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.
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