Over on the EU Referendum, Richard North points out the absurdity of media coverage on the arrival of spring. We’ve seen this before, for example at the Union of Concerned Scientists, they have this essay:
Early Warning Signs of Global Warming: Spring Comes Earlier
Even the daffodils are confused, though in that article the writer cites weather, not climate.
Here’s what North has noted about the confusion of the press:
Almost exactly three weeks ago, the press release queen, Louise Gray, was prattling about early springs as a result of global warming.
Fortunately for her, her kindly employer has spared her blushes, not requiring her to write the piece today, which tells us: “For those celebrating St David Day on Monday, there will be a noticeable absence of daffodils as the country’s growers say the cold snap has left their crops a month behind schedule.”
Britain’s “Arctic winter”, incidentally, was officially declared the coldest in 30 years “as parts of the country were lashed by gale force winds and torrential downpours.”
Strangely enough, almost exactly a year to the day, little Louise was writing under the headline, “Latest spring bloom at Kew for 20 years” – the strap reading: “After a succession of early spring blooms, flowers came out later this year than for 20 years because of the recent cold snap.”
Read the rest here at the EU Referendum
Met Office has just stated this has been the coldest winter in Scotland since 1962-3. Currently have 6 inches of firmly frozen snow. Snow drops had managed to get an inch above ground before the snow fell last week. Here’s a local summary (from http://homepages.tesco.net/barry.gratton1/ which confirms that December and January’s negative anomaly in average temperature of almost 3 degrees continued into February):
PITLOCHRY DAILY WEATHER RECORDS
MONDAY 1st March 0BSERVATION 0900
WINTER 2009/2010 (Weather & climate statistics define “winter” as the months of DEC. JAN. & FEB ) . Those born locally, during or after the Spring of 1963, have just experienced the coldest winter of their lifetimes. In many parts of the U.K.,however, the winter of 1978/79, was marginally colder. The figures below summarize the situation for Pitlochry, featuring the 2 coldest winters since 62/63, as well as the 30yr average. The figures given are the monthly mean max. & min. together with the mean winter temperature.
2009/10 1978/79 30yr. averages
DEC. 2.7/-4.6 4.4/0.5 5.7/-0.3
JAN 2.5/-2.7 2.2/-4.8 5.3/-0.9
FEB 4.0/-3.4 3.1/-4.5 6.1/-0.4
WINTER MEAN -0.3 0.2 2.6
The figures indicate that this past winter has experienced a negative anomaly in average temperature of almost 3 degrees. Over the past 20 years or so, there has been a succession of mild or very mild winters. Negative anomalies in ANY month have been the exception, so encountering 3 on the trot so much below normal is quite a shock to the system!! The jet stream, which plays a major part in steering Atlantic depressions over & to the north of Britain, giving mild, unsettled conditions has, on this occasion, been displaced some distance to the south. The result for Britain has been that mild westerlies have been replaced by airstreams from the Arctic & the cold continent.
The severest of the winter weather occurred during the period 18th Dec. to 10th Jan .& during Feb. the town has largely escaped the worst of the snowfalls which have plagued parts of Highland, Moray & Aberdeenshire. There was, however, a spell of sharp frosts between the 16th & 24th, during which a new February minimum of -12.6 was recorded.
The immediate outlook is for cold weather to continue, but meteorologically anyway, Spring has now begun, no matter how determined winter may be to hang on !
PITLOCHRY TODAY— Frosty at first, but a dry day ahead with long sunny periods. Wind moderate from the NNW & max temp. still a couple of degrees below normal at 5. TONIGHT—Clear periods with a sharp frost, down to around -7.
R. Gates,
Puhlease – ” Raising CO2 levels will trap more heat”
CO2 does not TRAP heat. If it has any effect at all, it slows the release of kinetic energy to outer space. If it trapped heat, this planet would have turned into a desolate rock eons ago!
Can we not be more precise in our terminology at least?
“NickB. (12:52:50) :
DeNihilist (11:31:16) :
OK – have to admit that this year on the left coast of canada, we are having a beautiful GW spring.
Don’t you mean El Nino spring? I could have sworn I heard that it’s always nice and mild for you guys during an El Nino”
Sorry NickB, forgot the smiley face!
Roger Knights
The ‘Meteorological Seasons,’ have now become the officially sanctioned seasons of our govt. in N.Z. Using Dec, March, June etc to start the seasons is out of step with the reality here in New Zealand. March is often hotter and drier than December in most years, but March has been cosigned to autumn when 3 weeks out of the four are before the equinox.
Expediency. No wonder our politicians went for it. They know all about expediency.
It’s because they are not just anybody. The Skagit Valley commercial growers boast how they sell more tulip bulbs to Denmark than Holland does. The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is held each year as an international tourist event while thousands of acres of narcissus and tulipa are in blossom. Thousands of tourists arrive from all over the world to see the fields of flowers and participate in the festival events. Consequently, there is a lot of money at stake when the festival officials schedule the events to satisfy the tourists and commercial buyers who are coming to see the fields of flowers in blossom.
Unfortunately, the warming weather during the 1990s kept pushing the week of peak blossoming out of its traditional event dates to earlier and earlier weeks. Then the trend swung the other direction and pushed the week of peak blossoming ever later in the month and across an entire month as the weather got colder and colder. during the most recent ten years. Festival officials have become more and more defensive about their scheduling problems, and they finally began to lengthen the Festival schedule so there would be at least some part of the fields blossoming more or less during at least some part of the new month long festival schedule.
During the 1990s, the weather was warm enough for the rosemary and some other tender plants to survive and prosper in the Skagit Valley and Fidalgo Island area. Tomatoes hybridized for the short, cold, and difficult growing seasons of the pacific Northwest actually ripened into nice red tomatoes by September.
During the 2000s, however, the tomatoes just sulked and were still green on the vine in September, refusing to ripen into red tomatoes on the vine or even curling up and dying from disease in the cold and wet weather in summers with few warm and dry days. Likewise with many of the flowers, the summers returned to the cold and wet conditions last seen in the 1960s and 1970s. As NOAA repeatedly trumpeted unprecedented warm weather and warm climate in Western Washington, the plants were having nothing to do with it, blossoming a month later than the 1990s and sometimes refusing to ripen and blossom at all. The rosemary plants thriving in the warmth of the 1990s have been nearly wiped out by deadly freezing weather in January to April 2007-2009.
Then the winter of 2009-2010 really confuses the plants in the Skagit Valley and Fidalgo Island. The weather was so warm in December and January the trees began to bud and blossom in the false Spring weather. The crocus and Iris danfordiae blossomed early. You have to cringe as you wait for another of those killer frosts to show up in March as an ugly reminder that the warm weather is a fluke of Nature.
Meanwhile in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the garden plants are being hammered by the recently and increasingly cold winters. All across the Great Plains the winters in the 2000s have seen motorists being stranded on the Interstate highways by severe winter weather, snowfall, and blizzards. In some places there has been snow on the ground from mid-December through February with the exception of maybe only three or four days. This much snow and this much persistance of snow cover on the ground is some of the worst seen since the 1960s and 1970s. The cold weather conditions have even been killing some of the native plants.
Farther south in the warmth of Southern California, it used to be necessary to where a modestly warm coat or jacket in the winters of the 1960s and 1970s. The air conditioner was in use only in the months of June, July, August, and sometimes in early September. Beginning in about 1979-1980 this all began to change. The coats and jackets stayed in the closet and were never used in Southern California for many years, because it just wasn’t cold enough to wear them anywhere at anytime except in the mountains or out of state. By 1985-1998 the air conditioner was in constant daily use from about Fbruary or March through October or November. Even then, there were days in December which required the use of the air conditioner to keep room temperatures in the high 70s.
By 2002, however, the coats and jackets came out of the closets and the air conditioners were no longer necessary nearly year round. The garden plants are not always so ready to bud so early as in the 1990s in Southern California.
You certainly are proving yourself to be a sucker for AGW false propaganda and disinformation. The Wikipedia articles are authored by some of the worst false propagandists supporting the AGW mythology. The chart is a classic example of the cherrypicking of information and torturing it to misrepresent results. It is a “great chart” only for those who seek to perpetuate bald faced lies to the public.
First, the numbers and dates are wrong. Mauna Loa Observatory claims to have measured 317ppm as late as 1959, and I don’t necessarily trust Mauna Loa’s results for a multitude of reasons including their advocacy of AGW long before they began making the measurements to bolster their advocacy. The bulk of the antrhopogenic carbon dioxide releases can only have occurred from about 1940 to the present based upon the world populations and industrial activities. Yet earlier measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide reported higher than 300ppm levels before 1940 and before 1900.
Even if you could blindly and uncritically accept the results of the founders of the AGW advocacy movement at the Mauna Loa Observatory, you still have the problem of the carbon dioxide rate of increase beginning a half-century to one century before humans were populous and industrious enough to have released the carbon dioxide after 1940-1960. The increases in atmospheric dioxide correlate to the natural emergence of the planet from ice age conditions, but they fail to correlate to human activities which occurred 50-100 years after the chnages in carbon dioxide and receding glaciers were already well and truly underway.
Maybe the data is not in dispute in the fantasyland you live in under some rock with the laughingstock AGW proponents like Al Gore and others, but there is great dispute from geologists, meteorologists, and others not participating in the great climate hoax and fraud. The data being used is from a mere handful of ice cores using methods and hotly disputed claims of accuracy which put even the dendrochronologists and their treemometers to shame. The same type of refrain and excuse enunciated by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich, is being used to defend the HCN surface weather observation air temperature datasets used by HADCRU, NOAA, and NASA-GISS; and we can all see how badly that fraudulent enterprise has fared. You cannot use the excuse of consensus to cheat science forever, because much sooner or sometime later you will be found out by anyone willing to adhere to real scientific methods, whether or not they are in a minority of a fashionable opinion.
There you go again with the illogical and unscientific “correlation is causation” assumption and argument. Even then, you argument still fails because most of the glaciers in Glacier National Park were melting away long before the industrial age had begun, and the high rate of increase in CO2 had already begun when the first electric light bulb and electrical generators were invented.
We are presently living in the Quatenary Ice Age that begun about 30 million years ago and an inter-glacial period which began about 12,000 years ago. Given the fact the Glacial periods of an ice age result in extremely suppressed levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and we are in the early stages of an inter-glacial warming period, it is to be expected and perfectly natural to find a rapid increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide in response to the temporary retreat of the conditions of a glacial period with or without the presence of humans and human activities. You simply cannot warm the planet naturally without also increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide or cool the planet without reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Furthermore, the carbon isotope in a molecule of carbon dioxide provides some indication of its source from biological or non-biological origins. The proportion of these carbon isotopes which can be traced to human activities is another hotly disputed subject, but it remains such a small percentage of the planetary atmospheric carbon dioxide as to be on the limits of measurability by our instruments.
When comparing the amount of carbon dioxide remaining in the known reserves of fossil fuels, humans are physically incapable of increasing its percentage contribution to the total planetary atmospheric carbon dioxide, even if you could somehow magically burn all of those reserves in only one lifetime or one year of a lifetime. Even if humans could burn such a vast store of the fossil fuels to generate a significant multi-gigatons increase in its percentage of contribution of CO2, it would have little further effect as the levels increased, because the effect is diminished the more you increase the quantities.
In other words, you are spouting [snip].
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha wow spring coming earlier! all the trees down here in texas should have leaves starting to push out, and the did until the snow last week killed them. I wonder what summer will look like now. I hope the trees regenerate because it will be one ugly hell hole without leaves on trees.
TonyB (11:39:20) : So either natural variability is much greater than had previously been admitted, or perhaps Co2 is not as powerful a climate driver as is believed? I agree with your perspective, and appreciate your historical perspective contributions here. A third alternative is that the natural variation in CO2 is much greater than we have been led to believe, and has a mild effect on climate.
Icarus (08:39:47) :
This is puzzling – are we supposed to believe that one late spring somehow trumps 20 early ones (or whatever the figures are)?
No, you’re to hope and pray that earlier springs stay and even occur earlier. Longer growing seasons mean more agricultural production, increased forest growth, etc. There isn’t much wheat grown in Canada under a glacier!
Steve
I agree with your third comment (and the other two as well of course!) and am curently preparing an article on Historic variations in CO2
tonyb
” R. Gates (16:42:03) :
[…]
but we know for certain (based on solid science) that CO2 can indeed keep a positive-feedback warming cycle going. ”
The only evidence being your interpretation of ice cores? I say no, we don’t know whether CO2 can keep a positive-feedback warming cycle going, there is no solid science that proves it. How do you falsify my statement? I don’t want a flame war, R. Gates, i just want to know with which evidence you would falsify my statement.
crosspatch (18:40:29) :
(…)
Seriously, never attempt to avoid a small animal in the road unless you have plenty of time to slow down.
Yup. As I was told way back in high school driving class, apologies to Disney, if it is you or Thumper then it’s Thumper. Swerving to avoid can be much worse than the impact. Had no place to go anyway, high sidewalk curb on left, parked cars on the right.
And with a pick-up truck you have ground clearance, the critter might be just fine between the wheels, and trucks are not known for doing fast braking nor fancy avoidance maneuvers. My experience, roughly half the time they are fine, might get whacked and dazed but they’ll walk away in a bit. When I said “I was driving a truck” that’s what I was referring to, as I made that split-second decision. And, as experience has shown, braking would likely have been worse for the critter as I didn’t have time to fully stop. It was moving and I saw it’d be centered. Slowing down would’ve increased the odds the right wheels would have gotten it.
I don’t kill critters for fun. When I lived in town I did a live capture of a possum that was hanging around my back porch when I was putting food out for stray cats, released it out here “in the wilderness.” However, I have personally put down suffering animals, including a much-loved dog we had for over 12 years. It’s tough, but there are times when it needs to be done, and waiting for a vet to do it for you just means it will suffer longer.
There is something that some people just have problems accepting, you have to make distinctions. As a practical matter. Cats and dogs can readily be pets. I have taken in numerous cats over the years. But possums are not pets. You don’t expect to find them at petting zoos. In an urban setting they are just very large rats, with very sharp teeth. You don’t want them around kids and pets. That possum I caught, in that situation I was able to remove it to a natural habitat, to remove a potential threat to my fellow humans without killing, and I did so.
Behind the wheel that night, knowing what it was, knowing it had a good chance of surviving anyway… Didn’t have the time to second-guess then, don’t see the need to do so now.
Dirk,
There are several studies related to the positive-feedback potential of increased carbon dioxide and warming. For example see:
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/carbon-dioxide-released-not-stored-by-soil.html
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iU4TDxWlzIv5N3MpuVWH8Nw0z4SQ
http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8239
Granted…the intensity of this feedback is still under debate…but the fact of a positive feedback loop is no longer. Also, integral to this loop is methane, which is rising as well in the troposphere, and could provide a key component in future positive feedback intensity.
Ugh. There ain’t nothing blooming here. I don’t believe it’s gotten above 37F all day. We had a few days where the high was near or above 50F, but the lows were always in the 20’s. I live in Arkansas and that’s “The South.” I’m not touching my garden until we pull out of the 20’s. Sure, I’m still dumping organics onto my compost, along with the winter ashes of course. But the only sprouting going on here is in Mason jars in the cupboard!
Please, oh, please! Let there be some global warming! Let it come earlier and earlier! I’m tired of being cold. I want my herb garden back. I want fresh tomatoes. I want to hear the “snap!” of snappin’ beans, sittin’ on the back deck with a paper sack between my knees. Flowers is nice, but veggies is more nicer. Y’all pray for warmer weather. I’ve run out of wood.
Observations from an occasional gardener.
I live in Selsey, West Sussex and last night, 1-2 March 2010, gave us a very heavy frost. It is now 8:45pm in the evening of 2nd March and already the frost has made my grey car white. It is bitterly cold outside right now. The snowdrops have only just started to open and of the daffoldils there is still no sign.
My Autumn-planted broad beans have failed completely, killed when the ground froze to the depth of their roots. The early potatoes which I had in the greenhouse to chit I have had to bring indoors to escape being nipped by the frost which would expose them to rot. I have shifted my entire gardening plan 30 days more towards what promises to be a subdued Summer.
My plans of growing physallis and tomatoes in the greenhouse have been abandoned; I shall stick to growing brassicas and root crops this year.
Spring has sprung,
the grass has ris,
dig in the snow
and see where it is!!
Do you even know or understand what “feedback” is and what its relationship is to the climate? Where is your alarm and concern for the other even more potent “feedback” culprits such as uncontrolled emissions of dihydrogen monoxide?
The MSM in the UK really have no understanding of how irrelevant they have become to the CAGW debate. The more they hype their warmist alarmist agenda as the Earth cools the less their intended audience believes in this fraud.
CAGW is dead here in the UK, and the MSM are not even trying to give it a decent burial. Just waiting to see how long it will be before they start the ‘ice-age is coming’ scam.
I am in central North Carolina USA. In the 15 years I have lived here I have seen snow four times…. until this winter. It has snowed five times and I am now looking at over two inches of the white stuff. Last spring and summer was noticeably cooler too.