Guest post by Steven Goddard
Photo Credit : BBC News
Last April, I wrote an article titled Global Warming and “The Early Spring” which highlighted one of the favorite AGW myths, that CO2 is making winter warmer and spring arrive earlier. Here is the 2010 UK update.
In 2005, the BBC wrote this article :
Wildlife winces at early spring. A survey involving 65,000 wildlife sightings suggests that frogs and bumblebees are among the hardest hit. “Climate change is not something that is happening a million miles away – it is going on in our own back gardens,” said nature presenter Bill Oddie.
Here is one from Global Change Biology :
Early spring in Europe matches recent climate warming August 25, 2006 Conclusive proof that spring is arriving earlier across Europe than it did 30 years ago is published today in the journal Global Change Biology.
Real Climate wrote about it last year :
Breaking the silence about Spring. Early Spring has the potential to be immensely influential, a real turning point in the popular appreciation of climate change impacts among laypersons and scientists alike. Read it.
England – Earlier first flowering date. One of the most comprehensive studies of plant species in Britain revealed that the average first flowering date of 385 British plant species has advanced by 4.5 days during the past decade compared with the previous four decades: 16% of species flowered significantly earlier in the 1990s than previously, with an average advancement of 15 days in a decade. These data reveal the strongest biological signal yet of climatic change. Flowering is especially sensitive to the temperature in the previous month, and spring-flowering species are most responsive (Fitter and Fitter, 2002).
From The Daily Mail
Riot of colour: As spring comes earlier and earlier each year, such species as hawthorn and hornbeam will cut off more and more light to the bluebell which will cause it to decline disastrously
* So how is that warm winter/early spring theory doing in 2010?
From The Guardian
Severe winter delays bluebell season National Trust predicts three-week wait for nature’s blue carpets
Usually from about now they spring up in the far south-west then spread like a Mexican wave across Britain. But the National Trust says today that nature-lovers could have to wait until the end of the month before carpets of English bluebells begin to appear in woodlands. The charity believes that after the coldest winter for more than 30 years the English bluebell season is likely to be up to three weeks late. The plants depend on warm ground temperatures and the prolonged frosts will have impacted upon their ability to grow.
From The Guardian
Small is fatal for our songbirds in Britain’s great winter freeze. A survey by the public in Britain’s gardens reveals the toll on wildlife caused by weeks of Arctic conditions
Few people may have been wanting more evidence of the ferocity of recent weather. Nevertheless they got one from an unexpected source last week: the Big Garden Birdwatch. Organised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), it involved members of the public reporting bird sightings in their gardens over the last weekend in January. More than half a million responses were received and a count showed precisely how this year’s winter – the coldest in 30 years – has taken a toll of the nation’s small songbirds, such as the goldcrest and the coal tit.
From The Guardian
Spring about to ‘explode’ in Britain, conservationists say Experts believe release of pent-up energy after such a long, hard winter could produce the most spectacular spring in years
From The BBC
Why is it going to be a stunning spring? I’s been the longest and coldest winter in years, but the pay-off will be a spectacular spring, conservationists say
Conclusion : An early spring is climate, but apparently a late spring is just weather. When can we expect retractions from The Guardian, BBC and Real Climate?
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Spring just won’t come here in N. Calif. At least not the kind that leaves all the snow and wind and rain behind.
Kate (02:33:37) : “’… experts believe release of pent-up energy …’ This means they are not experts. There is no such thing as ‘pent-up energy’. How stupid do they think we are?”
Stupid enough to believe one of the worst winters in recent history was nothing but ‘a cold snap.’
rbateman (10:23:27) :”Spring just won’t come here in N. Calif. At least not the kind that leaves all the snow and wind and rain behind.”
Apparently S Cal is stealing it from you.
ANAHEIM, Calif., March 16 (UPI) — A warm spell in Southern California has brought unseasonable Santa Ana winds along with warnings to motorists on one Orange County highway, officials said.
Gusts up to 41 mph in local canyons affected drivers on the 241 Toll Road in Anaheim Tuesday, The Orange County Register reported.
Santa Ana winds caused by high pressure over the western United States are most common between October and January, but can occur later in the winter, the newspaper said.
The combination of high pressure and strong, dry winds pushed temperatures to higher-than-normal mid-to-upper 80s in Orange County Tuesday and the warm spell is expected to last until Friday, forecasters said.
Tom W (10:23:12):
“It’s about global warming…”
Wrong. Global warming/cooling is normal and natural.
But “catastrophic anthropogenic runaway global warming” is a fabricated scare story, invented by climate alarmists to divert the public’s tax money into their pockets, and it has been very successful doing that.
But the whole scam is bogus. Here’s your “catastrophic global warming”: click
Also, didn’t you just make the point that climate is local? Thanx for the local Anaheim report.
The hoaxers have got to do something about the Internet and it’s keeping things around for so long. It makes for so many inconvenient truths that even Al Gore is now crying. In the old days when there was just three network channels and the local newspaper, propaganda was so much easier to distribute.
Resist all net neutrality government power grabs, it leads to government control and censorship of the Internet. And why would anyone want to censor free speech?
Rmember the menace of droughts in the amazon basin?
How does this seem? …FLOODS INSTEAD, AL BABY!!:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=a2f2YPa.9tVw
Smokey (10:33:26) : “Wrong. Global warming/cooling is normal and natural.”
To tell you the truth I’m not much interested in unsubstantiated declarative sentences.
Tom W (10:01:22) :
Just as it is not necessary to poll an entire country to get a fairly accurate estimate of voters intensions, it is also not necessary to know the temperature over an entire hemisphere to get a good estimate of the hemispheric temperature.
“Dewey Defeats Truman” comes to mind. And you didn’t say the temperature in the Southern Hemisphere in 2009 was higher than that which was *estimated* since the 1880s, you said it higher than the temperature for the entire SH — and, considering there was only random sampling of both the air and water temps in random locations which *didn’t* include Antarctica, we return to my original question: how do you determine the *actual* temperature of an entire hemisphere when you don’t have the assets to measure it?
Climate science is settled – the world is warming
Published Tuesday April 6th, 2010
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/1007536
Time to pack it in lads…
Tom W (10:44:46) :
Climatologist Roy Spencer: No one has falsified the theory that the observed temperature changes are a consequence of natural variability.
Substantiated.
Unless, of course, you are a climatologist?
Didn’t think so.
Tom W (10:44:46) :
Smokey (10:33:26) : “Wrong. Global warming/cooling is normal and natural.”
To tell you the truth I’m not much interested in unsubstantiated declarative sentences.
Except when you make them?
I had a lovely early spring here. Positive proof of global warming. Of course last year when we stayed below freezing throughout all of April with the lakes frozen over well into May that was just weather.
Do I have that right?
I am so glad someone else is having a cold year this year. We had two years of absolutely brutal springs I needed a nice one
Do I have that right?
Tom W (10:48:53) :
Climate science is settled – the world is warming
Published Tuesday April 6th, 2010
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/opinion/article/1007536
Time to pack it in lads…
I can only presume you’re being facetious. From the article:
He wrote an *opinion* piece. And, considering he doesn’t even know that plankton and krill don’t use calcium carbonate in their shells, his opinion on the subject is worth exactly squat.
Smokey (11:01:45) :
Bill Tuttle (10:57:17),
See post @10:56:00.
You lose.
You got to play while I got stuck in moderation! Not fair!
I need to reclaim the language of democracy and
Oh. Wrong thread. Never mind.
Bill Tuttle,
My apologies. I misunderstood that as an attack. I’ve asked my friendly mod to delete my post.
Bill Tuttle (10:46:27) : “Dewey Defeats Truman” comes to mind. ”
Sure there is always a chance that error is large. The odds however favour small error. Without additional evidence it would be foolish to assume otherwise
“considering there was only random sampling of both the air and water temps in random locations which *didn’t* include Antarctica,”
Read this and get back to me
hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/HadCRUT3_accepted.pdf
no early spring here.
2ft of new snow, and looks like the lakes will still be frozen over for opening day of fishing season.
usually before opening day the FD does a first aid refresher, this year we are doing an ICE RESCUE refresher
😉
No apology necessary — no harm, no foul. I’d already figured it for a misunderstanding.
Tom W (10:48:53) :
230 glaciers in the Himalayas are growing. The IPCC says they will all be gone by 2035.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/himalayas-glaciers-shrink.html
Here is a math problem for you. How long will it take for a glacier that is growing to disappear? Those IPCC scientists are first rate, if you consider failing 3rd grade math to be acceptable.
Jimbo (04:29:27) brought us this link:
BBC – 16 March 2010
“The Woodland Trust say they have uncovered striking evidence that spring flowering is weeks behind.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid…
Tooooo funny!!! What “striking evidence” did they ‘uncover??? Did they shovel off the snow to uncover it?
BBC = Monty Python’s Ministry of Truth.
Steve Goddard (11:37:02) : Tom W (10:48:53) :
230 glaciers in the Himalayas are growing. The IPCC says they will all be gone by 2035.
That was Working Group II. Working Group I, the scientific committee, said no such thing.
Here is a math problem for you. How long will it take for a glacier that is growing to disappear? Those IPCC scientists are first rate, if you consider failing 3rd grade math to be acceptable.
I guess that’s why they weren’t on the scientific committee.
Jimbo (11:39:05) : If you think linking to one article means you have ‘won’ the debate then you must be pretty new to WUWT.
I fear you are right. Scientific arguments seem to have little impact here.
Tom W (10:48:53) :
Thomas Mueller says
Continued fossil fuel consumption will continue to raise ocean acidity levels to as much as 150 per cent the preindustrial level over the next century and a half. As a result, marine ecosystems will collapse in our lifetime because of ocean acidification.
When plankton, krill, crustaceans and mollusks vanish as their calcium carbonate shells dissipate, so too will the food web that sustains marine ecosystems globall
Unfortunately Mueller has little understanding of the Kolmogorov complexity of biological systems eg Kolmogorov, A. N., I.G. Petrovskii, and N.S. Piskunov
A Study of the Equations of Diffusion Accompanied by an Increase in the Amount of Matter, and Its Application to a Biological Problem 1937
Here there is a significant constraint embedded in the Biology this is called evolution and is well understood eg Darwin 1856.
A good example is Hendricks and Rickaby
Abstract. An urgent question for future climate, in light of
increased burning of fossil fuels, is the temperature sensitivity
of the climate system to atmospheric carbon dioxide
(pCO2). To date, no direct proxy for past levels of pCO2 exists
beyond the reach of the polar ice core records. We propose
a new methodology for placing a constraint on pCO2
over the Cenozoic based on the physiological plasticity of
extant coccolithophores. Specifically, our premise is that the
contrasting calcification tolerance1 of various extant species
of coccolithophore to raised pCO2 reflects an “evolutionary
memory” of past atmospheric composition. The different
times of evolution of certain morphospecies allows an upper
constraint of past pCO2 to be placed on Cenozoic timeslices.
Further, our hypothesis has implications for the response of
marine calcifiers to ocean acidification. Geologically “ancient”
species, which have survived large changes in ocean
chemistry, are likely more resilient to predicted acidification.
In terms of underlying genetic mechanisms, currently, little
is known about genetic controls on calcification (e.g.
Marsh, 2003; Nguyen et al., 2005), or the detailed photosynthetic
mechanism of coccolithophores. Coupling of calcification
with species-specific Rubisco specificity provides
a tangible means to preserve the CO2/O2 composition at the
time of origin of photosynthetic phyla (Giordano et al., 2005;
Tcherkez et al., 2006). The preservation of calcification ability
at high pCO2 in C. pelagicus may occur through genetic
redundancy (Wagner, 1999), or variance in genetic expression
whilst the adaptation of E. huxleyi and C. leptoporus to
the modern low pCO2 niche could be associated with gene
inactivation of pathways associated with high pCO2 (Hittinger
et al., 2004). The high proportion of duplicate genes
within plant and algae genomes is indicative of a high rate
of retention of duplicate genes (Lynch and Connery, 2000).
Gene duplications contribute to the establishment of new
gene functions, and may underlie the origin of evolutionary
novelty. Duplicate genes can exist stably in a partially redundant
state over a protracted evolutionary period (Moore
and Purugganan, 2005). A half-life to silencing and loss of
a plant gene duplicate is estimated at 23.4 million years such
that remnant duplicate genes, which can be reactivated by
environmental conditions to encode calcification within coccolithophores
under “ancestral” conditions representative of
60 Ma, appears reasonable.
Leone (03:37:59) :
I agree. Here’s a few links to show them. Sorry, don’t have the time to argue with them myself.
Per J. Lean et al
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/irradiance.gif
Data source for graph: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/solar_variability/lean2000_irradiance.txt
Draw a linear regression with the data. The slope was actually greater with some satellite TSI instruments (TIM I think) reading 1367+ in late 1990’s and is now per SOURCE below 1361 and sometimes touching 1359 W/m2. It’s something like this, ~1367 W/m2 / ~1361 W/m2 * ~288 K – ~288 K = ~1.27 ºC. There’s your “sooner river breaking” date across the ~300 years. And point to them the up tick since ~2003 at end of cycle 23. They won’t believe you but at least you told them the some truth.