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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Interesting non-response/fog/snow-job from Gavin.
Gavin, can you help me out here?
A numbr of commentators have stated that increased snow cover (in the U.S.) is consistent with climate change.
But 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.
using nine general circulation models (GCMs) of the global atmosphere-ocean system show that all nine models exhibit a clear and statistically significant decreasing trend in 21st century.
Who is correct here?
[Response: Frei and Gong are using a single index for snow-cover across North America, but the situation is somewhat spatially and temporally heterogeneous. I haven’t looked into this much myself but you can get a sense from the graphs available on the GISS website (for instance, 20C3M+SRES A1B ensemble). Choose ‘Snow Cover %’, choose a month (Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar) and a period (1980-2010 say) and plot the trend. You get decreases in the northern US, and slight increases in the southern US depending on month. Thus I’d say the picture is likely to be a little confused over short time periods with a lot of weather-related noise. Intensity of precipitation is forecast to increase pretty much uniformly, and so that might be a contributing factor to the southern US trends, but that is just speculation at this point. The bigger issue is that single years are not climate change, regardless of the sign of the anomaly. – gavin]
OT,
I see a lot of people here denigrating the hockey stick. But it is real. Here’s how I see it will be created for AR5:
As the temperatures continue to fall, replace the temperature record (in degrees) with the number of AGW “deniers” to “hide the decline”. Splice the statistics of “number of AGW deniers” on the temperature record beginning in Fall 2009. Grafting two data sets together, like tree-ring width in mm and temperature in degrees, seems standard and legitimate practice in climate science after all. This would easily and undeniably produce a hockey stick graph.
Latest medium range models are showing a 5-10 inches of snow across Texas early next week. NWS is putting up an advisory tonight.
steve said:
“In Alice in Wonderland, up is down and down is up.
The climate models predicted down, the climate responded with up, and Tamino is the Mad Hatter.”
uh, ok. Putting aside the potential influence of mercury poisoning, his points about your statistical analysis seem valid.
Steve Goddard (10:17:55) :
> Your graphs don’t change anything and you seem to have forgotten that there are several weeks left in 2010 which will probably score in the top 100.
Your graph’s columns clearly shows the rightmost column starts in 2000. So it ended at the end of 2009.
>Why all the nitpicking? If you see something fundamentally wrong with the conclusions, fine. I’m not seeing that in your posts.
This is not nitpicking. It’s peer review pointing out flaws in your paper. I think Leif wouldn’t mind if you replaced your graph with Leif’s and describe it accurately.
I regret I didn’t see “weekly snow extents (out of 2227)” and do the math. Instead of bar graphs, I’d prefer graphs of the center points of 1, 5, and 10 year averages. They would have the same data points in yours and Leif’s graphs (except your 1960s datum of course) and nearly 30X more.
Robert (12:17:45) :
Robert; perhaps you would be slightly more credible if you stopped lying and obfuscating?
Hansen’s predictions were utter BS, you seem a bright fellow so why the lies?
In business, a predictive model that never yields accurate results is promptly junked. In government, the loons repeatedly try to fix the problem by spending enormous sums of taxpayer money making the model bigger and bigger. Got news for you, boys and girls! If the “outas” of a little one can’t even come close to the mark, you have a problem with your “inzas” and your “around-and-aroundas”. Making the thing bigger is not going to help solve your basic problem, even though it will give you bragging rights among your loony peers.
Could it be that raised temperatures actually cause more snowfall? 😉
A warmer storm will carry more moisture than a cold Arctic blast.
Where the two mix you get some real dumpers.
Comparing this El Nino only back as far as 1998 fails to take in the whole spectrum of strength or relative warmth of El Nino’s.
2009-2010 is lukewarm so far. Unfortunately for the those East of the Rockies, they get the added pleasure of Canadian Air instrusions.
Not being a meteorologist, I’ll take a swing at this one:
1.) string of lukewarm storms approaches West Coast.
2.) Current jet stream loops around High in Oregon/Wash. and runs warm air all the way up to the Yukon/BC border.
3.) 1st storm slams into high, breaking it.
4.) Meanwhile longer loop of warm air has reached Western Canada.
5.) 2nd storm slams into California plowing on eastward.
6.) Warm air in BC/Yukon displaces fridgid air and sends it south.
7.) 2nd storm reaches Rockies at same time blast of Canadian air crosses US border East of Rockies.
8.) 2nd storm meets Canadian air and dumps at intersection of fronts.
9.) Warmists blame overheating world for another snowstorm as a parade of them adds insult to injury, pointing to warm Canadian anomaly left by a lukewarm stream of air from modeate El Nino.
10.) Nobody has paid the slightest bit of never-mind to the 3,000 mile high squished loop of Jet Stream that started all this in motion yesterday.
How’d I do?
For What It’s Worth –
– An Observation on the Tone of Recent Blog Comments…
People are a sensitive lot every day of the week. On Fridays especially. Sometimes, without warning, sometimes with, they find themselves beset with various career, economic, political, medical, family, travel, and/or personal “issues”. For these reasons they’re a little less friendly and courteous than they normally are in public or on the Web. Many times, changes in the weather can also result in this condition; temperature, air pressure, humidity, rain, snow, ice, etc., can all singly or collectively tick people off and make them boil. When these times happen, when you start to show that inner-you, the part of “you” normally hided from everyone, or when you start to slip –even just a little– get some fresh air. Go out and smell the roses.
No roses? Pretend. But go out and take a deep breath of fresh air. Or Two.
PS: There seemed to be an unusual edge in the discussion lately.
tracking in the snow?
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Q_4mbCuV7QE/S3w5sHYE7LI/AAAAAAAAHkE/O25lUbY4yKQ/s1600-h/snow_tracking.png
seems about right.
The results of a look at the NA snow cover data are on the link on my name.
Doesn’t look like a great deal is going on but I can of course be wrong.
” Alan S (15:57:51) :
Robert (12:17:45) :
Robert; perhaps you would be slightly more credible if you stopped lying and obfuscating?
Hansen’s predictions were utter BS, you seem a bright fellow so why the lies?”
You’re wrong. Given that you introduce no argument and no evidence of any kind, I suspect you know it.
johnhayte,
So you are suggesting that these trends are actually downwards and match the models?
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/dec-feb_snow_ext.png
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/north_american_winter_dec-feb_snow_extent_1989-2010.png
Tamino is piling it up pretty thick this time.
johnhayte,
Mark Twain said “There are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
“We have no accurate global temperatures (you are referring to temperature I presume) before 1979.”
We have an instrument record that goes back a hundred a thirty years. On what basis would you argue we ought to throw it out? The satellite data (to which I assume you are referring, agrees well with the ground measurements when the two instruments are pointed in the same place.
We are expecting another 5-6″ of global warming here in the Kansas City area this weekend. I know, I know, weather isn’t climate, but quite frankly, I’m getting tired of hearing that about the warming climate, when the winters keep getting colder and snowier.
Quote: starzmom (16:55:10) :
“We are expecting another 5-6″ of global warming here in the Kansas City area this weekend. I know, I know, weather isn’t climate, but quite frankly, I’m getting tired of hearing that about the warming climate, when the winters keep getting colder and snowier.”
Welcome to double-speak!
Didn’t you notice when we passed through 1984 about a quarter century ago?
Seriously, keep those snow flakes as a personal gift from Al Gore. We’ve already had more than our fair share of Al’s generosity here in Missouri !
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel in
The Show-Me State
Robert (12:58:35) :
AGW is perfectly falsifiable — it’s simply that the world, so far, shows no interest in falsifying it.
Well there’s always the lack of any statistical warming trend for the last 15 years. Of course, warmers usually stutter and say but there is a positive trend. Now, we have a positive trend and the warmers say but there’s no statistical increase in the trend.
I wonder if they even realize how this sounds?
The main problem is the uncertainty in AGW is immense. Once the warmers admit that we can start to get somewhere.
Robert (16:49:54) :
An instrument record that has been heavily damaged by monkeyfingering and “the dog ate my B-91’s”.
The fact that our side doesn’t have these “less snow” predictions at our fingertips is an important indication that we are not well-funded and well-coordinated, nor that some carbonist consigliere has our ear. If our side weren’t mostly a grass-roots effort, we would have a long-term, thorough, well-organized database of “opposition research” material to employ. The most important would be an extensive collection of thousands of warmist predictions waiting to be shot down.
That sentence, or words to that effect, should be the epigraph in every thread on this site. But, just because snowfall hasn’t increased enough to falsify the models’ predictions, not to mention the CO2 hypothesis, it still has some “weight” as evidence. Just as a declining snowfall trend would have some weight in the other side of the scale. We’re entitled to mutter a soft-spoken “nyah, nyah.”
Superb reportage.
It is important to nail the Global Warmers failed predictions one by one and not let them switch stories or rewrite what they might have meant.
Undeniably they always predicted milder winters for USA and everywhere but here beware ‘at least’ – they bleat – ‘the West coast of USA is mild and the winter Olympics in Vancouver are very mild’.
This again illustrates the need to get to the roots of everything the GWers or their apologists say; and ask could whatever is observed be explained by more CO2?
The point about the cold and snowy winter in most of the USA is that like all weather it depends on a pressure pattern. In this case on a persistent ridge over the Rockies and THAT also caused the mild west coast. THIS weather pressure and weather pattern of ice and snow in most USA and the consequent mild sliver on the west was predicted in the long range by solar activity (the Solar Weather Technique of long range forecasting), and NOTHING to do with CO2, see: http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No9.pdf
The GWers have 4 problems:
Their science has failed;
Their ‘evidence’ is false or fiction;
Their predictions have all failed and
They can predict nothing.
Piers Corbyn, http://www.WeatherAction.com
PS: Another clue that our side is not well-funded or well-coordinated (as charged) is our side’s failure, until Glaciergate, to comb through the IPCC’s Assessment Reports looking for flaws and nits. Such opposition research is so valuable a tactic (as is now being shown) that no political or PR consultant would have failed to insist on it.
Piers Corbyn do you see any Lunar declinational patterns in the use of your forecasting method?
The pattern I find most use full is 240 cycles of the Lunar declination atmospheric tides in the atmosphere, which is just one 27.32 day cycle short of the Saros cycle period.
I have not used any solar activity adjustments, and still it shows a good correlation, and possible insight into the effects seen by solar cycle influences.
copied this snippet below, from the link at top of this entry..
Richard Mackey (04:34:31) :
To help better understand the phenomena now clearly visible in that magnificent video, I’ve extracted some relevant segments from my Journal of Energy and Environment paper (VOLUME 20 No. 1 2009)
The lunar nodal cycle and climate
The 18.6 year lunar nodal cycle (LNC) tidal periodicity has a pervasive role in climate change. It is the period of a full rotation of the Moon’s orbital plane around the ecliptic, the geometric plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. It is the clearest tidal signal in the thousands of time series analysed.
The LNC encodes information about the Moon, Earth, Sun geometry that relates to tidal extremes, at least at high latitudes. It defines how the angle of the Moon’s orbit to the Earth’s equatorial plane combines with, or partially cancels out, the tilt in the Earth’s axis. From the perspective of an observer on the Earth, during the LNC the Moon moves along a northern latitude about ten degrees from a position about 18.5 degrees north of the equator to one that is 28.5 degrees, which it reaches after 18.6 years.
The regular sequence of eclipses is a result of the regular, highly predictable rotation of the plane of the Moon’s orbit round the Earth. It has been known since ancient times that eclipses occurred in regular predictable cycles of a little more than 18 years. This period is known as the Saros cycle.
Thanks Piers!
Why does Lief engage in the technique “off axis graphing” method like everyone else, to exaggerate points?
A vertical axis on the left, going to ZERO with TWO HASH MARKS to indicate the “off access” is better procedure for “scientific” work.
But then if Lief is an economist, he is forgiven.