By Steve Goddard
The experts at East Anglia and CRU told us in 2000 that :
(March, 2000) According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, says ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow. Via the internet, they might wonder at polar scenes – or eventually “feel” virtual cold.
The 255 experts at the AAAS denouncing “climate deniers” in an open letter described this past winter in these cleverly sarcastic terms :
The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
I appreciate that government bureaucrats believe that there is no world outside Washington, yet nature has given us the opportunity to grade both the predictive and observational skills of the experts. And it looks like they deserve a rather poor grade. According to data collected by Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, this past October through March period was the snowiest on record in the Northern Hemisphere – with an average monthly snow cover of 39,720,106 km2. Second place occurred in 1970 at 39,574,224 km2.
‘
We also know that the past decade had the snowiest winters on record.
A month ago I discussed an AGW sacred cow – Glacier National Park. At that time, a WUWT reader (Craig Moore) expressed his concern about the lack of snowcover in Montana this year. The good news for Craig is that as of yesterday, snowpack in Montana is 98% of normal. California is 117% of normal. Arizona is 175% of normal. Wyoming is 101% of normal, etc.
Every good and conscientious citizen knows that snow cover is disappearing due to global warming. Google turns up over 100,000 hits on that topic. This is what the disappearing snowcover looked like in my neighborhood yesterday morning.
With lots more cold and snow on the way.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp1.html
Ulric Lyons says at 6:54 pm: So as the Older Dryas was the coldest part of the last Ice age sequence, we must have been building up more and more cloud over 98,000yrs yes?
No, less and less cloud cover. The colder it got, the less evaporation, the less water vapor, and the fewer clouds. As the Wisconsin Glaciation went on, it got dryer and dryer and colder and colder. The Older Dryas (~14,500 BP), or possibly the Oldest Dryas (~18,000 BP), is thought to be the coldest stadial period in the last glaciation cycle. The Younger Dryas (12,800 to 11,500) was a little bit warmer.
Between the Dryas stadials were the Bølling/Allerød interstadials, times of sharp rises in global temperatures that were completely anomalous given the more or less steady decline of the previous ~100,000 years. Then the Younger Dryas ended and the Holocene began with a rapid warming of ~15 deg C (in Greenland).
It’s a real mystery as to what caused the sharp temp rise out of those coldest stadial periods. One thing we know is that the Milankovitch insolation was coming on. The peak was ~10,000 years ago. But the insolation had been increasingly slowly and steadily for thousands of years, while the deglaciation was sharp and radical, albeit staggered around the Dryas stadials.
So why the sudden extreme change? Basic dynamics says that the positive feedbacks that caused increasing cooling must have suddenly ceased and been replaced by a positive feedback system going in the other direction. At some point the system flipped and went the other way. One theory, and it is just a theory, is that the positively reinforcing bright albedo must have shifted to a dark one, somehow because of the increasing insolation, and then suddenly warmth broke out all over.
The albedo theory is an old one. It is generally accepted that ice sheet growth requires a positive feedback, the most obvious of which is that snow and ice have a much lower albedo than other ground covers. Ice and snow reflect more radiation back into space, thus cooling the climate. A drying atmosphere with less water vapor and fewer clouds are also a positive feedbacks for cooling.
Something changed all that suddenly, and the most obvious conjecture is that it was the albedo that changed. If you have a better theory, that’s fine. I’d like to hear it. BTW, I’m sure it wasn’t CO2. There was no CO2 burst before the warm bursts. The increase in CO2 came later — it was caused by the warming, not the other way around.
REPLY: People like yourself who are publicly funded and who have public email addresses, using public infrastructure are held to a higher standard than regular citizens here. If they are doing work on the public’s dime, and commenting here doing work hours (as you do) I have no compunction about holding them to a higher standard of transparency than regular commenters. AGW Fan boy “Eli Rabbett” who also works at a university gets the same treatment here as you do, so don’t feel like you are being singled out in the public sector.
BTW, as of this writing, you have 1392 comments on WUWT, so kindly withdraw your whining about censorship, you are in the top 10 commenters here.
I don’t have much respect for your position in this Phil, and I think your anonymous commenting here on the public dime is insulting to those of us that support universities through our taxes and donations. But you’ve got an opportunity to take the high road here, and put your name to your words. I’m betting you don’t have the character to do so.
But if you do, I’ll eat my words and apologize. Your move, public employee. -Anthony Watts
Evidently you didn’t read my response to your last comment.
I am not a ‘public employee’ and am not ‘commenting here on the public dime’ and I’d be very surprised if you were making donations to my (private) university. I do not have a ‘public email address’, nor use ‘public infrastructure’ (well no more than anyone else), in fact I mainly post from home over Verizon Fios which I pay for.
I was commenting on the fact that a number of my recent posts failed to show up here. Since I was restricted based on your mistaken belief that I was a public employee I look forward to being treated like the rest of the private sector.
REPLY: So Phil, your university has never, ever taken any public money then? Your department has never been funded in any way for any research by public monies? Totally private in every way, not one penny of taxpayer money, ever?
If so, prove it. Also, yes your email is public, right there on your university page with your name and phone number. Meanwhile, I’m not changing how your posts are moderated. You have a chance to rise above. Take it. Otherwise quit your whining. I’m tired of your constant telling us how wrong we are about everything without taking any personal responsibility for your own words. -A
Let’s try again: weather vs. climate [days vs. years!]
Climate: long term trend
Weather: sawtooth variations about this long-term trend curve
Weather sawteeth cancel each other out in the climate long run.
No, I did not invent these definitions, which have been used forever – but are obviously not understandable for some visitors of this site.
dr. schweinsgruber
http://friendsofginandtonic.org/
In the next lesson we talk about: what is a straw man.
Dr. Schweinsgruber says, May 13, 2010 at 3:06 pm:
“Bruce Cobb,
Oh, and speaking of the 3% CO2 in the atmosphere having no or little effect. Try mustard gas at low concentrations….”
3% CO2 in the atmosphere??
So much for “Dr.” Schweingruber. What’s the PhD in, doc? Sociology?
Phil.
Did you notice that the two lowest April snow extents were 1968 and 1990 respectively?
It does appear that spring snow shifted in 1987, most likely due to some change in ocean currents.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=1&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=4
dr. schweinsgruber …
<bloclquote cite=""Let’s try again: weather vs. climate [days vs. years!]
Climate: long term trend
Weather: sawtooth variations about this long-term trend curve
Weather sawteeth cancel each other out in the climate long run.
No, I did not invent these definitions, which have been used forever – but are obviously not understandable for some visitors of this site.
I completely understand the difference between weather and climate, thank you very much.
The trouble being that what the AGW scientists are doing is using a computer model to try to predict what the climate is going to do, decades from now, based on percieved trends now plus the conviction that atmospheric CO2 content is the primary driver of temperature for the planet.
The models are programmed like that – “more CO2 == more heat energy retained in the atmosphere”. Then the models are also told that CO2 is increasing, and that it will keep increasing ad infinitum. The models – having been told that more CO2 equals a warmer planet – have no choice but to declare “WARMING!”. They’re programmed that way because that is the AGW theory.
So what do these scientists get when they ask of their models “what will the climate be doing in 10/20/50 years time?”, the models will say “Yeah it gets hotter, OMG look at how hot it gets!”, and the disaster stories of the future are pumped out to the press and the politicians, who ALL love this stuff. It filters down into the education system and a new generation of kids get taught about how CO2 is evil, will kill the planet etc. etc. Now these kids grow up, some of them becoming scientists all with the belief that CO2 is bad for the planet. Some of them may become climate scientists and the cycle repeats itself.
It’s a positive feedback loop all based on an unproven theory of CO2 as the main cause of global warming.
But lets get back onto your trends – it has been stated here in the recent past that obervations are showing that the global temperature trend in the last decade has been either flat or is trending downwards.
In other words, dr. , your sawtooth is now beginning to travel back down.
I say – we do not have enough good data to either produce a DECENT climate model OR to say what will happen to the climate in 10 years time let alone 50 or 100.
Ugh, html tag failure!
Dammit anthony, when will you add in a preview plugin? 🙂
(Also, there are very decent comment plugins available too which would make it easier for blockquoting, formatting etc.).
REPLY: Answering this for the ten gazillionth time, this blog is hosted on wordpress.com and they don’t allow plugins for security reasons. I’d have to get my own server and run an installed copy of WordPress.
Climate Audit tried this, and it failed to handle traffic. So not going there. -A
Well Kevin,
The sawteeth would be really going down, if the measurements of outgoing radation that support the CO2 forcing were fudged or the internal variability was larger than and of opposite sign of the CO2 forcing (which is likely not the case for a longer period of time). But arguing from a position of ignorance by ignoring the hundreds and thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles published every year, or not being aware of them, will not change the laws of physics. If you consider the scientific work on this invalid/nonexisting based on [snip, let’s just not cast about labels or comparisons like that. Stay civil ~ ctm ] Do you homework before crying out nonsense. And what do you know about all the computer programs being run [crude generalisation; do you know all the parameters of each modelling program?] and what do they have to do with the measured outgoing radiation?
Dr. Schweinsgruber
http://friendsofginandtonic.org/
R. Gates says:
May 13, 2010 at 11:02 am
“The coldest place on earth (Antarctica) is not the snowiest, but in fact, one of the driest in terms of precipitation. Most of the snow that blows around down there is from the ground blizzards blowing it around.”
Then it makes ice cores from which extraordinarily accurate scientific findings about global temperatures can be extracted.
Tommy May 13, 2010 at 1:29 pm
I note you have faith, enjoy.
jaymam May 13, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Exactly, where are the experiments confirming “heat trapping”???
My simple (minded?) suggestion; a tethered balloon carrying
a downward looking device tuned to say the 15 micron IR band.
An IR video camera may be able to do this (suitably filtered)?
Launch the balloon from say the middle of an airfield and allow
it to rise to say 3,000 meters and haul it down again.
The changing “brightness” of the surface with relation to altitude
should tell you something. Won’t cost much. Some camera buffs may
already have the equipment.
Kevin Cave says:
May 13, 2010 at 9:14 pm
“…..I say – we do not have enough good data to either produce a DECENT climate model OR to say what will happen to the climate in 10 years time let alone 50 or 100.”
__________________________________________________________
Actually with the majority of the climate “scientists” stuck looking at CO2 as THE major diver, the chances of climate “scientists” actually identifying all the major factors effecting climate are vanishingly small. If you have CO2 blinkers on you will never acknowledge seeing any observations that do not fit AGW. Therefore the climate models have no hope of being useful because the scientists are not looking for answers – they already “found them”.
Anthony…
Ah, I didn’t know WordPress.com disallow plugins. (I did know this site was hosted there).
Please accept my apologies. At the moment I run wordpress blogs on my not insignificant server at home (2 for me one for my wife), where I have the luxury of using plugins. If I ever get to the point where the traffic gets overpowering I’ll consider a hosted server. 🙂
Regards.
dr. schweinsgruber
You are doing a lot of talking, but are completely failing to address the fact that this past October-March was the snowiest on record and the past decade was the snowiest on record. Unless you want to shovel my driveway with peer-reviewed papers, I don’t see any relevance to the article. Peer review doesn’t create a barbecue summer or a mild winter.
Nature couldn’t care less about the ” thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles published every year.’
R. Gates,
Its been a long day for you. I’m only just now getting to this post after a busy day at work, but I see a good number of your posts all day. Sorry its taken me so long to offer comment. With regard to your comment before noon…
“Now if the winter had been Cold and Dry, then I might be thinking that AGW is showing signs of being wrong, but the fact that we’ve had so much snow, means we’ve got lots of heat in the system evaporating all that snow, and record snow would mean record heat (which is exactly what we’ve seen for the first few months of 2010).”
You must realize, of course, that California is starting to look at how to fund massive infrastructure investments to prevent the cataclysmic projections that AGW adaptation theorists say are threatening the West Coast. These include building sea walls to stave off increasing sea levels (never mind neglecting an inferior levee system that may not provide adequate protection of the new development in flood plains in northern CA) and finding ways to protect against draught because of lower snowfalls and snow pack available for water supply.
So this year the snow pack is almost 150% of normal. Does that mean we had record heat that caused the snow? Where was it? Will we be flooded when the heat finally materializes and melts the snow pack? Will the levies protect us from the increased runoff flows? Are we spending our monies to protect against the right potential catastrophes?
And as to your later, but still early afternoon post…
“My general point is that it takes warmth to provide the energy for evaporating the moisture of snowstorms, and warmer air to hold that moisture and bring it to Colorado. Places like Antarctica are dry specifically because they are so cold.”
Really? So during periods of glaciation, when snow builds ice structures of glaciers up to twenty thousand or more feet high over 100,000 years, this is surface snow blow? How do the glaciers build when its cold, colder than now? These are snow drifts from warmer snow areas?
My point is that you are stretching credibility far beyond the means of many rationale people to follow. As highly as you think of yourself, this may be a situation where you should think twice before you quit your day job unless Mike or Gavin came through with an offer… or you got a new grant.
Dr. Viner wasn’t making much of a forecast when he said snow would be a thing of the past for most British children, because as he well knows the majority of the population of the UK live in England where there hasn’t been much winter snow since the end of the little ice age. In fact it only snowed four times on Christmas Day in London during the last century. It has, however snowed in Scotland every year since his prediction, and in the Welsh Hills.
I live in East Anglia where the weather in the winter was extremely cold during the winter months (It once snowed in June) and every year up to 1988 we had snow cover for 5 days or more as well as freezing winds. Then, like someone switching of a light, it stopped abruptly in 1988 and we had mild winters until this last one just passed. We had snow cover but the temperatures were certainly higher. It was this abrupt change in temperature that led me to question the whole hyphothesis of AGW, surely nature can be arbitrary, but CO2 increases in the atmosphere could hardly have caused such an abrupt change in the weather.
dr. schweinsgruber …
(I’ll save doing the blockquote thing as it’s not worth it)
I was probably shielded from a lot of invective, bile and insult by CTM (thanks CTM). Way to go to put your point across 🙂
So you’ve played the old “thousands of peer-reviewed papers” card? Is that it? Nice argument from authority there.
My response : A billion peer-reviewed papers all saying the same thing will not be proof of human-caused global warming, until the models based on your sacred papers reflect an accurate and complete model of how this planet’s climate and weather systems work.
Until that day happens, then the science is not settled, and no amount of peer-reviewed paper stacked sky-high will change that.
“My general point is that it takes warmth to provide the energy for evaporating the moisture of snowstorms, and warmer air to hold that moisture and bring it to Colorado. Places like Antarctica are dry specifically because they are so cold. ”
I don’t know why people are arguing this point, it’s quite basic science. I wouldn’t base my argument against AGW on higher snowfall.
We’ve had early snow here in Australia. About mid-April I saw a webcam image of early snow in Threadbo. Didn’t see it reported in MSM of course. Like last winter, snow falls in Australia are early again this winter.
Jon P says:
May 13, 2010 at 1:39 pm
I think that is a misunderstanding. The sentence could just as easily be interpreted as meaning ‘in the order of the snowiest’ as ‘in the order of the warmest’. Poorly constructed, but so easy to do.
This thread is brilliant. It’s now 9.30am in South Lincolnshire in the UK. I’ve spent the last 3 hours reading all the comments. Like many in the UK who woke up to this thread (If WUWT is your home page), I’ve been unable to suppress the tears of laughter running down my face to the point that I nearly did’nt make it to the bathroom on time. This morning my wife is unable to understand me – as everything I try to say is overtaken by hysterical laughter and uncontrollable muscular spasms just below my rib cage.
R Shearer’s analogy of Python’s ‘Black Knight’ likened to R.Gates is spot on. I’m so glad that R.Gates is probably tucked up in bed somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. When he awakes, he just has to watch the video.
I also support Anthony’s stand. Most of the 1,392 comments posted by Phil on WUWT seem to be about Phil’s previous defence of Phil’s previous comment about the one that Phil left before the last one he did before and after the previous one before that!
However entertaining it all is, as a faithful skeptic, can those people please calm down tomorrow and allow the real responses to Steve Goddard’s ‘snow and cold’ report to be more prominent – factual and genuine comments less shrouded by personal vendetors, arguments and contradictions. Peter Plail’s comment about the loss of his 20 year old Fig Tree ticks all the right boxes. Like him, we should all be grateful to Anthony’s blog to help convince our better judgement on the scandalous belief of the whole warmism hoax.
Can we also take a step back for the benefit of those who are just beginning their journey of skepticism. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (as mentioned in some comments):-
Most of us already know that as a heavy ‘trace-gas’, CO2 makes up only 0.038% of the whole of our Earth’s atmosphere (380 parts per million). In fractions – this means that 1/2,632th (one x two thousand six hundred and thirty tooth!) of the natural air around us is Carbon Dioxide. About 4% (of this 1/2,632th of CO2) is man-made – albeit from stuff like Alka Seltzer, Beer Brewing, carbonated drinks or when you descale your kettle.
One commenter a few months back used the swimming pool anology. I’ve taken this a step further. If you still need further persuasion, another way to look at the potential warming impact is to think of all our air born man-made CO2 as five tiny 28ml bottles of red food colouring. These are the same size as you normally buy in the supermarket and if you convert these to imperial measures, they add up to 6.4 fl.oz.
Now, mix together our five bottles of colouring with water to make one gallon of bright red liquid. [6.4 fl.oz (4%) + 153.6 fl.oz (96%) = 160 fl.oz (1 gallon) 100%]. If we now poured this into a swimming pool filled with 2,632 gallons of water (our atmosphere), would we notice any difference? No. Not a jot.
Many other people – and bodies – presented as experts actually have little or no knowledge of the science involved. Gullible politicians and gullible media men and women have repeatedly fallen for it – along with hucksters, profiteers, world-government fanatics and, of course, the EU (always searching for an excuse to increase its power) – have all latched on to it. Huge public subsidies, including the carbon-trading racket and the tragicomic building of hideous, worse-than-useless wind farms, now depend upon it. It is because the scale of vested interest is so great that too many people have too much at stake to lose if we now admit that the planet is not warming up as a result of man-made CO2 emissions.
Oh, and by the way, it’s still cold outside.
GeeJam
@gareth Phillips
‘What I have noticed this year is that the colder the weather in the North East Atlantic, the less ice appears to be in situ in the Arctic. When we get back to normal temps, the Arctic ice returns to normal for the time of year. Is there a genuine correlation?’
Response from Dandy man
First off you wouldn’t know what would come to be the norm for this year, and since by your writing the extreme pertains to this year, you have not experienced it previously, where upon you then know nothing.
So essentially you only know what you know and that pertains to only this year alone, and only that.
So what is normal in that, of your, regard?
Response from Gareth
Many thanks for that. I don’t actually know anything about this paticular possible correlation, I was just pointing out an observation to see if there were others who had observed the same this year, or indeed such a correlation at any other year. Sometimes us non-experts and our observations can occasionally contribute to the debate.
Steve, I’d keep a copy off all the Warmist’s running around crying but weather is not climate then when they start crying that we’ve had the warmist summer in 1/2 an hour you can point to there comments.
What i find funny is that the BBC has been showing some great program’s on the solar systema and the history of science, I wonder what the program’s would look like in 100 years, TV commentator “and at the beginning of 2000 science enter the dark ages again where all scientific advancement was placed into models, Science for the next 50 years was sent back to the dark age’s and has only just recovered from these prctices of guess work”
Mike D. says:
May 13, 2010 at 8:11 pm
You missed my sarcasm. Yes the Dryas are dry, makes sense eh, why did it not warm again with this progressively drying climate with decreasing cloud cover? Must be a change in the heat source I guess.
Would you like me to map out the astronomical forcing Bølling/Allerød interstadials for you?
This year being the snowiest on record is very interesting. A few posts ago on WUWT, it was pointed out that tropospheric temperatures were quite high, particularly April. It was speculated whether it had to do with ocean cooling observed in the Pacific, and transfer of heat to the atmosphere. The troposphere is showing fairly high temperatures, yet Arctic ice has recovered, and the northern hemisphere has had record snow. Any thoughts on why these apparently opposite situations coincide?
Kevin Cave says:
May 13, 2010 at 11:56 pm
“dr. schweinsgruber …
So you’ve played the old “thousands of peer-reviewed papers” card? Is that it? Nice argument from authority there.
My response : A billion peer-reviewed papers all saying the same thing will not be proof of human-caused global warming,….”
______________________________________________________________________
Thanks Kevin you beat me to it. Oh and if you are going to “argue from authority”, you better make sure that “authority” has standing. Somehow the “standing” has gotten real tarnished lately.
“…I have decided to withdraw from
participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the
part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become
politicized…..” Dr. Landsea Resignation Letter
Time Line of Climate corruption:
Here is a tiny example of the corruption:
e-mail about changes made to the US temperature record
Graph of changes made to the US temperature data
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Unable To Justify Official Temperature Record:
“…..I think the startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.
That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century….” Source
The origin of the claim of “consensus”
The corruption of science:
Professional Discourtesy:
The data upon which your “peer-reviewed” studies are ALL based has been grossly manipulated and changed and then Phil Jones “lost” the raw data so there is no going back to independently verify the global temperature record. Without independent verification of the RAW data and the math used to manipulate it there is no science just a bunch of advocacy papers.
Sorry Doc after working with scientists for over thirty years as a chemist/lab manager, I have seen too much data manipulation, fabrication and out right lies to ever believe what another scientist says without checking his data. The basic principle in “Climate Science” according to Phil Jones at the UK Parliamentary inquiry was that “Climate Science” does not provide the data along with the paper for peer review. Therefore the peer review ain’t worth bovine excrement.