From the “weather is not climate” department, more chilling news from the southern hemisphere.
Guest post By Alexandre Aguiar
MetSul Weather Center via ICECAP
A brutal and historical cold snap has so far caused 80 deaths in South America, according to international news agencies. Temperatures have been much below normal for over a week in vast areas of the continent. In Chile, the Aysen region was affected early last week by the worst snowstorm in 30 years. The snow accumulation reached 5 feet in Balmaceda and the Army was called to rescue people trapped by the snow.
In Argentina, the snow in the region of Mendoza, famous for its winery, was described by local
meteorologists as the heaviest in a decade. The temperature in the morning of July 16th was the lowest in the city of Buenos Aires since 1991: -1.5C. The cold snap caused a record demand for energy and Argentina had to import electricity from Brazil. Many industries in Argentina were shut down due to gas shortage.
It snowed in nearly all the provinces of Argentina, an extremely rare event. It snowed even in the western part of the province of Buenos Aires and Southern Santa Fe, in cities at sea level.
The most famous beach of Argentina, Mar del Plata, was whitened by the snow in the morning of July 15th, a scene only seen in recent memory in 1991, 2004 and 2007. See below:
The snow was heavy even in Northern Argentina. In Santiago Del Estero, according to media reports, some areas experienced snow for the first time in living memory. In the province of Tucuman, some town saw snow for the first time since 1921 (Gaceta de Tucuman newspaper).
In Uruguay, there were widespread reports of sleet and even snow mixed with rain in towns in the Southern and Eastern part of the country, even in the capital Montevideo. At leas two deaths have been blamed in Uruguay on the low temperatures. Hospitals were packed with patients with respiratory illness.
In Paraguay, at least nine people died due to the cold weather in only 3 days. Cattle were very affected and one thousand animals died of hypothermia. In Bolivia, dozes of people died in consequence of the very low temperatures. In some areas of the nation the cold period was described as the worst in 15 years. It even snowed in the Chaco of Bolivia, one of warmest areas of South America, where the local population never saw snow before. Classes were suspended in Bolivia for three days to prevent more cold related deaths (El Nacional newspaper from Bolivia).
Southern Brazil was also very affected by the cold air eruption from the Southern Pole. Last week the temperature dropped to -7.8C in the city of Urupema, Santa Catarina. In Rio Grande do Sul, in the hills of the state, temperature felt to -4.9C in the city of Cambara. In the state of Paran�, the low was -6C. Only the nights were freezing, but the afternoons were very cold. In some days, temperature failed to reach 5C in many towns, the first time in a decade. Flurries observed in towns of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana and sleet was also reported in Western Santa Catarina.
The most striking scenes came from the top of Morro da Igreja, a 1800 meters elevation in the state of Santa Catarina. The area recorded snow and freezing rain. As anyone can imagine, freezing rain is extremely rare in Southern Brazil. The event was witnessed and photographed by weather observers from MetSul Marcelo Albieri and Caio Souza.
On July 14th, in the afternoon hours, temperatures in the hills of Rio Grande do Sul state in Southern Brazil were lower than in Marambio, the main polar base of Argentina in Antarctica. In Central Brazil, in the tropics, the long streak of cold days was considered extremely rare. It was so cold that thousand of animals died in this region of Brazil known for its cattle, just South of the Amazon basin.
Maybe the most notable fact took place in North South America. The cold reached Amazon and temperatures felt to as low as 7C in towns in the Amazon Forest in the states of Acre and Rondonia. Temperature even felt in Roraima, where the state capital Boa Vista record 20C (normal lows are 25C) and the wind were blowing from the South.
Boa Vista is located at 2 degrees North of latitude, so the influence of the Antarctic cold blast crossed the Equator line and reached towns in the Northern Hemisphere. It would be the same of a cold snap from the Arctic crossing the entire North America continent, the Caribbean and reaching North Brazil in cities at 2 degrees South of latitude as Santarem, a bizarre situation.
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North America has record highs, South America has record lows! There is only one true answer to this! The Earth is tipping over! AH!
O/T
http://www.iaes.info/pdf/ENVI_REL_EN_%20HEARING_DOC2.pdf
This EU proposal is very scary given that they believe AGW to be very real.
Why don’t you show your readers the way I “phrased it”? You ought to withdraw that remark that I was “mocking people’s deaths” or show them what I wrote and let them decide for themselves if they agree with you.
[because it’s deleted. if you are unhappy with the policy of snipping off color comments, don’t comment. others get the same treatment. read the policy page ~mod]
Alex Baker says:
July 20, 2010 at 10:39 pm
I believe some cattle ranches in South America are similar to the Aussie Cattle Stations in that they can be thousands upon thousands of hectares in size.
Cattle are usually turned out for months on end to fend for themselves until they are rounded up, usually by helicopter.
So the answer to your question “were they grossly incompetent or unfortunate”, I suspect might be “unfortunate”.
I’m in no PC mood after an article like that, breaks my heart and it goes out to all suffering down south… cold is the real killer.
I’m just waiting for some of these AGW saints to come forward and say how bad they feel for these people dying from the cold, the 1000’s of cattle, the some 2,700,000 cattle in Mongolia last year, the hundreds who died from the cold in the N.H. last winter, all of the hardship caused by soaring food prices it caused, that they realize the magnitude or even magnitudes greater the death caused by cold compared to mearly being hot in the summer. Come on AGWers, you saintly environmentalists, show us your true hearts and how you suggest legislation to ease these future strikes of cold.
If the sun doesn’t perk up in 2011, which is what my rough calendar says when cycle 24 should actually begin, and it still might be a small one, we are going to be thankful for every p.p.m. of CO2 we have in this atmosphere (even though I now don’t think it physically make one iota change in the temperature due to H2O’s override, but, larger plant growth will be a good thing at least).
john,
The 80 deaths in the report are from hypothermia. Sadly cold exacerbates many medical conditions so there’ll tens of thousands more deaths.
For example here’s excess winter deaths in England and Wales (40 million population): http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
Many more people die in winter than in summer every year, 2008/09 (the winter before last) was a little bit cold for a few weeks and more than 10,000 extra deaths occurred. The unusually mild winters in the UK this decade easily saved 100,000 lives.
Being an incorrigible sceptic, I’ve checked several meteorological stations in the region (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay), and all of them show average or slightly below average (-1°F) temperatures for July so far. So it’s correct to speak of a cold ‘snap’.
On the other hand, temperatures in central and eastern Europe have been running well above average (up to +10°F in Russia), and it looks like several records might be broken.
I was pondering this the other day. Came to the conclusion that climate is NOT the average of weather over a time period, it’s the integral over both time and space (weather is a local thing, climate large regions. Weather is a moment in time, climate a long duration.). The whole notion that temperature (a single factor in weather) says anything about the integral of weather over both time and space is very broken; from a philosophy of mathematics point of view.
For folks mathematically inclined, more details here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/derivative-of-integral-chaos-is-agw/
The basic point is that temperatures are point data at a point in time, a single factor of weather (that includes, for example, the water cycle). And we take temps, then average them as a weather PROXY and then further do averaging over both time and space as a proxy integration of weather to get a pseudo-climate proxy, then do a bad job of taking the derivative with respect to time (via the offset between averages in two different time periods) to get dC/dt (change of climate over time).
And that is just broken mathematics. (Why integrate over time in one way, then take the derivative in another, accumulating loads of errors? Why not just integrate over space instead? As one example brokenness… )
But yes, the question really comes down to “what length of time and distance of space is sufficient to the integral of weather such that it represents climate?”.
But my conclusion is that doing the integral (badly) of weather to get climate, then doing the derivative of that (equally badly) to get dC/dt is really just showing that weather changes.
At the end of the day, the ‘climate codes’ like GIStemp are just showing that weather changes, and doing it by a very poor method.
That’s what the mathematics says to me.
(Note: Not the arithmetic, they have other issues there. This is the fundamental relationship between the objects they manipulate and what they mean. Mathematical philosophy.)
in sydney the Russian heat wave is in the news but no news on the cold snap in Argentina { don,t you think its a bit strange }
Sorry Antony but everything may point to a cold snap in South America and the pictures may look good with all that snow but i’ve put the tempreture records for South America through my AGW filter and its retuning the hottest winter on record for South America and you can’t argue with me as my AGW filter is endorsed by 95%* of scientists with a genral consensus of ‘He’s right, Antony’s wrong’.
*Statistic’s made up to improve my grant.
James Sexton –
I did read an article recently about weather in South Africa – people attending the world cup were complaining about the unusual cold. Not something they were expecting when it’s the “hottest year ever”.
@FergalR says: July 21, 2010 at 12:11 am
You are absolutely right. And when the “excess deaths” statistics for South America are analysed, it will make the reported “80” look like a drop in the ocean. In part, these computerised analyses are very problematic and I’m sure that, were you to add up all the similar projections for deaths in the UK due to pollution from cars / passive smoking / obesity / excess alcohol consumption / food poisoning and fifty more things the do-gooders want to tighten control on, it would suggest that the UK’s population should now be a negative number.
But before “John” and other warmist trolls run away, they should check out:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
This “30,000” deaths caused by a heat wave in Europe in 2003 is regularly quoted as “proof” of Anthropogenic Global Warming and as justification for “urgent action” to change the energy base of our economy.
So warm snap in Europe = climate (and mankind’s fault)
Cold snap in South America (or the coldest winter for at least a generation in the UK) = weather (and we don’t even need to consider this. It will be “rotten” cold, no doubt)
And when I look at my burgeoning energy bills, I’m not supposed to get cross?
“Meanwhile, hundreds died in a Russian heat wave this last few days and people reading this blog wouldn’t even know about it. What’s up with that?”
The cause of death in a majority of those incidents was actually put down to drowning caused by intoxication as Russians downed LOTS of vodka and then went swimming,
…..or rather… didn’t.
http://www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=105117&code=Ne2&category=2
(Source for the Russians drowning due to being drunk story)
“Which is more unprecedented? Russia recorded it’s highest temperature ever in some areas, correct?”
No. Just the highest in a long time. Highest ever suggests higher than a few thousand years ago when temps were an average of 5 degrees higher than now. Or millions of years ago with temps 10 degrees higher.
Highest on record of a few hundred years, possibly.
Although I have not looked at the current Southern hemispheric cold records, I do remember the last Northern hemispheric winter where the coldest temperatures on record were recorded in places across the USA, Europe, Russia and Asia. And where we are now occasionally seeing the hot records broken by a degree or two in some places, the cold records were broken by as many as 10 degrees.
Have lived here in Brisbane Australia for thirty years and EVERY winter has has the westerlies blow in from around the end of June to almost the end of August. These winds bring cool days and cloudless blue skies. This is the first year for us that we are still waiting. It is cold and dreary every day, and hardly any sunshine. Oh where are the snows of yesteryear?
From the “just weather and not climate department” we see that it’s not just South America feeling the chill – see Africa and Australia.
I wish to cast people’s memory back to this past winter when we saw snow in the snow in the mediterranean, Tanomah in south western Saudi Arabia and the ‘warm’ snow of Florida including another 50 US states.
—–
With the summer heatwave we have been getting endless alarm over global warming. These warmists just can’t see the signs of cooling. Don’t be alarmed either way as warming and cooling fears are nothing new. The next year will be exciting either way.
Over sixty years ago, I learned that weather has always sprung nasty surprises on the unwary, the unprepared or the stupid. Farmers and those whose economic survival depend on such information in New Zealand know that heavy lamb losses due to sudden extremes of weather more typical of midwinter can occur during during the middle of summer. They also know that climate tends to be cyclical in nature but the cycles are so complex and interrelated that Man can only understand the most obvious of such cycles. This knowledge translates into lunar calendars unique to local microclimates for the growing of traditional crops such as the various cultivars of Kumera, the Polynesian sweet potato common to the islands and coastal regions of the Pacific.
Any person who has ever worked on the land in ‘temperate’ climes understands that cold is both an immediate and long-term killer, while warmth is both benign and beneficial.
This comment from the Australian BOM regarding the sub surface temperatures is telling.
“The map for the 5 days ending 19 July shows a large volume of cooler than normal water evident below the surface of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The sub-surface of the ocean is more than 4°C cooler than normal for this time of year in the central Pacific. When compared with two weeks ago, the central Pacific has cooled.”
Correction:
“including the other 49 US states.”
I said 50, my bad. 🙁
Last night it was snowing on Mar de la Plata
That should make Al Gore a persona non grata
But Reid he will still
Put forth “cap and trade” bill
The premise of which is much falsified data.
Just The Facts says: “Antarctic Oscillation (AAO) […] Note that June had the 2nd highest positive anomaly in the historical record, second only to July 1979: http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/aao/monthly.aao.index.b79.current.ascii.table “
See May 1989.
Juan says:
July 20, 2010 at 11:06 pm
“Which is more unprecedented? Russia recorded it’s highest temperature ever in some areas, correct? ”
The Russian high temp is the highest recorded in 130 years. So its NOT unprecedented.
“The cold reached Amazon and temperatures felt to as low as 7C in towns in the Amazon Forest in the states of Acre and Rondonia.”
What was that about Amazon’s sensitivity to rising temperatures? The danger is from cold my friends not tropical rainforest type warm. :o)
Stephan says:
July 20, 2010 at 8:12 pm
“Its quite common for these cold snaps to occur here. I remember 1974 when the entire coffee crop was destroyed.[…]”
In 1976, there was also a catstrophic winter in Germany. And the PDO was in its cool phase. That’s where we’re headed.
And i wonder… The ones who still carry the fear of global warming inside them, they will have larger and larger problems justifying their belief. They cling on to the AMSU AQUA5 channel
( http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/ )
or to GISTEMP or whatever data set that still gives them confirmation. Meanwhile, the Bilderberg group discusses global cooling.
http://bilderbergmeetings.org/index.php
(not much to see there).
Here’s a plank for you: CO2 does indeed absorb some LWIR. But the effect drowns in the absorptive spectrum of H2O. That’s why the expected warming doesn’t take place. It’s not a shame to have been wrong.