snow cover. If the snow cannot last the summer then it does not matter how far south it goes in Winter.
I attach links to a couple of (very amateur) graphs I have done to show this. Snow reaches a maximum (usually) in January and a minimum in August. So I have calculated an average over the 30 years 1975-2005 for each month (the satellite record only goes back to 1973) and show the variance from that.
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/7003/nhsnowjanuary.png
http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/7197/nhsnowaugust.png
What these do not show is that in percentage terms the summer snow melt is much bigger – in fact snow has now virtually disappeared from the NH land mass in August.
Another trend is that the snow is melting earlier, as temperatures are increasing in March/April, which is primarily what has been driving the reducing summer snow extent.
I think it would be plain stupid to attribute this either to AGW or global cooling at this stage. This does not fit the expected pattern of either and clearly is a form of “climate change” not yet built into anybody’s models.
This needs a lot more research and calling the trend as proof of either AGW or natural variability is premature – although if I were a betting man I would put my money on the latter rather than the former.
Does this mean we can skip painting our roofs white?
Here’s another view of the current N.H. snow & ice cover, compared with last year: click
From the late 70’s the average global latitudinal position of the air circulation systems, most notably the mid latitude jets moved fitfully poleward in response to warming sea surfaces.
Since 2000 following the 1998 El Nino peak of warm ocean surfaces the air circulation systems stopped moving poleward and ever since have been drifting slowly and fitfully back equatorward.
At the same time the sea surfaces have been gradually cooling albeit fitfully.
How much more empirical evidence do we need ?
Yes it would be ironic if the whole world fell into a severe cooling snap. Would even be more ironic to see official temperatures still rising. It would prove once and for all how fraudulent the whole game is being played by the likes of CRU, NOAA and NASA. They already have egg on face. If the cooling trend continues they are totally discredited. Sad though as I held NASA and NOAA with high regard many years ago. Now they have turned into political spin con artists.
Baa Humbug (01:16:07) :
Doesn’t a US Govt department publish frost lines? I believe it’s important for the integrity of buildings and structures etc as well as agriculture.
Would be interesting to see if the frost line has also shifted south.
I don’t know the answer, but it made me think of the parallel to growing seasons. Most reports I am aware of are that growing seasons have been getting longer. But that raises a question: longer relative to what time frame? Like temperature trends themselves, we can come up with just about any answer we want, depending on where we start and stop the time frame of analysis. I don’t doubt that growing seasons became longer, in recent decades, to some earlier decades. But all that may be changing.
An interesting paper abstracted here:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AGUFM.B43B0265N
ties a later start to the growing seasons since 1998 to a possible shift in the PDO.
Here’s a chart of the last 450ky from the Vostok ice core data.
http://www.ianschumacher.com/img/iceagetemphist.png
As can be easily seen, Earth’s chaotic climate fluctuates between periods of being warm and cool on a regular basis, with cool being the predominant mode. The changes between cooling and warming mode are quite rapid and we are at the top of the peak at the moment.
I think that a series of small events which coincide with a conjunction of the regular quasi-cycles our climate exhibits, can in the right circumstances, cause these shifts.
Here’s a list of ‘possible’ events which could catalyse the change:-
Triggers for cool-mode climate – happening now.
Low latitude jet stream in the northern hemisphere.
Low Ap index.
Weak NH polar vortex.
Less UV hitting Earth’s atmosphere.
Low density/speed solar wind.
Reduced depth of Earth atmosphere.
Increase in cosmic rays.
Enhanced cloud cover.
PDO turning negative.
El Nino conditions weak.
Weak Gulf Stream.
Increased albedo from extra NH snow.
Additional potential triggers – yet to happen.
Big volcanic eruptions.
Strong La Nina.
Thanks to all at WUWT for helping compile this list.
Rome has just had the first snow fall for a generation
http://current.newsweek.com/budgettravel/2010/02/live_from_rome_snow.html
Tom P (01:43:18) :
Steven Goddard,
Looking at the Rutgers seasonal data there is no significant trend in the fall and winter snow extents for the northern hemisphere. As for spring and summer, the trend is significantly down over the last few decades.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=3
Your post should have been titled: “The Snow Line is Moving North.”
Why focus on just the spring and summer? Why not look at the complete picture, as in this link, from the same source?
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/images/anom_nhland.gif
The 12-month moving average has moved up sharply since 2007. And since it is a centered moving average, it doesn’t include the most recent 6 months, which are sharply positive, so the trend line will continue to move up over the next few months, probably bringing it back to, or near to (if not actually above) the zero anomaly line for the entire base period, which covers all months back to November 1966.
Would you perhaps, also, notice a regime-shift-like transition in the late 1970’s in this graph? I wonder what that means? Natural climate variability, perhaps?
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess; even to crimes it did not commit.”
Stephen Wilde (03:43:18) :
From the late 70’s the average global latitudinal position of the air circulation systems, most notably the mid latitude jets moved fitfully poleward in response to warming sea surfaces.
Since 2000 following the 1998 El Nino peak of warm ocean surfaces the air circulation systems stopped moving poleward and ever since have been drifting slowly and fitfully back equatorward.
At the same time the sea surfaces have been gradually cooling albeit fitfully.
How much more empirical evidence do we need ?
Stephen, what is the evidence for this? Not that I doubt you, but I’d like to look at it for myself. Are there data, anywhere, for the position of the jet stream over time?
Uk headline today.THE GREAT CLIMATE CHANGE RETREAT
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/158214
Slightly off topic…but still in the realm of snow… perhaps this is a clue as to why we don’t hear about Kilimanjaro any more??? From the NY post :
Last Updated: 3:49 AM, February 15, 2010
Posted: 1:21 AM, February 15, 2010
Yahoo! BuzzDiggRedditFark ItNewsvineStumbleUponTwitterFacebook RSSKick Kennedy, granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy, recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness about the water crisis in Africa. The Stanford University senior made the summit with Jessica Biel, Emile Hirsch, Lupe Fiasco, Santigold, Isabel Lucas, Elizabeth Gore and Alexandra Cousteau as cameras recorded the adventure for MTV, which will air “Summit on the Summit” on March 14. “We had historically bad weather,” Kennedy told Page Six. “On the seven-day ascent, it rained or snowed every day, and we had a complete whiteout at the summit.” Kennedy is also working with Consuelo Vanderbilt-Costin and Sara Delano Roosevelt for the Legacy Group, which auctioned a blouse she designed for $14,000 — for charity, of course.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/rugged_ascent_4aoyrc6Gj533JwgWszUYLL#ixzz0fbdClh9n
I’ve read that scientists want to drop something into the atmosphere to simulate a erupting volcano to reduce AGW. What are these people thinking? Are they really caught up in the AGW religion that deeply?
I’ve reached the conclusion that very many of the people involved in “Climate Science” are not Scientist’s but merely skilled Technicians who are very good at the mechanics of their field, but lack the philosophical sense that leads to true understanding. I believe Hume would agree with me.
Basil (04:04:57) :
“Why focus on just the spring and summer?”
I’m not, but they are the only seasons with significant decadal trends. There’s little of any significance that can be concluded by looking at two or three years’ worth of data.
It’s probably not coincidental that arctic sea ice has also shown the greatest relative loss during the summer months over the last three decades:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Alarmists tell us that heavy snow used to be caused by cold…
Cite?
Northern Hemisphere snow cover is declining:
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=0&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=1
… and:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-spm-3.html
And the record snow we are seeing this winter is due to cold, not warm temperatures.
Quantity of precipitation is related to atmospheric moisture content, not temperature. Antarctica is extremely cold but nevertheless has dry valleys (free of ice and snow) which cover about 0.03% of the continent. The planet is warming, therefore atmospheric moisture content is rising*, therefore we are seeing more heavy precipitation.
* “The average atmospheric water vapour content has increased since at least the 1980s over land and ocean as well as in the upper troposphere. The increase is broadly consistent with the extra water vapour that warmer air can hold.” – IPCC AR4, WG1 –
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-direct-observations.html
jbrodhead (00:11:48) :
As glaciers expand, will sealevels drop…
Glaciers are shrinking worldwide –
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb10/Abb2.pdf
So much new speculation and theorizing here. Isn’t the real lesson for all of us that observation and watchful waiting are all that our narrow and partly opaque window in time will permit? You have theories that are internally inconsistent, predictions that vary more than a compass needle in an iron mine, i.e., literally from North to South, and still everyone wants to predict what a truly humble scientist would admit in the face of the imperfect and contradictory data: we don’t really have an idea of where it is going next.
Mia Nony (00:21:06) :
THE TROUBLE is that people have been so focused on proving or disproving warming that as a whole they are largely COMPLETELY UNPREPARED for a very severe prolonged COOLING TREND. Google “The Year Summer Never Came”. Late 1700s, I think, During the lifetime of the author of Frankenstein, who documented this as well. It was like a plague. It became very very cold. Millions died, in Europe and in North America, and there were vast crop failures. Are we wasting valuable time now?
[REPLY – 1816. Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death. The Tambora eruption (inter alia). ~ Evan]
Certainly a very large eruption would cool the planet, but it’s not so easy to predict large volcanic eruptions, and to the best of my knowledge none are predicted, whereas ‘greenhouse’ warming is well-understood and is happening now. Best to prepare for what we know is a danger right now, rather than for something unpredictable that might not occur for hundreds of years.
What do you think is the ideal level of CO2 in the atmosphere?(opinion)
aMINO aCIDS iN mETEORITES (00:33:42) :
As far as snow depth goes, Washington D.C. recently broke their 1899 snow record of 54.4 inches and now has a new record of 54.9 inches. We are told that the new record is due to “extreme weather” caused by “global warming.” If so, what caused the nearly identical “extreme weather” over a century ago?
=================================================
Important question.
What climate scientists are actually telling us is that heavier snowfall is consistent with global warming (because of increased atmospheric water vapour content) and that in a warmer world we should expect to see a higher incidence of extreme precipitation events. Neither of these things are in any way contradicted by the occurrence of heavy snowfall events in the past, for reasons which should be obvious.
Snow moves to the south, and if craziness prevails, as industries moved to China and Asia – and with it your GDP-, so you will have to move there too, just to have the possibility of breathing, as exhaling poisoning CO2 by you nasty humans beings has been forbidden by your EPA.
Stephen Wilde (03:43:18) : Patterns of air circulation are most probable driven by changes in geomagnetic field/LOD:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LOD-GMF.gif
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GeoMagField.gif
Something to watch in these interesting times.
Ja, ja, more snow because of all that global warming. I already saw it coming. What else can they say now? That is why they started using the term “climate change” instead of global warming. In this way you can always explain anything!
I cannot even say anymore: enjoy your global warming while it lasts!
The reality is that we are heading towards global cooling.
All indicators are that we tipped towards cooling in 2003. We were just lagging some time before the down turn. It is always like that when you are on a top: you first have to stand still before you start moving down.
I am actually scared. We all know that more snow will cause more cooling (reflection of sunlight out to space)
As Easterbrook noted on WUWT last year: it might get a lot worse. Does he have any comments on which way the global cooling is going to go?
Joe Romm says the dustbowl in the southwest is becoming permanent.
Floods in southern California, snow Arizona, New Mexico and blizzards Houston to Dallas.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/07/11/drought-news-once-in-a-century-texas-drought-stunting-crops-drought-twice-as-likely-to-lead-to-mental-health-problems/
Then Joe says mental health is compromised by drought.
Snow is a sign of drought? Neurosis is a symptom of mental health? So Joe as a fool makes up information. He says drought doubles the onset of mental illness. I guess with rain, snow and ice, a lot of people have been cured. Of course foreclosure and homellessness after losing jobs to China or other causes is stressfull.
I wonder how Joe who admires Spain where there is 22% unemployment is doing. Warmists use fear to promote the agenda.
I guess the drift of the snow line will be followed by a drop in scripts for psychotropic meds.
Steven Goddard:
“Today’s NBA All-Star game in Dallas is covered with snow. Last time I checked, Texas was in the South.”
Not necessarily. My theory is “mini-plate tectonics.” Texas is slowly moving north towards Wisconsin. Just wait about 2.5 million years and you’ll see that I’m absolutely correct. ;o)
Proof now, you say? Most of the ‘Red’ states are in the West and most of the ‘Blue’ states are in the east. Massachusetts seems to be shifting from a ‘Blue’ state to a ‘Red’ state i.e., moving west, given the recent special election. Obviously, mini-plate tectonics is causing that shift, too. ;o) ;o)
Me? I’m counting on mini-plate tectonics to shift my home in the Midwest down towards Florida so I don’t have to sell here and buy there ;o) ;o) ;o)
(Nice article, Steven. Earlier commenters have hit the more salient points, so I thought I’d take a shot at expanding “global warming science.” They’re gonna’ need something to replace the CO2 model, ya know.)
Off topic, but…
The Google ad at the bottom of this post on the main page looks very much like just another WUWT blog entry: font style, size, color, layout. The title says, “Global Warming”, and it takes you to bookmarky.com or some such.
Pretty sneaky, if intentional.
Icarus (04:32:21) :
“The planet is warming, therefore atmospheric moisture content is rising*, therefore we are seeing more heavy precipitation.”
It is actually too moist. Climate models are based on the principle that increased CO2 leads to more warmth which then evaporates more water. This paper by Wentz et al. looked at rain, both as modeled by GCMs and as measured.
GCMs predict that rain will increase some 1-3% per degree C of warming. However, satellite data since 1987 show an increase of 7% per degree, an amount somewhere between 2.3 and 7 times larger than what is predicted by climate models.
Theoretically, the only way to bring the two results in harmony would be through a decrease in global wind speeds by some 0.8% per decade. Unfortunately, data shows just the opposite, an increase of 1% per decade.
Wentz writes “the reason for the discrepancy between the observational data and the GCMs is not clear.” He also states that this dramatic difference between the real world and the virtual world of climate modeling “has enormous impact with respect to the consequences of global warming” concluding that the questions raised by the discrepancy “are far from being settled.”
How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/317/5835/233
Re: Basil (Feb 15 03:50),
Thnks for the response and link Basil.
All the hypothesis here, warming causes snow, cooling causes droughts etc reminded me of Get Smart Harry Hoo episode.
Icarus is begging to look like real silly when someone decides to collate “scientists say” (not to mention the blowhard politicians) articles on ‘global warming = less snow’.
What exactly would be inconsistent with AGW? I’d sure like to know.
Easy. If AGW makes more snow & frost in places that normally dont have it, global cooling would need to be named as responsible if next winter is rainy, warm or just dry in these places. I could already imagine the headlines this time next year. Would be logic, or? Hmmm, some doubts about main stream media tackling it in a strict logical way. Maybe they could ask Al Gore for an interview to explain.
So, now that the polar bear’s territory has expanded down to Georgia, does that mean that the southern brown bear will become endangered?
<i. Tom P (04:26:23) : It’s probably not coincidental that arctic sea ice has also shown the greatest relative loss during the summer months over the last three decades.
With a total of three decades of data, your statement is relative to when?
Stephen Wilde (03:43:18) :
…At the same time the sea surfaces have been gradually cooling albeit fitfully.
Cite?
This paper suggests the opposite:
http://www.euro-argo.eu/content/download/49437/368494/file/VonSchukmann_et_al_2009_inpress.pdf
Page 50, top figure – Global ocean heat storage, 0 to 2000m, 2003 – 2008.
0.77±0.11W/m²
Agreed that the AGW shills shot themselves in the foot when they linked old snow records to the current weather begging the question – “Where’s the “catastrophic climate change” if today’s climate is generating weather not much different than over a 100 years ago?” I found myself shouting at my computer monitor, (again), when I read NYT: “Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.” (So now not only do they inject subterfuge, they inject disproven subterfuge.)
The science is so settled that those same ‘most’ climate scientists proved it to NYT reporter John Broder by showing him a video by Vinny the Scam-Wow guy of how to make ice cubes on a stove top, (in ‘real time’!).
The real question here is, when AGW alarmists shoot themselves in the foot in the middle of a complicit MSM, – does it make a sound?
The AGW folks reason “a priori” only and they never encounter a disconfirming fact. From that it follows that “climate change” is causing the snow line to move
south. Got it?
Maybe “Snowgate” can be added to the list of “gates” explained here:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/-234092–.html
No one seems to have responded to this observation yet. Is TLM right, and if so, how does that affect the argument pro or con the effect of putative (A)GW?
/Mr Lynn
Henry Pool (04:58:55) :
The reality is that we are heading towards global cooling.
Apparently not. The planet is warming at about 0.2°C per decade –
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/trend
Ocean heat content is rising –
ttp://www.euro-argo.eu/content/download/49437/368494/file/VonSchukmann_et_al_2009_inpress.pdf
Northern Hemisphere snow cover is declining –
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=0&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=1
Glaciers are shrinking worldwide –
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/mbb/mbb10/Abb2.pdf
Arctic sea ice is declining at 3.2% per decade –
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100203_Figure3.png
Seems like global warming to me.
I read an oldish book. 2 ex weather/sciance chaps. called “the Sixth Winter”
so if their theory re ice age coming was right it should prove it in about 4 to 5 years from now.
personally I am storing woolen items heavy boots and planning to make sure my home could stand extreme cold as well as normal aussie Heat.
caution doesnt go astray.
Looks like the snowline is moving down AND over to the east a bit too.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250983/Met-Office-warns-Britain-brace-heavy-snow.html
Basil (04:07:51)
Unfortunately no one seems to have been mapping jet stream positions globally over time beyond seasonal variability but there is lots of anecdotal evidence and also evidence that the ITCZ also moves latitudinally in line with global tropospheric temperatures.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1755-1315/6/7/072010/ees9_6_072010.pdf?request-id=8e5e203e-0a2b-4cea-a76c-edf1713da5ad
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/Sachs_etal_2009.pdf
I also remember lots of media reports up to 1998 about the jets having moved poleward. A Discovery Channel documentary blamed it on human emissions and suggested the poleward shift was permanent.
Now we have lots of reports (such as this thread) of the equatorward drift that I have personally been noticing for ten years now.
So we really need to firm up on WHY this is happening and personally I don’t see anything else powerful enough or correlating well enough other than globally averaged sea surface temperatures.
I may have jumped the gun a bit in the absence of detailed data but I have extensively explored the possible implications of those air circulation shifts having been driven by the oceans and it has built up to quite a detailed climate description that fits a lot more real world observations than anyone else’s.
There are lots of gaps to fill with more specific work from others and amendments may well be necessary but the general overview is looking clear enough to me.
That all leads to more discussion being required about ENSO and PDO in particular but although we have our own expert in Bob Tisdale he has told me in no uncertain terms that he is not interested in the longer term phenomenon or whether it can be made to mesh with his work.
A great pity.
Jonesll (04:26:55)
If you can get the LOD numbers to explain sea surface temperature changes and latitudinal air circulation shifts back to 900 AD or earlier then I would be very interested.
Icarus (04:52:23) :
What climate scientists are actually telling us is that heavier snowfall is consistent with global warming (because of increased atmospheric water vapour content) and that in a warmer world we should expect to see a higher incidence of extreme precipitation events. Neither of these things are in any way contradicted by the occurrence of heavy snowfall events in the past, for reasons which should be obvious.
Yes, obviously AGW/CC “theory” says that whatever happens now, it is “consistent with, and predicted by the models”. Whatever happened in the past is immaterial. Got it.
“Icarus (04:32:21):
Quantity of precipitation is related to atmospheric moisture content, not temperature.”
The article under discussion states that snow cover in the northern hemisphere is moving–and has been moving–south. This can only occur if global temperatures are cold enough to allow snow to fall and remain on the ground, and this has been occuring with more frequency over the past ten years or so. An increase in global temperatures may allow for more dramatic snow events (as you assert), but it should only be occurring at locations farther north, and this is not happening. In fact, the opposite is true.
I also take issue with the IPCC snow cover graph you cite. It shows a decline in snow cover up to approx. 2002. There has been a substantial increase in snow cover since that time.
“Some people have been claiming that the anomalous snow this winter is due to warming temperatures. “
Sounds like a negative feedback if you believe that. Snow has a higher index of reflectivity.
Henry Pool (04:58:55) :
Does he have any comments on which way the global cooling is going to go?
First: How the sun is behaving:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PolarFields.gif
Then look at page 50, figure 9.1
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/y2787e08.pdf
So about 2020 we’ll reach the minimum.
More:
We expect that the next relatively deep minimum of the solar activity, radius, and radiation flux in the 200-year quasi-cycle will be close to the Maunder minimum level and will occur in the year 2040 ±10.
LONG-TERM VARIATIONS OF THE INTEGRAL RADIATION FLUX AND POSSIBLE TEMPERATURE CHANGES IN THE SOLAR CORE
Kh. I. Abdusamatov
This is it!
JonesII,
Your geomagnetic field data seems to lag the temperature changes. I doubt the temperature effects the geomagnetic field so it’s a spurious correlation.
Fine post. Great comments. I have gobs of data and hypotheses to send leaning-AGW family, friends, and scientist-acquaintances. Thanks, everyoneWUWT. Special nod to Moa Nony’s comments at beginning.
I suspect he’ll say, “down.” 🙂
I’m sorry, I’m terribly off-topic, but look at this quote from Gavin on RealClimate, regarding Jones’ recent interview:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/comment-page-3/#comment-159809
“Nothing jones said is out of line with what any of us have said on the topic. -gavin”
Wow.
You are killing the planet with this heresay. When will you learn that you can’t burn millions of tonnes of coal an gas and not kill the planet! Lots of snow storms is caused by Global Climate Change, clearly. Everyone knows that the Global Climate Crisis is going to cause lots of bad weather we don’t like. Here is a simple way to deduce whether weather is Global Climate Change Crisis Armageddon(GCCCA) related or not. Ask yourself do you think the weather outside is pleasent? If you don’t then that weather is made unpleasent by GCCCA. If, on the other hand, you think the weather is pleasent then we must move quickly to destroy capitalism so we can continue to have pleasent weather.
For example. Suppose you go outside and it’s nice out but a little windy. The wind is caused by GCCCA because of melting antarctic glaciers, something to do with salt and albinos I can’t remember the exact terminology. But GCCCA definitely.
Another refutation of the IPCC’s hurricane claim. Follow the link at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/15/hatton_on_hurricanes/
I thought AGW was going to give us droughts but the extra snow is blamed on an increase in precipitation. I’ve found another AGW guard to falsification.
1. AGW causes droughts
2. AGW cause increased precipitation
The outline of that ice age snow reminds me of a cold PDO, cold Atlantic Oscillation, a negative AO, and a neutral or moderate jet stream pattern circulating the globe. hmmmmmm
Icarus (04:52:23) :
aMINO aCIDS iN mETEORITES (00:33:42) :
As far as snow depth goes, Washington D.C. recently broke their 1899 snow record of 54.4 inches and now has a new record of 54.9 inches. We are told that the new record is due to “extreme weather” caused by “global warming.” If so, what caused the nearly identical “extreme weather” over a century ago?
=================================================
Important question.
What climate scientists are actually telling us is that heavier snowfall is consistent with global warming (because of increased atmospheric water vapour content) and that in a warmer world we should expect to see a higher incidence of extreme precipitation events. Neither of these things are in any way contradicted by the occurrence of heavy snowfall events in the past, for reasons which should be obvious.
——————
Reply:
No, but their AGW theory is baseless if it simply regurgitates the past. Besides, Jones is now telling us there hasn’t been any significant warming for quite a few years. So which is it? Heavy snowfall because we once saw increasing temperatures, or heavy snowfall because we no longer have AGW?
Since Jones also states that our current warming period is no different than past warming periods (i.e., the MWP), so unusual weather events can’t be used to support a debunked theory–take the “A” out of AGW and you’re far more accurate than if you leave it in, yet a debunked theory is still debunked regardless of the weather.
This is how ice ages start.
And to all those global warmers out there who are saying that AGW predicts more snow? Well I can let you off with maybe more precipitation but it should be rain.
Global warming? More snow? Nah.
OT: Many meteorologists break with science of global warming
No mention of WUWT, but Coleman and D’Aleo are mentioned.
My take is somewhat different, could be wrong but it keeps popping up in my mind.
I don’t take this as the start of a little ice age but it is directly related to the irradiation from the sun. This ties to Anthony’s post over a year ago in “It’s the sun, stupid”, search and look it up. In that post there is a chart of what the sun has done in the last decades according to Lean et al (1995) paper. Imagine of the trend line of that graph. It now seems more likely that she was correct.
In the last decades we have been in a period of increasing irradiation from the sun averaged over the years. During that period the earth was cooler than the thermal equilibrium it would have at that irradiation. This causes a drier period as excess heat is moving into the top layers of the earth. Less convection and condensation.
Now we are on the other side with decreading irradiation. The earth is warmer in the top layer of soil and oceans than it would be if it were at thermal equalibrium. The earth is getting rid of that excess heat as fast as conductivity and emmisitivity will allow. You get more water vapor and convection and that is the fastest way the earth can perform that. A wetter period. In physics it is realated to the minimum time principle.
Tom P,
I made it quite clear that I was talking about autumn/winter snow cover, and if you took the time to read the links provided, you would know that the autumn/winter snow line has been moving south over the last decade and has been well above the 50 year mean.
Graeme,
Do you think it is logical to claim that snow and freezing crops in Florida are due to unusual warmth?
Things cused by Global Warming
1)Snow (ie East cost snow)
2)Lack of snow (ie Vancouver)
3)Floods
4)Droughts
5)Warmth (NW area of NA)
6)Cold (Texas, Alabama and Florida)
7)Earth-Quakes
8) Well as Joe Romm would say everything
So there it is the Earth is heating up and is caused by man, what more proof do you need?
John
Not CO2 but the Sun
IPCC Corruption Included Ignoring Facts and Science
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, February 15, 2010
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/20029
Phil Jones, disgraced and dismissed Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), granted BBC reporter Roger Harrabin an interview. Why Harrabin? His reporting has shown bias on all the IPCC and CRU activities. Leaked emails showed the CRU gang used friends in the BBC and that apparently continues. Prevarication, evasion, half-truths continue in Phil Jones’ answers. Despite this there are stunning admissions from Jones. “There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.”
—————-
The Sun They Ignore
Why did they include ER and ignore major solar factors of the Milankovitch Effect and changes in solar magnetism that cause temperature change? The simple answer was to counteract the claim that the Sun was causing warming. Variance in ER for the short periods of record are about 0.15%, which sounds like very little, but theoretical calculations show a 6% variance explains all temperature variance in the history of the Earth. They manipulate the data and models to attribute temperature change since 1950 almost totally to CO2. As Jones explains, “The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.”
Tim 03:36:27 … less summer snow
Just an undocumented observation- I have been hunting in Colorado (sorry peta fans) for apx. 20 years around the September-Oct. time frame .I used to stop often in snow pack at around 11000 feet and have a snack for lunch. The last 5 or 6 years there has been no snow at all. This past year it also did not snow while we were there which was the first time that that has happened. Of course why is another question . I live in LA (lower Ala for you northerners) near the coast and we had snow last week for the first time in years. Why? GW? Pooh! The climate is always changing.
“Does this mean we can skip painting our roofs white?”
Yes, but you will need to paint the roses red.
Like a skilled swordsman, the media has put on quite the
display of their knowledge, of where the snow came from.
jack morrow,
What part of Colorado do you hunt in? The Front Range had one of the snowiest and coldest Octobers on record. A-Basin ski area had their earliest opening ever.
http://www.denverpost.com/extremes/ci_13751035
r (05:47:40) :
So, now that the polar bear’s territory has expanded down to Georgia, does that mean that the southern brown bear will become endangered?
———–
Reply:
No, he’ll just turn white and start eating frozen cattle.
Has anyone else noticed that the recent rise in Solar Flux and attendant sunspots coincides with a sudden burst of activity from Icarus, who seems to have awoken from deep sleep to a state of narcassistic reflectiveness, as witnessed by his tortuous emanations above. Climate Change – another idea that just won’t fly!
narcissistic actually
Increased precipitation + increased warmth = more rain at low latitudes. Not heavy snow in the deep south.
Steve Goddard (07:04:59) :
“…the autumn/winter snow line has been moving south over the last decade and has been well above the 50 year mean.”
Are you seriously suggesting a discernible trend in this plot:
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1
while ignoring the significant change here?
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=3
If global warming can really cause more snow, then it means there is a negative feedback to global warming because snow reflects more light to space. I once been said that negative feedback was impossible with CO2.
Apropos of cold weather in our anthrogenically-warmed world: yesterday it was so cold in church that blankets were handed out.
Yes, well at least ole Gav was on topic with the “spin” in his title.
Edited to add El Nino:
The outline of that ice age snow reminds me of a cold PDO, cold Atlantic Oscillation, a negative AO, and a neutral or moderate EL NINO jet stream pattern circulating the globe. hmmmmmm
If warm causes cooling then cooling should cause warming, therefore in order to fix the global warming, we need to increase the global temperature.
Anecdotally, I await Feb. 14 each year. For the past 38 years I’ve been in Colorado, that date marked the end of subzero temps, hinting at spring. This morning changed my point of reference, it was -4°F just before dawn..
Some smart guy should take advantage of this discussion and get a license from Libya to sell lots in the Sahara. When it goes green again as the ice advances across Canada and half the continental US, our offspring can move there.
From what I’ve seen, its still at least 1000 years away and probably 3 millenia with another MWP in the mix … so there will be grapes in Newfoundland again before we get weighed down by a few hundred feet of ice. In between there will be minor Solar Maximums and Grand Minimums to keep us guessing at what the sign of the trend is. 20 to 30 years left in this minimum which by recent activity (if you ignore Sunspot Inflation/Exaggeration from Galileo to now) is more a Dalton type than Maunder.
Oh the misery of Climate Change … it just won’t stay in one place! Homo Sapiens must be the main driver since it looks like nobody is at the wheel. Am I paraphrasing Suzuki? … or Gore?
The idea that snow lines move south when the climate cools and moves north when it warms seems to be confirmed by paleological data.
I’m no expert for sure, but as far as I know, the last ice age was characterised by glaciers moving south, and when the climate warmed, the glaciers retreated north. But of course, I ain’t no climate scientists, so I could be completely wrong.
Steve Goddard
Monarch Pass- Gunnison area
I know they had lots of snow on the front range.There was lots last year too. But, just like Tim mentioned, the snow pack goes away by the time I get there around the second week in Sept. In the past it was always there. This last year was the first time it never was below freezing at our cabin at apx. 10,000 feet also. I’m sure it is just a temporary weather change and not something that really matters. I’m still going.
Frugal Dougal (07:36:01) :
“Apropos of cold weather in our anthrogenically-warmed world: yesterday it was so cold in church that blankets were handed out.”
I don’t want to start an argument but that serves you right for going to Church.
As we say in Thailand: ‘som nam naa’.
Given the conditions I put forth above, as the wet Jet Stream and cold atmospheric systems collide further South, assuming under El Nino conditions (which is one of the few ways Jet Stream moisture can be found further South), The Sahara will likely be a miserable place. The dust storms would be deadly and the night time air very cold. When La Nina occasionally occurs, this would be a triple threat of cold, dust dry, windy air. I wouldn’t be buying any plot of ground there under these kinds of conditions.
Tom P,
The graph you linked shows an upwards winter trend over the last 20 years, and the autumn graph shows an even stronger upwards trend over the last 30 years.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=1&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=1
I’ll plot the mean and trend line if it helps you visualize it.
Icarus
If Global warming causes more fresh water to be distributed in the form of snowfall is that good or bad? Would it be better if it was colder and less fresh water was distributed?
Kyle
Icarus (04:43:24) :
Seems you prefer to overlook the fact that eruptions, though hard to predict when, have always happened looking backwards. We haven’t had a big one for some time so might you think we could be due one? Will we be ready when it does happen? Not if we make the earth cooler than what it naturally would be! Man would then be the factor that made the cold period even worse!
As long as the slight warming we had prior to 2000 is manageable and in fact may not continue, I’ll vote to leave nature alone presently. Cold is the larger danger!
I think it would be good for everyone to go back and look at the Rutger’s report for the previous40+ year period, going back to 1966. It can be found here:
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/files/snowdata2008.doc
Especially take a look at the trend line of anomolies for snow cover extent at the end of the report. The trend over the past four decades has been down, not up.
Again, the AGW physics is quite clear on this– greater warmth during the normally cooler months in the N. Hemisphere will INITIALLY lead to greater quantities and more intense snow events. This is of course contrary to nonscientific common-sense thinking. The report references above shows that the snow cover extent may be higher than normal in winter, but quickly goes far less then normal in summer months, making the average over the year less than nomal. The anomoly chart shows that average clearly declining over the four decades. Just as is the case with decreasing arctic sea ice extent, the decreasing ANNUAL AVERAGE snow extent, means a more solar radition to be absorbed and higher land temperatures, and that’s just what we’ve seen:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080417_marchstats.html
Snow jobber?
There once was a pitch-man named Gore,
Who quickly became quite a bore.
He repeated his sayings,
Like a donkey’s brayings,
Lying his ass off, even more.
Tom P,
I plotted the Rutgers winter (Dec-Feb) snow data here.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHFzTFVnTlVrYnV0bEpxLWt5aXE2UEE&oid=1&v=1266250893404
The trend is an (impressive) increase in NH snow cover of 205,000 km2 per year since 1990. Autumn shows an even stronger trend since 1980.
Data is from
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/files/moncov.nhland.txt
Tom P,
The 205,000km2 number I just quoted isn’t accurate. That value is the sum total of three months. The actual trend is 1/3 of that value averaged over three months : 68,300 km2/year
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHFzTFVnTlVrYnV0bEpxLWt5aXE2UEE&oid=1&v=1266251373996
Just wait,
The administration is splashing more $$ to the so called scientists to buy their support for the CAGW agenda. Forget the data, the snow line trend is moving North, just wait till this extra $$$ proves it.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/11/obama-spending-increase-global-warming-research/
“Global warming skeptics are agog that President Obama is seeking to dramatically increase federal funding for global warming research in the wake of the Climate-gate scandals that have emerged during the last three months.
The federal budget for 2011 proposes $2.6 billion for the Global Change Research Program, a 21 percent boost over 2010. It will bring funding to a level higher than under any administration dating back to 1989 — when global warming first attracted federal budget funds.”
It’s a good thing that we are awash in surplus funds in the US treasury.
Mia Nony (00:21:06) :
THE TROUBLE is that people have been so focused on proving or disproving warming that as a whole they are largely COMPLETELY UNPREPARED for a very severe prolonged COOLING TREND.
Concerned as they were for the wellbeing and salvation of Humanity, the U.N.’s noble Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its elite Climate Scientists were not studying “climate change” as otherwise implied, they were hyping and selling AGW by what is solely a gigantic Propaganda Operation. Of course then AGW became “climate change”.
As evidenced by “Climate Science” which for practical purposes has never been real Science, Post Normal Science is malign in itself and eventually destroys word meanings, real Science, and any other meaning it touches, save the “meaning” involved with brute force. The idea that the ipcc, enc., enterprise was not directed toward World Domination via near total destruction of anything truely good right from the start is extremely dubious.
jack,
Monarch has five feet right now. Bring your boots if you come back!
Curiousgeorge (04:22:02) : “skill technicians”…with an easy money making attitude.☺
Hi Icarus
Sorry, Icarus, but I don’t even believe global warming is possible at all!
Follow my thinking on these easy steps:
1) the higher the temp. of the oceans, the more water vapor rises to the atmosphere,
2) the more water vapor rises from the oceans, the more difference in air pressure, the more wind starts blowing
3) the more wind & warmth, the more evaporation of water (evaporation increasing by many times due to the wind factor),
4) the more evaporation of water the more humidity in the air (atmosphere)
5) the higher the humidity in the air the more clouds can be formed
6) Svensmark’s theory: the more galactic cosmic rays (GCR), the more clouds are formed (if the humidity is available)
7) the more clouds appear, the more rain and snow and cooler weather,
8) the more clouds and overcast conditions, the more radiation from the sun is deflected from the earth,
9) The more radiation is deflected from earth, the cooler it gets.
10) This cooling puts a brake on the amount water vapor being produced. So now it is back to 1) and wait for heat to start same cycle again…
Now when I first considered this, I stood in amazement again. I remember thinking of the words in Isaiah 40:12-26.
I have been in many factories that have big (water) cooling plants, but I realised that earth itsself is a water cooling plant on a scale that you just cannot imagine. I also thought that my idea of seeing earth as a giant (water) cooling plant with a built-in thermostat must be pretty original….
But it was only soon after that I stumbled on a paper from someone who had already been there, done that …. well, God bless him for that!
i.e. if you want to prove a point, you always do need at least two witnesses!
Look here (if you have the time):
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
But note my step 6. The Svensmark theory holds that galactic cosmic rays (GCR) initiate cloud formation. I have not seen this, but apparently this has been proven in laboratory conditions. So the only real variability in global temperature could be caused by the amount of GCR reaching earth. In turn, this depends on the activity of the sun, i.e. the extent of the solar magnetic field exerted by the sun on the planetary system. We are now coming out of a period where this field was bigger and more GCR was bent away from earth (this is what we, skeptics, say really caused “global warming”, mostly).
But apparently now the solar geomagnetic field is heading for an all time low.
Look here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/07/suns-magnetic-index-reaches-unprecedent-low-only-zero-could-be-lower-in-a-month-when-sunspots-became-more-active/
Note that in the first graph, if you look at the smoothed monthly values, there was a tipping point in 2003 (light blue line). I cannot ignore the significance of this. I noted similar tipping points elsewhere round about that same time, for example from about the same time an increase is noted in earth’s albedo. To me it seems for sure that we are now heading for a period of more cloudiness and hence a period of global cooling. If you look at the 3rd graph, it is likely that there wil be no sun spots visible by 2015. This is confirmed by the paper on global cooling by Easterbrook:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/29/don-easterbrooks-agu-paper-on-potential-global-cooling/
In the 2nd graph of his presentation, Easterbrook projects global cooling into the future. These are the three lines that follow from the last warm period. If the cooling follows the top line we don’t have much to worry about and the weather will be similar to what we had in the previous (warm) period. However, indications are already that we have started following the trend of the 2nd line, i.e. cooling based on the 1880-1915 cooling. In that case it will be the coldest from 2015 to 2020 and the climate will be comparable to what it was in the fifties and sixties. I survived that time, so I guess we all will be fine, if this is the right trendline.
Note that with the third line, the projection stops somewhere after 2020. So if things go that way, we don’t know where it will end. Unfortunately, earth does not have a heater with a thermostat that switches on if it gets too cold. Too much ice and snow causes more sunlight to be reflected from earth. Hence, the trap is set. This is known as the ice age trap. This is why the natural state of earth is that of being covered with snow and ice.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data
However, man is resourceful and may find ways around this problem if we do start falling into a little ice age again. As long as we are not ignorant and listen to the so-called climate scientists who really have other agenda’s. A green agenda is still useless if it has the wrong items on the agenda… Obviously: As Easterbrook notes, global cooling is much more disastrous for humans than global warming.
Note that in Easterbrook’s projection graph, the line showing the increase and decrease in global temperatures of the northern latitude is dashed. It looks like the northern hemisphere is always getting the brunt of the extreme weather.
So if you get tired of all that ice and snow, you may know that you are always most welcome to come and stay with us here, in the southern hemisphere!
Henry from South Africa
R. Gates:
“Especially take a look at the trend line of anomolies…”
Translation: Down is up, black is white, evil is good, and global warming cause global cooling.
You want anomalies? I’ll give you anomalies. 1928 -2008 December anomalies: click
Note the trend line.
Seems to me that increased snow fall in north temperate zones in fact IS a consequence of global warming (HEY I’M A FREAKING SKEPTIC STOP SHOOTING AT ME!) and note I said warming not AGW.
Look at any temperature data set broken down by latitude, and you will see that variance in the temperate and arctic zones is much higher than the quatorial. The south hemisphere tends to lag but due to preponderance of land mass in northern they oscillate together. When equatorial is up a bit, arctic is up a lot, and vice versa. Here’s a plot using nasa/giss (yeah I know, suspect data, just look at the pretty lines for a moment a bear with me) of global vs arctic means:
http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/global-versus-equatorial-versus-arctic1.png
This has what to do with snow? Convection processes are driven by temperature differential. Now the earth spinning in circles etc messes up the nice neat convection circulation we would otherwise get, but it is still there. So, in a warming cycle (like we just had) the increase in temperature differential between poles and equator would speed up convection processes. Cold air moving south would pick up more moisture due to more air moving plus higher temps, convect up at equator, spill back toward poles, and as it cools on the way… drop first more rain, and then farther north/south, more snow.
So warming should in fact, cause more snow. What’s the time delay between the warming and the snow? Dunno. But the increase snowfall would result in an an increased negative feedback as more sunlight is reflected out by the snow. Increased temp rise in the arctic zones would cause increased radiance at arctic zones out of proportion to over all earth warming, hence also a negative feedback. As the momentum of these things exceeds the momentum is the factors inducing the warming trend, we enter a cooling trend. As the differential between temp at equator and poles drops, convection starts to slow down.
So yes, warming should cause increased snowfall. Which should cause cooling. whats the time lag? again I dunno, but probably years if not decades and certainly complicated by all other sorts of factors.
Steve Goddard (08:06:04) :
“The graph you linked shows an upwards winter trend over the last 20 years, and the autumn graph shows an even stronger upwards trend over the last 30 years.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=1&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=1 ”
A little sleight of hand, Steven! You’re not showing a plot of winter or spring extents, you’re just picking a single month, January. The other winter months show quite different trends. To get anything statistically significant you need to aggregate the data.
There’s no statistically significant trend in either the winter or fall data, but spring and summer both show snow cover significantly decreasing over the past decades.
Slightly OT, but gore has been found:
http://i45.tinypic.com/t64it5.jpg
For those who think global warming is causing more snow: click
Have been looking into the blizzards of 1888. There were at least TWO – one on Jan 12, centered around the mid-west (also called the schoolchildren’s blizzard, and 500 people died), and a second paralyzed the East Coast in March 9 (also called Great White Hurricane, and 400 people died – 200 in NYC alone) .
So let the climate scientists explain how those were caused by increased CO2.
Steve Goddard (07:31:31) :
Increased precipitation + increased warmth = more rain at low latitudes. Not heavy snow in the deep south.
Global warming so far is around 0.7°C in the last half century. This is far smaller than the seasonal temperature range and far smaller than the temperature range of normal weather variations.
Let’s suppose that you occasionally get a spell of weather down to -10°C in New York – I have no idea whether this is realistic but it’s just to illustrate the point, so bear with me. You might expect, with the influence of anthropogenic global warming, to see -9.3°C instead. This is still cold! If it snows at -10°C, it will still snow at -9.3°C. It will not rain instead. In a warmer world you will tend to see *heavier* snowfall when it does snow, as we all know by now.
Global warming isn’t going to stop the weather from happening, so you will still get unusual cold spells as well as record-breaking warm spells – it’s just that the cold spells will become less frequent, and the warm spells more so. I’m sure you’ve seen the evidence that record high temperatures now outnumber record low temperatures 2 to 1 in the US.
So, 0.7°C of global warming does not preclude the occurrence of heavy snow in the deep south. We still have weather, and the weather still has large natural variability.
Does that makes sense?
Vincent (and many others). Forget the “ice-age” references in this article, they are nonsense. Ice ages are caused by changes in the shape or our orbit around the sun – primarily caused by the pull of other planets in the solar system – called the Milankovitch cycles after the man who discovered them.
They make it quite possible to predict an ice age, and we are not yet at the position in the cycles to indicate an ice age just yet. Just type Milankovitch into a Wikipedia search to get a fairly mind-boggling explanation.
It is quite true that ice ages are marked by a move south of the snow line, but the important snow line is the SUMMER snow line.
The point was that snow and ice from the winter did not melt in the summer because it was too cold. First of all there was permafrost and then permanently lying snow that lasted the year round. If most of the snow from the winter melts in the summer, it has to start from scratch each year and the ice age never gets a chance to progress.
Right now we are seeing dramatically reduced summer snow, particularly an early spring melt in March and April. 35 years ago there was on average 4 million square kilometres of lying snow in the Northern Hemisphere by August each year. Now there is less than 2 million square kilometres.
The combination of a rising winter snow cover with a falling summer snow cover is an odd (probably) natural phenomenon and needs further research – but it is NOT an indication of an ice age.
Now I get it !!! Since record cold is caused by increasing warmth, that is why as hades gets hotter, hell will freeze over! Brilliant 😉
Smokey, that graph you posted above to R.Gates, could you give us chapter and verse please on where it comes from?
thanks
V
Steve Goddard (08:30:50) :
“The 205,000km2 number I just quoted isn’t accurate.”
You’ve messed up more than that. Your plot doesn’t overlay the Rutgers’ data:
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/2466/goddardvsrutgers.png
Please try again.
Slightly OT, if we are entering a Dalton Minimum, what, if anything, happened to sea level heights during the last one?
On the Phil Jones discussion, some people are suggesting that cold spells did not occur during the MWP. So you see, this warming is unprecedented!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/14/phil-jones-momentous-qa-with-bbc-reopens-the-science-is-settled-issues/
Will the real sophists please stand up?
Thank you
Tom P, you make some interesting counter points. I think interest should focus on the North American continent as that appears to be most affected by a negative AO. What are your thoughts on what would happen under a strongly negative AO oscillation, cold Atlantic oscillation, cold PDO oscillation, and El Nino-like jet streams? I ask this because it seems intuitive to say that the Jet Stream has to be wet enough to produce precip. It has to collide with cold air masses to dump that as snow, and it has to be in a Southern track to dump that load so far south. And it has to maintain this pattern, off and on, for decades.
davidmhoffer (08:40:33) :
I agree. Your explanation is a bit different and I can see that. We are both saying increased water vapor will cool and I agree there too. You say snow fall and I said increase in the evaporation/ condensation cycle due to a warmer oceans. NASA did state the temperature of the top 700 meters of all oceans have increased since 1955 by 0.18 degF. How long it takes to shed that excess energy if irradiance stays low and the earth is warmer than that irradiation level will support, I don’t know.
Earth’s incoming heat energy has far more influence on the climate warming / cooling than any CO2 or other greenhouse gases’ effects. Albedo is the important factor that influences incoming heat energy. Anything that reflects sunlight is important, such as ice, snow, high altitude dust or other reflective particles, and of course white clouds. Except for Chu’s white rooftops. Those are laughable due to the very small area involved and the high cost to make them white.
Tom P,
Again, the Rutgers data for December-February (meteorological winter) showing a strong upwards trend in snow extent over the last 20 years.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHFzTFVnTlVrYnV0bEpxLWt5aXE2UEE&oid=1&v=1266251373996
I’m not sure what it is going to take to keep you from thinking that you are being fooled.
My apologies to the list for an OT entry. Unfortunately, when I try to enter the Tips thread it crashes my browser.
On Accuweather; Joe Bastardi has a video topic explaining his thoughts on the PDO, AMO, forecasting temperatures, and AGW. “The “American Pie” February: Food For Thought”
http://www.accuweather.com/video-on-demand.asp?channel=VBLOG_BASTARDI&title=Joe Bastardi
A I said before:
Time magazine / CNN is still with AGW
because this is where the big money is still flowing
THE SNOW IS BECAUSE OF AGW!!!
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962294,00.html?artId=1962294?contType=article?chn=sciHealth
Onset of a new Dalton Minimum goes mainstream:
By David Archibald
http://www.icecap.us
Anthony:
Given that The Guardian has just posted a piece which, surprise, surprise, trumpets Menne’s paper and trashes your work, perhaps it’s worth doing a posting on the subject to catch the eye of any Guradian readers coming here as a result – possibly for the first time.
“Scientists dispute climate sceptic’s claim that US weather data is useless”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/15/climate-sceptic-us-weather-data
Tom P,
I don’t know what dates the Rutgers plot uses for winter. I plotted their raw data for (December+January+February)/3
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/files/moncov.nhland.txt
You can see the spreadsheet here.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tqsLUgNUkbutlJq-kyiq6PA&single=true&gid=0&output=html
Plot it yourself if you think you are being fooled. Both graphs show warming.
wayne
NASA did state the temperature of the top 700 meters of all oceans have increased since 1955 by 0.18 degF. How long it takes to shed that excess energy if irradiance stays low and the earth is warmer than that irradiation level will support, I don’t know.>
I should have said one more thing. As convection increases, cold air from arctic moves more rapidly south to fill in the hot air at the equator convecting upward. Since the cold air is closer to the ground than the hot air coming back, this would tend to decrease land temps in temperate zones and drive the latitude at which snow can occur southward, even though the net temp across the globe has gone up.
As for the oceans, since long wave only penetrates a few mm of water, which would pretty much evaporate right into the atmosphere, it seems to me that long wave feedbacks cant heat the ocean up very much, they mostly affect atmosphere and land mass. Solar variation on the other hand penetrates hundreds of meters, so that energy is stored there, and radiance by the oceans would tend to mitigate oscillations in atmosphere and landmass, but oscillations in energy being stored from the sun to being released by the ocean would have to be decades at a minimum, and possibly centuries.
TedK (09:26:41) :
Not OT. Joe Bastardi is parellel to what has been said above minus the sun’s influence. Or wait… what I said plus the sun’s influence is parallel with Joe… whatever.
Warming: The snow line moves North.
Cooling: The snow line moves South.
Easy to understand, unless you are Time magazine or The New York Times and you have cast your lot with globalized economic control by the United Nations and as Lord Monckton pointed out, the failed Copenhagen treaty which called for a “world governmental framework” to enforce carbon reduction.
Case closed.
Stephen Wilde (06:21:20) :
Basil (04:07:51)
Unfortunately no one seems to have been mapping jet stream positions globally over time beyond seasonal variability but there is lots of anecdotal evidence and also evidence that the ITCZ also moves latitudinally in line with global tropospheric temperatures.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1755-1315/6/7/072010/ees9_6_072010.pdf?request-id=8e5e203e-0a2b-4cea-a76c-edf1713da5ad
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/Sachs_etal_2009.pdf
Stephen,
It is too bad that there isn’t better data to test this hypothesis with. Long term (decadal) shifts of the jet stream, combined with shifts in wind directions, i.e. zonal vs. meridional, could go a long way toward explaining multidecadal variations in global temperature trends. When the jet stream drifts poleward, I think winds tend to be more zonal, and this moderates climate, especially in the northern latitudes, with climate being dominated by maritime air flows. When the jet stream drifts southward, the polar jet, in particular, becomes more meridional (loopy, Rossby waves) with climate being dominated by continental air masses that bring polar air to lower latitudes (think of snow in Florida!).
I think it is not just the movement of the jet stream, but the tendency of one regime (northern jet streams) to be more zonal in wind flow, and the other (southern jet streams) to be more meridional.
I suspect that there are atmospheric “regimes” here that tie in closely with the PDO and that they contribute significantly to recent trends in global temperatures.
But the data to test the hypothesis doesn’t seem readily accessible.
Basil
“the logical corollary is that ice ages are caused by further warming temperatures. Clearly that is not true.”
Hang on just a minute! Everyone knows that the warm temperatures during an interglacial cause the glaciation that follows, just as summer causes the winter which follows. Cause always precedes effect (except with Co2 warming) 😉
what we really need to do is plan for BOTH eventualities. First we need to build places for people to live where we can control the temperature inside regardless of it getting hotter or colder outside. What? We already did that? OK, next we need to secure food supply. we need to create a monetary system that forces farmers to choose crops that produce maximum yield for their particular local, and consider changing the crop types as climate changes. What? We already did that too? Well next we need to correct world imbalances in food supply. what we need to do is set up some sort of system where areas that can’t grow enough food can trade labour or resources for food from countries that have more than they need. What? we already did that?
How am I supposed to win a Nobel prize if other people keep implementing my ideas before I come up with them? This just isn’t fair.
OT completely, but a sojourn over to RC to see what’s cooking and I immediately notice a phenomena that is becoming more apparent.
1. They accuse the MSM being virtually non-existent, biased and favoring the “other side”.
2. They accuse the “other side” of having an alternative political agenda.
3. The other side is well organized and funded.
4. The other side is guided by sinister forces.
I am aware that this can be a useful tactic, but is it so universally understood to be used by the “average” poster – no offence implied. Or is there the same degree of belief, distrust and paranoia suffered by all opposing forces.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8515375.stm
“Thousands of deer are thought to be at risk of starvation in Scotland following this year’s harsh winter.
Hillwalkers across the country are being warned they will almost certainly come across dead or dying animals.
In Sutherland, there are fears that an entire generation of deer will be lost due to the winter weather.”
Hey Charles … we sense your absence.
Another carnival …. also …. that is carnival…..
The Snow Line is Moving South….(weel)
I have seen snow in the last two years in southern Brazil …. please snow further north.
Many brahmas.
Reply: Been very very busy, not just Climategate. I need to get a new visa as well. Ten years went by sooooo quickly. ~ ctm
The good news of a new ice age is that we’ll be able to walk across the Straight of Georgia from Vancouver to Victoria on ice rather than taking a BC Ferry. Heck we’ll be able to drive the distance! It’ll also lower house prices in Vancouver to an all time affordable level.
pwl
http://www.PathsToKnowledge.net
davidmhoffer (09:44:13) :
Exactly my thoughts, long term.
Look at TedK’s link to accuweather above. The graph Joe keeps showing is the graph I have had in my head for quite a while, I just had never come across it or I would have linked to it earlier. That makes it vividly visual, 20-30 year rolls!
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…
“There is more dangerous weather to come this month for Britain, Ireland, Europe, the USA and other parts
of the world” warned Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction long range forecasters 9th Feb. “Our long range
forecast says the next big hits will be around Feb 11-13th and really dangerous events 15th-17th.
Wish you this time to break records again!!
“Ice ages occur when the snow line moves very far south. If “most climate scientists” are claiming that global warming is causing the snow line to move south, then the logical corollary is that ice ages are caused by further warming temperatures. Clearly that is not true.”
Actually, I recall reading precisely such a theory while I was in high school during the 1950s. It appeared in that prestigious (albeit non-peer reviewed) journal The Readers’ Digest. Since my office is about as cluttered as Phil Jones’, and I’ve misplaced my bound volumes, I’ll have to relate it from memory. It went something like this:
As global temperatures rise, the Arctic ice cap will break up sometime in the late 20th or early 21st Centuries, allowing warm Gulf Stream water to flow into the Arctic Ocean. This in turn will cause much heavier snowfall to occur during the Northern Hemisphere winters and, eventually, glaciation and a new ice age. The author was sufficiently enthusiastic about his theory that he even predicted that we would watch the breakup of the arctic ice cap on TV.
I guess the only part he missed was that we would watch the break up of the Global Climate Consensus on TV, which is actually more entertaining.
If anyone claims this cold and snowey winter is evidence on global warming, show them the headlines from 2000 when the same scientists proclaimed snow storms are a thing of the past!
I know we are only mere non-climate scientists and could not possibly understand the complexity of the “simple physics” behind AGW, but you can not keep changing your story and think the public are so niave that they will not notice!
Off topic but:
“When half of the continental United States is encased in ice, saying “How’s the global warming working out for you?” in an arch and sarcastic way will get you thrown out into the cold. Because while technically you may be right, now is not the time.”
via: http://blogs.amctv.com/scifi-scanner/2010/02/winter-in-scifi-movies.php
OTH, I do have a tendency to gloat.
I’m planning a science-fiction/Fantasy novel based on this stuff. My only fear is that I’m going to hit too close to the truth. That this planet is moving into a new glaciation period. (I’m planning on making it worse than the last Glaciation to give a better imputus to do what my novel is having the people on earth do. But I can’t help but think what if I’m hitting on the truth and we aren’t prepared to tackle the real issues that a major glaciation period would bring. How many people, animals, fish etc etc would die.)
Anthony if you have the capability to email me, please do so, since I’d like to run a few concepts by a more knowledgeable person than myself, so I know I’m on the right track for what could bring on a new glaciation period.
Icarus (09:03:44) :
Global warming isn’t going to stop the weather from happening, so you will still get unusual cold spells as well as record-breaking warm spells – it’s just that the cold spells will become less frequent, and the warm spells more so. I’m sure you’ve seen the evidence that record high temperatures now outnumber record low temperatures 2 to 1 in the US.
Used to be that record highs outnumbered record lows.
The Globe is not warming any more. It’s cooling, and rather abruptly. It is cooling abruptly where it matters the most…. on the land where we live.
And that big Tambora-like eruption that hasn’t happened yet…those type of pops like to happen much more frequently when the Sun is doing it’s lower activity mode…like right about now.
Warmer is cooler, wetter is drier, famine is plenty, lead is gold, darkness is light, ignornance is genius, the Emperor’s clothes are so beautiful that only the purest of heart can see them.
Such ideas as those make sense in a dream world, but upon waking, one laughs off the nightmare.
I am just an interested amateur in the global warming debate. I don’t believe the planet is warming, but what about this article, which Al Gore (I’m no fan!) cites on his blog about satellite pictures and Arctic ice:
Melting Arctic Ice: What Satellite Images Don’t See
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1956932,00.html
My thanks to anyone who can refute the information in this article!
Tom P,
There was an error in the spreadsheet. I was pairing year end December 1990 with year start January 1990. It is fixed now – didn’t change things much but might match the Rutgers winter graph better now. Trend is slightly lower +52,000 km2/year.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHFzTFVnTlVrYnV0bEpxLWt5aXE2UEE&oid=1&v=1266258598225
I always wondered why Florida with its humidity and heat has had so much more snow than Pennsylvania. Has common sense taken a complete holiday?
Chu’s white rooftops would basically just keep a single building a bit cooler. However in The Great White North having black rooftops is better because we need all the stored solar energy in the fall, winter and spring to save energy. Funny that.
I wonder if all the roof tops of a city were painted white would the Urban Heat Island effect be affected? Would it go down?
Conversely, if all the rooftops of a city were painted black would the Urban Heat Island effect be affected? Would it go up?
Now consider those two questions depending on how far south or north the city is… how does the latitude of each proposition impact the UHI effect? how much energy can be reflected or absorbed to impact each building’s energy costs (air conditioning or heating)?
Doesn’t it make more sense that in the months that it’s cooler the rooftops should be absorbing heat (by being black) to improve the energy efficiency of the building and during the warmer months to be reflecting heat (by being white) to save energy (and reduce cooling costs)?
During some months in the fall and spring it might even change day to day, so one day it’s a bit cooler out but the sun is shining and the rooftop would change to black to absorb the heat, while on another day it’s warmer and the rooftop would change to white to reflect away unwanted heat.
Of course there are now high tech roofing tiles that change from black to white and back again, so maybe this would be viable in the energy profiles of some structures. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/madmec-roof.html
Then of course would it be more efficient to simply absorb the sunlight as energy with solar roofing tiles and use the energy to heat or cool or power lights or whatever as needed. They even make them look nice on homes now: http://www.premierpower.com/solar_energy_residential/roof_solar_tile.php.
The bottom line is that energy solutions need to be considered for each structure, no one solution such as white rooftops fits all needs or situations or geographic locations. Heck in some cases other roof colors might be better, or other roofing materials being their natural color… or maybe a rooftop garden is better… it all depends.
Further study is needed.
pwl
http://www.PathsToKnowledge.net
“Slightly OT, if we are entering a Dalton Minimum, what, if anything, happened to sea level heights during the last one?”
I think the most accurate answer would be that no one was making measurements anywhere in the world that were accurate enough to be able to tell, and the proxy measurements for time scales that short seems to always come down to some guy just making stuff up.
>>>Your post should have been titled: “The Snow Line is Moving North.”
Or better still: “”The Snow Line is Moving Towards the Middle””
.
Icarus
Can you tell me what would falsify AGW?
“Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.”
Most of the articles that I’ve seen claiming that AGW causes extreme cooling winter weather events fail to state just HOW such a mechanism would work. So they are propaganda fluff pieces selling the populace on the idea that AGW causes harsh winters. Its’ quite annoying.
The question for any journalist who puts their name on such an article is of course, how does that work and what is the hard evidence for it.
Icarus, remember Phil Jones in his recent BBC interview:
Q) “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming [?]”
“Yes, but only just.”
So Icarus, do you agree with Phil Jones about there has been no statistically-significant global warming since 1995?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Just in case you are a newcomer to global climate change scares:
http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=globalclimatefacts.wordpress.com
as found on this page:
http://globalclimatefacts.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/%E2%80%98in-search-of-%E2%80%A6-the-coming-ice-age%E2%80%99-a-video-from-1978/
And oh, how Leanord Nimoy delivered.
Basil (09:59:26)
Exactly right about the zonal / meridional issue.
As the equatorial air masses shrink during a cooling spell the air circulation systems in the mid latitudes have more room to wander about meridionally because there is less pressure from the equator squeezing them into the narrower more zonal east west track.
Ultimately one even gets the polar high pressure cells migrating down over the mid latitudes leaving room for lower pressure to develop at the poles.
Pretty much what has happened this winter in fact.
So the main controlling feature of the climate syatem in synoptic terms is the balance between equatorial oceanic air masses pressing poleward (or not) and the polar atmospheric air masses pressing equatorward (or not).
The rate of energy release from the oceans dictating the former and the rate of energy loss to space dictating the latter.
The observed climate is just the equilibrium response to such variations in energy transfer rates with the positions of the air circulation systems and the speed of the hydrological cycle always adjusting to bring energy variations above and below the troposphere back towards equilibrium (Wilde’s Law ?)
Tom P,
Corrected version (w/ Decembers lined up to the correct year, overlaid on the Rutgers graph is here:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddw82wws_396g45kcjgn
Trend line for the last 20 years is 63000 km2/year.
Expanding snow cover and cold snaps? Exactly as predicted by Global Warming, thats what most unquoted/unreferenced climate scientists say.
“It snowed in Rome over the weekend, the first time in a generation?
Sorry that’s weather not climate?”
Also precisely predicted by global warming.
“Things cused by Global Warming
1)Snow (ie East cost snow)
2)Lack of snow (ie Vancouver)
3)Floods
4)Droughts
5)Warmth (NW area of NA)
6)Cold (Texas, Alabama and Florida)
7)Earth-Quakes
8) Well as Joe Romm would say everything
So there it is the Earth is heating up and is caused by man, what more proof do you need?
John”
Replace that factor(GW) with God and you have religion. Drought? God did it. Heat waves? God did it. Blizzards in Dallas, God did it. What a nice simple world we live in. Good luck reasoning with the GW bible belt.
By the way Anthony, it appears Denmark and Sweden might be crossable by ice.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi?lang=e&mode=img&date=set&y=2010&m=02&d=14
“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,” [Kevin Trenberth] said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40 per cent and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined.”
So this record snowfall is good. Now they must be happy that there is some snow cover back in the northern hemisphere.
No, wait that’s bad, because there was more water vapor in the air from global warming which caused the snow cover.
No, wait that’s good, because all the greenhouse gas (water vapor) is now out of the atmosphere and on the ground.
No, wait that’s bad, because it was an anomaly, and broke records, and was extreme.
No, wait that’s good because at least there are not unseasonable highs like in Vancouver for the games.
Love to see this to its conclusion, but I gotta go…clean my garage or something. 🙂
Possible quote of the week:
[Jones} said: “I don’t think we should be taking much notice of what’s on blogs because they seem to be hijacking the peer-review process.”
From the lead story in The Guardian:
“Hacked climate emails: Phil Jones admits loss of weather data was ‘not acceptable’
Head of the Climate Research Unit at the University East Anglia says he would consider correcting his paper on the degree of warming in China”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/15/phil-jones-lost-weather-data
Steve Goddard
Steve you have been coming here for long enough to know that you should ignore TOM [snip (P)]
It just goes round and round. Just ignore him.
It doesn’t matter if the China weather stations were moved. “The science still holds up.”
Jones in http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100215/full/news.2010.71.html
Everything is consistent with AGW. Now, we’d like you to go ahead and give us 5% of your money and income (EVERYONE, that is) so we can get on with the business of saving the world!
stephan,
Tom P made a valid point. The first version of the spreadsheet had an error and he caught it. I appreciate him pointing it out.
Here’s an anecdotal anecdote: My wife and I don’t have children. We have two house dogs which are perfectly behaved and excellently breed (mutts). Our larger animal (100lbs.) is Sadie. She is part Doberman and very loyal. She lays by the door and pines (whines) when I’m away. When my wife and I are both away, Sadie tends to snick some oddment of clothing in which to lay with until we return. Sometimes she finds her way into the dirty clothes hamper, sometimes she takes her prize out through the doggie door onto the back deck. You can sense where this is headed? No? Think cold…
I live in Arkansas. We get snow, yes, but usually in mild doses that come and go rather quickly. We do a fair amount of grilling and smoking during the winter months. Folk up North have been relocating here for ages, seeking the mild winters. That being said here’s where Sadie, Winter and Watts Up With That combine for some bottom lines:
We got a heavy snow that covered our unroofed deck. The snow lasted for days. Some thawing took place, yet not nearly enough to expose the deck boards. More snow fell, another winter storm. The deck was covered deeper than before. Now it’s been weeks since the deck has been clear. This time, now well into February, the snow finally melted down… exposing a pair of boxer briefs that had to have been drug out onto the deck weeks before. I don’t know about other folks, but I really don’t relish the fact that I had dirty underwear out on my deck for so many weeks, but let this anecdote give a little hint how the snow is falling oftener and lasting longer this year.
pwl (10:43:43) :
The question for any journalist who puts their name on such an article is of course, how does that work and what is the hard evidence for it,/i>
The real question it he/she is paid for that. Ethics or courage are long gone virtues.
For those who agree that the IPCC and Al Gore have gone too far, signing the online petition “Al Gore and The UN IPCC Should Give Back Their Nobel Prize!” seems like a reasonable option. The link is http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nomorenobel/
Ecotretas
Gary
Thanks for that story, it brings “global warming” really home, does it not?
Do enjoy your global warming while it lasts
because I have a funny feeling that things are still going to get a lot colder still
How about moving more south?
(I also have two naughty dogs, one of them always has to chew on anything that I touched)
Veronica (England),
The graph was taken from one of the numerous skeptic sites, but I didn’t note which one. Sorry, I should have. But I think it was from NOAA data, like this very similar one for October anomalies going back to 1900: click
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/15/phil-jones-lost-weather-data
roger (07:29:57) :
Has anyone else noticed that the recent rise in Solar Flux and attendant sunspots coincides with a sudden burst of activity from Icarus, who seems to have awoken from deep sleep to a state of narcassistic reflectiveness, as witnessed by his tortuous emanations above. Climate Change – another idea that just won’t fly!
—————
It’s not that he didn’t fly; he just didn’t know where he was going. CC is the same ball of wax.
From a story about how the New York Times has ignored the climategate story:
“Meanwhile, out in the real world, the multifaceted credibility collapse that is Climategate majestically and inexorably unfolds.”
I wish I wrote that line! Nice prose! “majestically and inexorably” indeed!
Gail (10:28:37) :
I am just an interested amateur in the global warming debate. I don’t believe the planet is warming, but what about this article, which Al Gore (I’m no fan!) cites on his blog about satellite pictures and Arctic ice:
Melting Arctic Ice: What Satellite Images Don’t See
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1956932,00.html
My thanks to anyone who can refute the information in this article!.
———
Gail, you’ll have seen occasional allusion to ‘rotten ice’ or ‘rotten something’ in the comments here and you have happened upon the inspiration behind them.
Here’s where this was discussed at WUWT:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=barber
If we take the Schove estimates of the maximum magnitudes (R(M)) from the period 1500-1750 and the measurements from 1750, we get (the rounding for exact centuries done only to make the general picture clear):
1410-1500 ? cold (Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 107 warm
1610-1700 61 cold (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 114 warm
1810-1900 95 cold (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 151 warm
2010-2100 ? cold?
http://personal.inet.fi/tiede/tilmari/sunspot5.html#historic
graham UK 10:08:52
I love words that are different from what I normally use to describe something and your term “hillwalkers” just amused me a bunch-I’m going to use it now instead of hiking.
Coincidental with the Snow Line moving south are the Active Regions on the N. Hemisphere of the Sun going south a bit early.
“Watch OUT! Soon the glaciers will start growing again and it’ll be panic stations, they’ll be engulfing towns.
I would have thought glaciers receding is good, more land!”
Reasonable thought to have. But in many parts of the world, glaciers serve as natural reservoirs, capturing excess precipitation and releasing it gradually as melt. Without glaciers, over a billion people around the world would be subject to more intense flooding and droughts (I can hear the “skeptics” now: “Droughts AND floods! Maybe glacier retreat causes acne, too!”)
Gail (10:28:37) :
Enter “Rotten Ice” in WUWT’s searchbox. You find this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/14/a-look-at-sea-ice-compared-to-this-date-in-2007/
Steve Goddard (11:29:34) :
stephan,
Tom P made a valid point. The first version of the spreadsheet had an error and he caught it. I appreciate him pointing it out.
You don’t fool us, Steve Goddard! What with your seeming willingness to accept that you made a mistake and needed to correct it, implied openness to dialogue with your critics, and measured statements! Quit subverting our attempts to demonize you!
Interesting perusing RC these days.
Jones said, “For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.”
So Ruth asks on RC (paraphrased): If that’s the case, with not enough Southern Hemisphere records, how can one have confidence in the 1,000 yr climate reconstruction.
The argument over seasonal snow extent trents is silly in the extreme. The Rutgers data is from the late 1960’s to late 2000’s. It shows warming half of the PDO cycle.
If the same trends could be shown for a full PDO cycle, either side of the argument might have some validity. As it is all you are doing is fitting linear trends to a partial sine curve – not very convincing.
Robert,
Perhaps you’re confusing winter snow-pack with glaciers.
Glaciers comprise hundreds of years of snowfall that didn’t melt.
If your point is that ice from another century is the happy inheritance of today’s farmers, because it is melting faster than it’s being replaced, okay; but you make it sound like they can have their ice and drink it, too.
Icarus : “quantity of precipitation is related to atmospheric moisture content, not temperature. ”
That is not exactly true. Warmer air can hold a greater amount of moisture without needing to release it in the form of precipitation. Cooler air needs less moisture in order to trigger precipitation. So to say that temperature is not related to quantity of precipitation is inaccurate at best.
Any given parcel of air can have a large amount of water contained within it, yet until that air reaches the temperature at which relative humidity is 100%, it cannot rain. Obviously there is a huge interplay between moisture content and temperature in the creation of conditions for precipitation.
This does not mean however that increased temperature necessarily means less rain because increased temperature also causes increased evaporation, as has been mentioned in other comments. So in some cases it would lead to more rain and in some it would lead to less. Some probably reach homeostasis.
That’s part of my confusion about the predictions of less water and less rain everywhere because of global warming. In some places in the world it is hot and dry, in others hot and wet, yet the media often portrays warming as something that only causes lack of precipitation. Where I live afternoon heating often leads to refreshing and welcome evening showers.
The South is Moving Snow.
If the glaciers didn’t run off they would be around longer.
Doug in Seattle,
The point of the article is to demonstrate that recent shifts in snow patterns are not due to global warming. There is no intent here to forecast future behaviour.
James Chamberlain (11:28:49) :
Everything is consistent with AGW. Now, we’d like you to go ahead and give us 5% of your money and income (EVERYONE, that is) so we can get on with the business of saving the world!
That is consistent with AGW
If GW causes more snow and/or snow cover that’s clearly a negative feedback which will lead to eventual cooling. If it’s not GW then it’s just business as usual variability.
For skeptics it’s a win-win situation.
Scarlet Pumpernickel (00:38:45) :
Watch OUT! Soon the glaciers will start growing again and it’ll be panic stations, they’ll be engulfing towns.
I believe that some Alaskan, Canadian and the Greenland Ice sheet have been adding mass for the past two years. I suspect that the same is true for some Sierra and Cascade glaciers also. Glaciers have been known to be stealthy by adding mass while at the same time appear to be receding.
It is safe to assume that precipitation equals evaporation. If the oceans warm and there is more evaporation, then the change in precipitation has to match. The law of conservation of matter requires this.
Re snow extent increasing and an ice age approaching, Eureka (California) has only 67 more years of ice-free climate:
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/eureka-ca-headed-for-ice-age-in-67.html
Steve Goddard,
re precipitation matching evaporation, that is only true at steady-state. If the air is indeed warming ( a non-steady-state condition), then evaporation can increase without changing precipitation. This is the changing inventory component. The opposite is true for a cooling atmosphere.
Roger,
The amount of moisture stored in the atmosphere is very small and long term changes in atmospheric temperature are also very small. Within reasonable measurement error, precipitation equals evaporation.
Richard M,
Alarmists seem to be claiming now that the snow line moves south from warming, and it also moves south from cooling. The implication being that any change in the climate causes the snow line to move south. If they are correct, then the earth is always moving into an ice age.
joe (10:55:27)
Here’s a pdf map from SMHI showing Baltic Sea ice conditions.
http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/sstcolor.pdf
Steve Goddard (15:53:51) :
If they are correct, then the earth is always moving into an ice age.
And such proclamations about warming causing cooling is due to wandering about in a Desert devoid of calm reasoning for many decades.
Steve Goddard (10:51:33):
“There was an error in the spreadsheet.”
Glad to see you’ve untangled your maths. So the winter trend for your chosen period of the last twenty years is +52,000 km2/year, and is not statistically significant.
But the overall trend for the annual measurements is a much more substantial snow loss, -89,000 km2/year since 1966.
Your headline that the snow line is moving south has no basis in observation.
Tom P (16:49:43) :
The real world of people caught up in severe snow storms is not a trend line, southerly or otherwise.
It does not matter one bit to them how you might minimalize the condition: the condition exists, and precious few there were to prepare them for what should have been emphasized months ago.
We saw what was happening in the S. Hemisphere last summer, and we posted what we perceived was coming. Everyone who frequents this place is well-aware of what that portent was. Behind the veil of Xth warmest month on record portrayals was a hopscotch of increasing cold and snowy winters.
The forecast that was put out was not for what was coming, but what was politically correct, and that hurts more than anything else.
If Phil Jones can man up to the uncertainty and the inability of statistics and trend lines to accurately portray the real world, so can you.
This isn’t a game about who can snow whom over what numbers, it’s about real people on the real ground in the real world who need help.
They have been so far grossly mis-served.
What do you have for those people?
It is true that warm oceans can produce increased snowfall *in the higher latitudes* of continents, warming would not move the snow line *south*.
Warm oceans would indeed evaporate more, and warm atmosphere can certainly hold more water. Who doubts that?
But that would give you more snow in the Rockies and in Labrador, not in Georgia and South Carolina.
I have much appreciated the gentlemanly debate style in this thread. I have learned from both points of view.
Simply, the snow happens where warm meets cold.
If the warm-meets-cold line moves north, the snow happens further north.
If the warm-meets-cold line moves south, the snow happens in the south.
Why does the warm-meet-cold line move? The simplest answer is because the planet as a whole is warming or cooling.
Oh sure there are some complex bits involved. Wind and water currents mix it up a bit. But apparently the snow line has moved south for the entire northern hemisphere.
Warming cannot make the snow-line move south. Warming only makes the snow-line move north.
Tom P,
I admire your persistence. The trend since 1979 is very significant, and 2010 (so far) is a particularly interesting year.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHFzTFVnTlVrYnV0bEpxLWt5aXE2UEE&oid=1&v=1266293307202
Warming cannot make the snow-line move south. Warming only makes the snow-line move north>
If you hit a big bump in the road with your car, does it go only up? Or does it come back down, compress the suspension to the point where it was lower than before, then it rises again. Each oscillation is smaller than the previous until the car rides level once more. If you measured at just the right time and for only a brief period, you could show that the bump made the car lower to the ground. Warming causes oscilations such as increased convection at the equator that pulls increased cold air from the arctic zones to repace it. So yes, warming can TEMPORARILY push the snow line toward the equator just like hitting a bump with your car can TEMPORARILY make it lower to the ground.
Steven Goddard: Is TLM correct, that the summer snow line has been receding, while the winter snow line has been increasing? And if so, what does this tell us about the direction of ‘climate change’, assuming that it makes sense at all to speak of an Earthly or even hemispheric ‘climate’?
/Mr Lynn
Interesting how, whether 3.11, 95, XP or Windows 7, computer programs only eject reasonably accurate information if fed intelligent, unbiased data points by, hopefully, intelligent pteople. This being an unpredictable state of affairs, I have always erred on the side of empirical evidence – the hard stuff of personal observation and written record of same.
Oceans rising? Always have, always will. Note that as recently as 500 years ago, they were much lower, even lower 2,000 years ago. Observation? Santonge, a town near the west coast of France, a thriving commercial seaport in the 1500’s is now 2 miles inland. Local records show the seacoast was miles even further inland in Roman times (when they built villas along the coast). Stone foundations of the first Roman port in England (in Kent) is 1/2 mile inland now. Tarsus in Turkey much the same scenario.
The sad truth is hundreds of millions of people have built onto what are now low-lying coastal plains, but was sea-floor only 25 generations ago. To now commit massive amounts of the world’s wealth and energy to stem any rise so as to ‘protect’ these areas is futile in the extreme. Can’t, shouldn’t be done. Gradually, over one or two centuries, relocation farther inland is the only sensible alternative – IF you believe in global warming, AGW or other.
Idiocy, greed and a grasp for all-consuming power will be the end of mankind as we know it.
So yes, warming can TEMPORARILY push the snow line toward the equator just like hitting a bump with your car can TEMPORARILY make it lower to the ground.
Yes physical systems can oscillate when an external force is applied. However, just because it is possible doesn’t mean that it is happening. Unless, of course, you have a testable physical explanation for warming causing winter snow to move south.
MrLynn,
The point of this article is to demonstrate that the increase in winter snow extent is not due to warming temperatures. Snow falls mainly in the winter, not much in the summer.
Whatever is happening in the summer is a different topic of discussion.
I also wanted to ask something from both the Stevens or anyone who knows…
I used to work a lot with de-salination and I know it happens a lot now on large scale everywhere around the world. I am sure the salt that we take out of the water ends up somewhere in the sea. Likewise many human industrial activities include processes with acids and alkalis. This will also accumulate as salts in the oceans. Same story goes for the carbonates.
I am thinking now that this accumulation of salt could be a cause for global warming (if global warming were to continue – which I am doubting now – taken into account the past behavior of the sun). But supposing global warming continues my questions would be:
a) do we test the salinity of the oceans and has it been increasing?
b) do you think it is possible that the extra salt we are putting in the oceans can act as additional receptors of heat thus giving the oceans extra storage capacity to store heat?
What do you think?
davidmhoffer,
So you are proposing the existence of a giant low pressure cell which sits over the equator and pulls in cold air from the poles? You should write a paper about that.
The fundamentals of global warming theory include the ideas of :
1. Expanding tropics
2. Arctic amplification
3. Warmer weather with the snow line receding to the north.
It is important for people to remember these ideas when throwing out creative explanations of how global warming is causing the snow. Warm air from the “expanding tropics” is supposed to be encroaching to the north, not the other way around as we are seeing.
Steve Goddard (21:43:34) :
davidmhoffer,
So you are proposing the existence of a giant low pressure cell which sits over the equator and pulls in cold air from the poles? You should write a paper about that>
Why would I? All kinds of papers are already out there explaining convection at the equator, how high it goes before gravity takes over, causing the rising air mass to tip over and flow toward the poles. I dont think I could add much. but increased convection processes are a pretty logical outcome of increased warming from natural as well as any other cause. So, in a warming period, it would be reasonable to expect more extreme weather events, more heat in summer driving snow line away from equator, and more snow and cold air in winter driving the snowline toward the equator, even through the average is higher.
Steve Goddard (21:35:31)
“The point of this article is to demonstrate that the increase in winter snow extent is not due to warming temperatures.”
There is no long-term increase in winter snow extent – in fact it’s trending slightly down. You have to carefully pick just the last 20 years to try to persuade us otherwise:
http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/396/snowextent.png
“Whatever is happening in the summer is a different topic of discussion.”
I wonder why?
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=3
I just wonder why Berkeley doesn’t power their municipal lighting with Kundalini energy.
I don’t think that we should forget that a fundamental argument of skepticism is Svensmark’s theory. I have been looking regularly at the weather reports especially those that show cloudcover first and my perception is that cloudcover has been increasing compared to previous years. Obviously cloud cover means more rain or, obviously the further you go north, more snow. I think precipitation records must show an increase, all over the world. So everything what we are seeing is consistent with global cooling on its way. This must also show in earth’s albedo. Do we have any new measurements on that?
Steven Goddard,
you make the following statement:
[i]”Now lets take their poor logic one step further. Ice ages occur when the snow line moves very far south. “[/i]
There is one very important omission from that phrase. It should read
“Ice ages occur when the [b]summer[/b] snow line moves very far south.
As you state elsewhere that
[i]”Whatever is happening in the summer is a different topic of discussion.[/i]
I can only assume that you think that ice ages only happen during the winter…
If you don’t want to talk about the summer snow line then don’t include discussion of the movement of the snow line during ice ages.
In 1999 the 5 year moving average of maximum winter snow extent (January) was 44.9 million sq km. This had increased to 46.06 million sq km by January 2010, an increase of 1.16 million sq km or +2.58%.
During the same period the 5 year moving average of minimum summer snow extent (August) has changed from 3.34 million sq km to 2.02 million sq km, a decrease of 1.32 mllion sq km or -39.5%.
Whether you look at the absolute area of snow area or the relative percentage of snow area it is clear that the summer snow extent is declining quicker than the winter snow extent is increasing.
Raising the rising winter snow extent without mentioning the falling summer snow extent is blatant cherry picking and spin.
Drat, how do you do bold and italics in this blog?
Common sense and logic some-how escaped the scientists involved in the AGW IPCC non-sense. Their starting point should have been the historical warm and cold periods.
Rather than hiding them, analysis and understanding them would have given them the data and tools to compare.
If our modern period showed non of the parameters that caused the other historically recorded periods, only then, should they look for other reasons.
That would be science and not fairy tales,perhaps, then I would take note.
Wayne
Tuesday, 16 Feb, North American snow
cover from NOAA:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/USA/2010/ims2010046_usa.gif
…and the Actic ice cover as of 14 Feb:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
You can save these graphics and compare them youselves
with reports from the same sources this coming August.
>>>> davidmhoffer (20:24:38) :
Warming cannot make the snow-line move south. Warming only makes the snow-line move north>
If you hit a big bump in the road with your car, does it go only up? Or does it come back down, compress the suspension to the point where it was lower than before, then it rises again. Each oscillation is smaller than the previous until the car rides level once more. If you measured at just the right time and for only a brief period, you could show that the bump made the car lower to the ground. Warming causes oscilations such as increased convection at the equator that pulls increased cold air from the arctic zones to repace it. So yes, warming can TEMPORARILY push the snow line toward the equator just like hitting a bump with your car can TEMPORARILY make it lower to the ground.
Oh didn’t I say that small bumps in the road can mix it up a bit?
No? Oh, let me fix that…
Oh sure there are some complex bits involved. Wind and water currents, and small bumps in the road mix it up a bit. But apparently the snow line has moved south for the entire northern hemisphere.
Warming cannot make the snow-line move south. Warming only makes the snow-line move north.
Wind and water currents, and small bumps in the road can only move the snow-line north in a tiny limited area. There is only so much arctic air to go around. To increase the snow-line over a large global area or move it a great distance, you need an increase in cold air.
To claim that warming causes cooling would mean that cooling also caused warming. In that case the way to solve global warming (if that were a problem) would be to increase warming. That is obviously wrong.
Tom P,
I appreciate you noting the mismatch vs. Rutgers yesterday. However, claiming that the trend over the last twenty years is cherry picking is absurd. The last decade or two have seen both growth in autumn/winter snow cover and above average autumn/winter snow cover. 2010 is going to be one of the snowiest winters on record.
TLM,
Summer snow extent is a completely different issue. Lots of people (including Hansen) have published papers hinting that soot is the primary factor affecting summer snow. That has nothing to do with snowfall trends. Snow falls in the winter.
http://www.citeulike.org/user/SuzanneBevan/article/6535177
Steve Goddard (06:22:10) :
“… claiming that the trend over the last twenty years is cherry picking is absurd.”
No, claiming that particular trend is statistically significant is absurd when longer or shorter periods give different signs for the trend. The last forty years have seen a drop in the winter snow coverage, as have the last five. Overall there is no significant trend in the winter data. This in contrast to the significant drop in the summer extent.
“Summer snow extent is a completely different issue. Lots of people (including Hansen) have published papers hinting that soot is the primary factor affecting summer snow.”
The paper you cite says something quite different: “Snow grain size tends to be larger in late winter and spring, when there is enough sunlight that black-carbon absorption is most important.”
Steve Goddard, you keep stating that “summer snow extent is a completely different issue” then why did you mention snow extent in the ice ages?
As I said before, is it only an ice age in the winter?
Put your ‘b’ or ‘i’ between angle brackets, , before the phrase, and add a / after, e.g. (with no spaces).
There are other tags, which however I have not mastered, except for ‘blockquote’.
/Mr Lynn
That didn’t work; the angle bracket examples disappeared. Oh well, you get the idea. Here’s one: . Watch out! They may disappear, too!
It would help if our hosts had a box next the Comments field with instructions—or better, buttons!
/Mr Lynn
Mr Lynn, TLM,
<b>, <i> for bold or italics.
Then, put a slash / in front of the b or i to close the tag: </b>
Your HTML will look like this:
<b>[words you want in bold]</b>
Same for italics, except use an i.
[Find a thread that’s a few weeks old. Practice on that. If you make a misteak, no one will notice.]
So as between TLM and Steve G, it we have increased snowfall in winter, and increased melt in summer, the former caused by colder times, and the latter caused by soot. I don’t know why this sounds disjointed to me, but if both are right, then we can forestall another ice age by simply producing a lot more soot. Get rid of those scrubbers!
/Mr Lynn
Tom P, TLM,
According to Rutgers data, North America broke its’ record last week for the greatest snow extent ever recorded – going back to 1966. Please tell us that this is due to global warming.
Tom P,
Tell me again that this trend is not statistically significant.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHFzTFVnTlVrYnV0bEpxLWt5aXE2UEE&oid=1&v=1266415282706
Henry@Steve Goddard
Just leave it Steve. Give it up. Like I always say:
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see
(or whose job it is to keep sowing confusion! )
Remember what I said before: there is big,big, money into “green”
They will not give up that money until their own bodies are frozen up
I remember asking one of these greenies (From wwf) : What if we fall into an LIA?
Is honesty in science not more important than a green agenda?
I am still waiting for an answer.
Steve Goddard (06:03:03) :
Of course on the same basis we should ignore all the temperature data before 1989 at Brenham TX if we want to properly understand what’s going on:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/brehamtxuschn.png
Looks like we should all be moving to Brenham Texas to be sure to avoid any upcoming ice age.
Henry,
Skepticism is the new consensus. We need to make sure we don’t fall into the same patterns of ignoring critics as did the hockey team. People who criticize every detail of your theories are very important.
Tom P,
What part of “greatest extent ever recorded” last week is not clear? The winter snow line has been moving south for the last twenty years and has been consistently above average for the last ten.
Europe is buried in deep snow.
http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=0&article=8
This is not terribly startling to anyone with open eyes and an open mind.
However, I have to point out to some of you…
I see that some of you have been using this website to forward your anti-green, anti-conserving, anti-environment ends. Read up on Anthony Watts before you assume he’s on your (bizarre) side. Even if you discredit AGW (and I do, it’s become far too religious to be taken seriously) you cannot deny that we do things in unsustainable ways, and no amount of debunking the effects of carbon will change the finite nature of oil, the fact that heavy metals are in coal, that particulate matter in diesel fumes causes repiratory problems, and so on. Those things can be proven. Those things have been proved. They don’t require crystal-ball models to prove them.
Personally, that’s why I keep reading WUWT. It drives me nuts that we have power plants that spew out mercury and uranium, cars that spew out benzene, fertilizer that puts cadmium in our food, and all the various things that are totally reliant on a finite amount of stuff we can dig or drill out of the ground. And what does science demand we do? Tax the basic building blocks of life such as carbon and nitrogen. What do they base it on? Computer models which attempt to peer into the future. And what drives me equally nuts? People who think we can ignore the crap we put into our bodies and the finite nature of everything which fuels our society, all because they think that because taxing carbon is ludicrous, anything “green” is equally ludicrous.
We ignore scarcity and toxicity at our (humanity’s) own peril.
regeya (10:03:09) :
“I see that some of you have been using this website to forward your anti-green, anti-conserving, anti-environment ends.”
Where? Be specific.
“And what does science demand we do? Tax the basic building blocks of life such as carbon and nitrogen.”
You’re conflating science with government and special interests. They are the ones who covet your money for their own self-serving purposes.
Also, the U.S. is one of the very cleanest countries on the planet. The EPA heavily regulates the emissions you refer to. And even if they were as dangerous as claimed, human life spans would not have increased so much over the past century.
That is not to say emissions should not be closely monitored and regulated. But there is a trade-off between emissions and the benefits of electricity, just like there are trade-offs between the particles of animal hair, feces and insects in food products, and the benefits of food.
If you want a target rich environment to scold, China is always available.
regeya ,
Life expectancy is about 3X longer now than it was before we started using all this “nasty coal and oil.”