While some other bloggers and journalists insist that recent winter snows are proof of global warming effects, they miss the fact that models have been predicting less snow in the norther hemisphere. See this 2005 peer reviewed paper:
Frei, A. and G. Gong, 2005. Decadal to Century Scale Trends in North American Snow Extent in Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models. Geophysical Research Letters, 32:L18502, doi: 10.1029/2005GL023394.
It says exactly the opposite of what some are saying now. – Anthony
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Guest post by Steven Goddard
A 2005 Columbia University study titled “WILL CLIMATE CHANGE AFFECT SNOW COVER OVER NORTH AMERICA?” ran nine climate models used by the IPCC, and all nine predicted that North American winter snow cover would decline significantly, starting in about 1990.
In this study, current and future decadal trends in winter North American SCE (NA-SCE) are investigated, using nine general circulation models (GCMs) of the global atmosphere-ocean system participating in the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR4)…
all nine models exhibit a clear and statistically significant decreasing trend in 21st century NA-SCE
Some of the models predicted a significant decline in winter snow cover between 1990 and 2010.
Climate Model predictions of Snow Cover Decline
As we know, winter snow cover has actually increased about 5% since it bottomed in 1989, and is now close to a record maximum.
Below is another interesting graph. It shows the number of top 100 snow extent weeks by decade. I took the top 100 weekly snow extents (out of 2227) from the Rutgers record and sorted them by decade. The past decade has been at least as snowy as the 1970s.
The past decade has had the most weeks in the top 100 since 1966.
Above are images from NASA showing snow extent from 2001 to 2004. Below is an image from 2010, showing snow cover in all 48 states.
NOAA Image – February 12, 2010
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UPDATE: Here is a new graph of north American winter trend produced by Steve at the request of commenters:
So far, the climate models have the wrong polarity on their predictions of winter snow cover changes.
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After a new temp history is constructed from the efforts at surfacestations.org and the E M Smith analysis, will we see we’re right where we were in 1977 ?
…why UAH doesn’t reflect this I couldn’t say. I expected a calibration issue until Roy’s last post.
Some interesting historical documents are available here:
http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim_v1/robinson_pubs/refereed/Frei_Robinson_and_Hughes_1999.pdf
http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim_v1/robinson_pubs/refereed/Hughes_Frei_and_Robinson_1996.pdf
A similar document for Frei and Gong is available at
http://www.easternsnow.org/proceedings/2006/frei_et_al_2.pdf
Ecotretas
Is there not a danger in the programming of these models? The danger being that you observe what is perceived as a trend in reality, put it into the puter, & out pops a trend like the one apparently observed, then claim that the model are validated? Perhaps it’s just me then.
Well done. The authors of the paper were aware that their model do not work well.
Form the abstract:
“20th century simulations are poorly correlated with observations”
An easy win.
You’re saying “the climate models have the wrong polarity on their predictions of winter snow cover changes”??
That’s easy to fix: Just reverse polarity on the batteries and everything will be just fine.
Duh.
I expecting Tamino to produce some statistical magic, showing that the 20 year upwards trend and record maximum correlate well with the models.
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics”
– Mark Twain
I don’t know if the ice extent has so much taken an upward jaunt that interests me, as much as the slope since the first of the year has not begun to roll over yet. Another two weeks of average cold Arctic temps (quite possible due to the high snow extent?) and the ice extent could be be the second highest since 2003. Add that to the information posted earlier that the multi-year ice is gaining strongly and we could have some decent, persistent summer ice cover.
William Sears (08:27:34) :
“It was Langmuir who said that it is a characteristic of pathological science to give ad hoc answers, invented on the spur of the moment, to any and all criticisms.”
Yes, that is a clear characteristic of catastrophic AGW promoters. More on Langmuir:
We can see these symptoms of pathological science throughout the "science" of AGW — which is not science at all, since it fails the scientific method. We are at #5 – 6 now.
Catastrophic AGW is in reality a rent-seeking mechanism being promoted by various entities, with the ultimate goal of separating enormous amounts of money from taxpayers, and to aggregate national political power to government, particularly to the UN.
No politician or political movement could hope to reap the financial benefits of the "carbon" scare by appealing to the electorate for such large tax increases in a straightforward manner, and in general people do not trust the opaque, unaccountable, and completely corrupt UN to be a world government; something it was never intended to be.
Therefore, various entities have invented the myth that a tiny trace gas will likely destroy the world through melting ice caps, rapidly rising sea levels, and other disasters thought up on the spur of the moment [while reading Langmuir's list, keep in mind the CO2 scare].
It is a disgrace that some scientists and universities have sold out their integrity for grant money and status. They must know that their self-serving behavior would ultimately result in a literal army of new government bureaucrats, and the forfeiting of national sovereignty to an international criminal body whose own blue helmeted soldiers rape and pillage, without repercussions, in areas they were sent to stop rape and pillage, and that Sec-Gen Kofi Annan and hundreds of UN functionaries have accepted vouchers redeemable for many millions of barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein in the Oil-For-Food scam. [MEMRI had a lengthy list of individual oil voucher recipients, but it has since been taken down.]
And the repeatedly proposed implementation of the UN's "World Tax" of .7% of GDP, to be paid into the unaccountable and unauditable UN [a tax which would cost U.S. taxpayers alone over $100 billion a year in onerous new taxes, and which would quicky ratchet up from the original .7%] has been promoted for many years by Ban Ki Moon's predecessor, Kofi Annan. Moon now proposes the same world tax, but now it would ostensibly be for mitigation of "climate change." In reality, it is loot. Loot which would only be confiscated from the industrialized G-8 countries, passed through the opaque UN, and what remained would be doled out to developing countries – which include China, Russia, and the rest. And it is all planned as a back door tax, with no consent of the citizens to be allowed, similar to the EU Referendum.
The free world owes an enormous debt of gratitude to whoever leaked the Climategate emails prior to COP-15. That action temporarily stalled the move toward the confiscation of much of the wealth and freedom of the West.
But the war to make the world's citizens serfs of the UN and subject to the World Court is far from over. And those Quisling scientists like Michael Mann and the rest of the AGW promoters, who have tried to sell us out for their own personal aggrandizement, must be held to account for attempting to sell out their own country for money and status.
Physics Major (08:45:16) :
“So anyone who claims that increased snow extent is consistent with CO2 induced global warming is what?”
One needs two things for snow, moist air and temperatures below 32F.
Warmer oceans provide moist air. Score 1 for Global Warming Crowd.
It would appear that more moist air is creating more snow, which has a cooling effect. Score 1 for the skeptics side.
The big disagreements in the ‘Climate Debate’ have been over how nature will react to compensate.
I.E. WIth more CO2 emissions will trees grow faster? Will we get more or less snow, which will have a cooling or heating effect.
What happens to clouds?
The doomsdayer’s all assume natures reactions will compound the problem. The Skeptics say natures reactions will mitigate the problem.
All that is needed is to find a climate model predicting more snow. Problem solved.
Why doesn’t a journalist ask them what they think has caused the discrepancy between the models and observations?
The Hockey Team and the other Climate Bandits must sooner or later realise that AGW is close to being falsified if not already.
Believers have recently been spouting the position that AGW theory predicts more snow as the earth warms. That was curious to me because before we got more snow, the mantra was AGW would bring snowless winters. Steven Goddard’s presentation underscores several things I’ve been noticing lately:
1) The AGW models predict less snow. Believers predict more snow because that’s what is observed.
2) The believers, in total ignorance of their own theories, jump on any weather event, human tragedy, or animal story, irrespective of what it is, and say the models predicted it, it is further proof of global warming, and its occurrence is unprecedented.
3) Believers follow a double standard. They demand peer reviewed science from skeptics, summarily rejecting anything that isn’t peer reviewed and published. They in turn use journalist commentaries, tour guide eye witness accounting, and pamphlets from advocacy groups in AR4 as proof and evidence of the validity of of their position that global warming is real and it is occurring today.
4) The demarcation between weather and climate is very much dependent on one question. Can the event in any way be twisted to support the alarmist position? If the answer is yes, it is climate. If no, it is weather.
Thank you Steven Goddard for yet another revealing post.
Looking at the Northern Hemisphere graph above, one wonders how the modelers will hide the incline.
harrywr2,
Don’t confuse snow depth with snow extent. More moisture in the air might produce heavier snow in Greenland, but certainly not Florida.
Yeah, but the data is raw, and thus needs to be adjusted.
Hank Hancock. This is how religion works, by re-interpreting the situation to suit one’s model of the world e.g.
My daughter has cancer – pray for her and God will heal her.
God did not heal her – we don’t have enough faith.
My daughter is worse – God is testing those he loves.
My daughter died – God wants her to grace heaven.
God is good and has taught us so much through suffering.
Anything but change your view on whether God exists.
Watts Up With That? Stockholm has never been so cold since 1829!!!!
That means Global Warming isn’t it? 😉
It’s great to see that the sceptic side are starting to run their own models, based on the data that the scientists went to great lengths not to disclose.
I suspect it’s this replication of their results (and discrepancy with real-world observations) that they really wanted to avoid.
Just look at this:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
A ring of warm waters north of the equator, from the pacific to the atlantic, reaching north africa…and, as earth rotates from west to east, all that atlantic humidity will feed US snow.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…
There is little doubt that the models got it wrong [but who around here doubted that anyway 🙂 ]. That said, we have to also be aware of not overstating [or conveniently hiding things] our case. Take for example Steve’s plot showing ‘top 100…’:
[I hope it shows, otherwise look above]
It shows that the 1960s and the 1990s were not very snowy. For the 1960s, that can be explained by Steve’s failure to multiply the count by ~2.5 [to account for the data only starting late 1966]. The difference between 1990s and 2000s is due to the reliance on ‘extreme cases’. If one sticks to the Winter Averages [as Steve has argued are the best – show falls in the winter, right?], the average winter snow cover per decade looks quite different from Steve’s ‘top-100’ chart:
or http://www.leif.org/research/Average-Winter-Snow-NH.png if image not showing.
I show two columns for each decade, depending on if a decade is from xxx0 through xxx9 or from xxx1 through xxz0 [also showing how sensitive this is to when things are picked].
So, there are great opportunities for careful selections to emphasize [or deemphasize as one wants] things.
After a slow start it looks like N/H sea ice extent is putting in something of a sprint at the end.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
Question:
Willis, how did you manage to include an image in your comment?
Veronica (09:52:57) :Every prayer can be summirized as follows:
Please God, make 2+2 not being equal to 4…and God can’t make it because it would destroy its creation.
[snip – while I often disagree with Tamino, I won’t have you say such disparaging things – Anthony]
“While some other bloggers and journalists insist that recent winter snows are proof of global warming effects,”
It’d be nice to have a link for that straw man. I think most people would say that they are not inconsistent with global warming, not that they are proof of global warming.
“they miss the fact that models have been predicting less snow in the norther hemisphere.”
Over the course of the 21st century. Maybe. Look at the caveats from the paper cited:
“Significant between-model variability is found, with most models underestimating mean NA-SCE. 20th century simulations are poorly correlated with observations, and, while individual ensemble members capture the magnitude of decadal scale variability, the variability of the signal is dampened in the ensemble mean, indicating that decadal-scale NA-SCE variability is associated predominantly with internal model variability rather than external forcing.”
— Frei, A., and G. Gong (2005), Decadal to century scale trends in North American snow extent in coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32, L18502, doi:10.1029/2005GL023394.
They aren’t exactly overflowing with confidence about he predictive power of their models for snow, are they? Also note the title, “Decadal to century scale trends.” Ultimately they say:
“Two 21st century emission scenarios with realistic (moderate or significant) greenhouse gas emission rates produce decreasing NA-SCE trends, while one unrealistic scenario with fixed concentrations produces little or no NA-SCE trend. These results suggest that snow cover may be a sensitive indicator of climate change, and that North American snow extent will probably decrease in response to greenhouse gas emissions, although the magnitude of the response may be nonlinear.”
So, at some point in the 21st century you can expect winter snow extent to decrease, as opposed to have no significant trend, as now.
Current conditions seem to be anticipated well by one of the paper which cites the paper above:
“The sensitivity analysis suggested a potentially complex elevation response of SCD and SWEmax to increasing temperature and precipitation in mountain regions as a result of nonlinear interactions between the duration of the snow season and snow accumulation rates.”
” These findings were echoed by the climate models that showed earlier and more widespread decreases in SCD than annual maximum snow water equivalent (SWEmax)”
— Brown, Ross D., and Philip W. Mote (2009), The Response of Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover to a Changing Climate*, J Clim, 22(8), 2124.
We are, of course, seeing significant decreases in SCD with no significant change in SWEmax. So that paper holds up quite well. Anyone know if one of these papers is more representative of the current state of the science?
REPLY: It’s not a strawman.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962294,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/28/AR2010012800041.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/earth/11climate.html
And I have a question. Since you are using a public email address of an educational institution, do they approve of your posting opinions here? See our policy page. – Anthony