Paging Joe Romm:
In fact, this record-breaking snowstorm is pretty much precisely what climate science predicts. Since one typically can’t make a direct association between any individual weather event and global warming, perhaps the best approach is to borrow and modify a term from the scientific literature and call this a “global-warming-type” deluge.
From Columbia Earth Institute, home to NASA GISS:
“This paper explains what happened, and why global warming was not really involved. It helps build credibility in climate science.”
See PR below and a link to the full paper follows. Hemisphere winter snow anomalies: ENSO, NAO and the winter of 2009/10, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L14703, doi:10.1029/2010GL043830.
Via Eurekalert: Converging weather patterns caused last winter’s huge snows
The memory of last winter’s blizzards may be fading in this summer’s searing heat, but scientists studying them have detected a perfect storm of converging weather patterns that had little relation to climate change. The extraordinarily cold, snowy weather that hit parts of the U.S. East Coast and Europe was the result of a collision of two periodic weather patterns in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds.
It was the snowiest winter on record for Washington D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia, where more than six feet of snow fell over each. After a blizzard shut down the nation’s capital, skeptics of global warming used the frozen landscape to suggest that manmade climate change did not exist, with the family of conservative senator James Inhofe posing next to an igloo labeled “Al Gore’s new home.”
After analyzing 60 years of snowfall measurements, a team of scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found that the anomalous winter was caused by two colliding weather events. El Niño, the cyclic warming of the tropical Pacific, brought wet weather to the southeastern U.S. at the same time that a strong negative phase in a pressure cycle called the North Atlantic Oscillation pushed frigid air from the arctic down the East Coast and across northwest Europe. End result: more snow.
Using a different dataset, climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came to a similar conclusion in a report released in March.
“Snowy winters will happen regardless of climate change,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty and lead author of the study. “A negative North Atlantic Oscillation this particular winter made the air colder over the eastern U.S., causing more precipitation to fall as snow. El Niño brought even more precipitation—which also fell as snow.”
In spite of last winter’s snow, the decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, with 2009 tying a cluster of other recent years as the second warmest single year. Earth’s climate has warmed 0.8°C (1.5°F) on average since modern record keeping began, and this past June was the warmest ever recorded.
While the heavy snow on the East Coast and northwest Europe dominated headlines this winter, the Great Lakes and western Canada actually saw less snow than usual—typical for an El Niño year, said Seager. Warm and dry weather in the Pacific Northwest forced the organizers of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver to lug in snow by truck and helicopter to use on ski and snowboarding slopes. The arctic also saw warmer weather than usual, but fewer journalists were there to take notes.
“If Fox News had been based in Greenland they might have had a different story,” said Seager.
While El Niño can now be predicted months in advance by monitoring slowly evolving conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic Oscillation— the difference in air pressure between the Icelandic and Azores regions—is a mostly atmospheric phenomenon, very chaotic and difficult to anticipate, said Yochanan Kushnir, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty and co-author of the study.
The last time the North Atlantic experienced a strong negative phase, in the winter of 1995-1996, the East Coast was also hammered with above average snowfall. This winter, the North Atlantic Oscillation was even more negative–a state that happens less than 1 percent of the time, said Kushnir.
“The events of last winter remind us that the North Atlantic Oscillation, known mostly for its impact on European and Mediterranean winters, is also playing a potent role in its backyard in North America,” he said.
David Robinson, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the research, said the study fills an important role in educating the public about the difference between freak weather events and human-induced climate change.
“When the public experiences abnormal weather, they want to know what’s causing it,” he said. “This paper explains what happened, and why global warming was not really involved. It helps build credibility in climate science.”
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Here’s the full paper (PDF, thanks to Leif Svalgaard)
Abstract:
Winter 2009/10 had anomalously large snowfall in the central parts of the United States and in northwestern Europe. Connections between seasonal snow anomalies and the large scale atmospheric circulation are explored. An El Niño state is associated with positive snowfall anomalies in the southern and central United States and along the eastern seaboard and negative anomalies to the north. A negative NAO causes positive snow anomalies across eastern North America and in northern Europe. It is argued that increased snowfall in the southern U.S. is contributed to by a southward displaced storm track but further north, in the eastern U.S. and northern Europe, positive snow anomalies arise from the cold temperature anomalies of a negative NAO. These relations are used with observed values of NINO3 and the NAO to conclude that the negative NAO and El Niño event were responsible for the northern hemisphere snow anomalies of winter 2009/10.
Citation: Seager, R., Y. Kushnir, J. Nakamura, M. Ting, and N. Naik (2010), Northern Hemisphere winter snow anomalies: ENSO, NAO and the winter of 2009/10, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L14703, doi:10.1029/2010GL043830.
Conclusions
[11] In winters when an El Niño event and a negative NAO combine, analyses reveal that there are positive snow anomalies across the southern U.S. and northern Europe. In western North America and the southeast U.S. snow anomalies are associated with total precipitation anomalies and southward shifts in the storm track. In the eastern U.S., north of the Southeast, and in northwest Europe positive snow anomalies are associated with the cold temperature anomalies accompanying a negative NAO. The relations between large‐scale climate indices and snow anomalies were used to attribute the snow anomalies for the 2009/10 winter with notable success in pattern and amplitude. We conclude that the anomalously high levels of snow in the mid‐Atlantic states of the U.S. and in northwest Europe this past winter were forced primarily by the negative NAO and to a lesser extent by the El Niño. The El Niño was predicted but, in the absence of a reliable seasonal timescale prediction of the NAO, the seasonal snow anomalies were not predicted. Until the NAO can be predicted (which may not be possible [Kushnir et al., 2006]), such snow anomalies as closed down Washington D.C. for a week will remain a seasonal surprise.
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And yet after all that, Columbia still had to put this piece of CYA as a subtitle in their Press Release:
However weather is driven by the Sun, according to NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/space_weather
You people do realise that when we go back to the bitter winters of the late 1960s and 1970s Warmists will say that the models predicted this and that it is a sign of ‘climate change’. They have already begun.
10 Feb 2010 – Time Magazine
“Snowstorm: East Coast Blizzard Tied to Climate Change”
28 Jan 2010 – Reuters
Extreme US winter signals climate change
So, global warming can lead to record breaking winters I see:
2 Mar 2010 – The Guardian (UK)
“British winter was the coldest for 31 years”
1 March 2010 – Met Office UK
“Coldest UK winter for over 30 years” and a year earlier it was the “Coldest winter for a decade”
6 Jan 2010 – Daily Telegraph UK
“Britain’s freezing weather: worst snow for 50 years”
24 Feb 2010 – Onearth.org
“Massive snowstorms can coincide with climate change”
Then we have this great piece from the Washington State Department of Ecology
“Warmer temperatures mean more precipitation will fall as rain, not snow”
And I haven’t even touched on the rest of Europe, Asia up to China this past winter. There must be a lot of global warming goin on in the NH. Is there more ‘global warming’ just around the corner? You’d better hope not!
rbateman: July 26, 2010 at 11:20 am
Nice article, except for this:
“In spite of last winter’s snow, the decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, with 2009 tying a cluster of other recent years as the second warmest single year.”
Proofreading error. He obviously meant “…the warmest on record for the current decade…”
Reply: The link leads to an error page.
I found his though
First Global Connection Between Earth And Space Weather Found
NASA – 12 Sept. 2006
Let’s not overlook Seager’s nasty little crack about Fox news and Greenland, for it tells us everything we need to know about the mindset of the warmists. The implication was that Fox misrepresents weather events through ignorance. Never mind that their coverage was accurate.
There was no reason for the remark, except to sling mud at conservatives who, unsurprisingly, are overwhelmingly of the skeptical persuasion.
The larger question is why virtually all the AGW proponents display marxist/fascist orientations. There are a few lefties in the skeptic community, but not the other way around.
Why should this be so? Something about control, maybe….
R Shearer says:
July 26, 2010 at 11:58 am
Ask, and you shall receive:
Global Cooling causes a drier atmosphere which shrinks due to the loss of water, lets in more heat during daytime and loses more during nightime. So, Global Cooling causes wild extremes due to the expansion of the diurnal. It’s the resulting anomalous humidity feeds, that mix with the searing daytime heat, which produces the killer hot & humid heat waves.
I just made all that nonsense up, to show how easy it is.
<i.Jimbo says:
July 26, 2010 at 1:24 pm
You people do realise that when we go back to the bitter winters of the late 1960s and 1970s Warmists will say that the models predicted this and that it is a sign of ‘climate change’. They have already begun.
Which is why the world + dog thinks they have lost it.
Everyone on all sides of this debate seems willing to admit that the global climate is a mechanism of such overwhelming complexity that it is at present and for any foreseeable future beyond the capability of human intelligence to comprehend fully. The “barely able to crawl toddler” science of the climate has amassed some evidence, mostly not very reliable, deeply flawed, and too limited spatially and temporally to be really meaningful, about global average temperature, which is one of an uncounted myriad of factors comprising the global climate, which may or may not prove to be the most significant of those factors in determining what our future weather and planet will look like.
Indeed the evidence of recent times suggests that warmer GATs will make the weather less extreme rather than more so. If you think about it logically that is what we should expect. Extreme weather phenomena are generally created by strong differentials, in temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity,etc., and what data we have suggests that the warming that has occurred is not so much the result of increasing maximum temps but of declines in the range of max to min temps.
The incredible amount of attention that is given to weather as a result of the contentiousness of the CAGW kerfuffle means that every episode of extreme weather anywhere in the world is fodder for the global climate propaganda machine, but the fact that we are now paying more attention doesn’t mean that those extreme events were not happening in the past, it means only that in the past we didn’t much care. Once you get past the scare headlines almost every story eventually gets to a line of the general form of “We haven’t seen this for XX number of years” and usually that XX is well within the historical record.
Nobody ever gets to experience the global climate. All that any of us ever see is the weather where we are at the moment. Whatever the GAT does in the future the weather where people live will continue to cycle within the same limits it always has. There will of course be events that are truly unprecedented. After all records are meant to be broken and the only climate that would be really unprecedented would be one which did not bring a number of new records each day. And yet, from what little real “evidence” we do have, that seems a more likely scenario than any that the alarmists support.
“The memory of last winter’s blizzards may be fading in this summer’s searing heat, but scientists studying them have detected a perfect storm of converging weather patterns that had little relation to climate change.”
Not here in middle of Norway 😉 We have only had two months in my part of norway with temps around normal. Rest of the months have all been way below normal including june. The summer here this year is pretty much non existant and a few days ago a town just south of here recorded the coldest july night in 100 years with night lows reaching -2.1c.
Absolutely every month this year have set multiple cold records in some way or another.
I am not looking forward to this winter.. Long term forecast shows a cold start of august as well and summer here usually ends somewhere between middle of august-early sept.
This is just another CYA paper.
Everyone made fun of the “no more snow” forecast, immediately followed by record breaking snow falls.
So, true to form, here they come with a paper covering their slimy butts, saying they can’t predict anything, and more or less snow has nothing to do with climate change.
Peter (July 26, 2010 at 11:04 am): “What many (most?) people either don’t realize, or fail to acknowledge, is that – given the same amount of energy in the earth/atmosphere system – if it’s anomalously cold (or warm) in one area then it must be anomalously warm (or cold) somewhere else.”
Not really true. There are many simple proofs of why not, but the simplest is the UAH bouncing around all the time http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ Another simple proof: because there is more albedo somewhere does not mean there is less somewhere else.
What is true about your statement is that the cold in the southern US last winter was part of a pattern that warmed the Arctic. But those did not balance each other at any point in time or over any period of time.
Q.: How can it be, that cold air was rushed from the Arctic into Northern America AND into Europe – AND into China, too, for that matter! – causing enough snow on it’s way to bring the western as well as the eastern World almost to a grinding halt for WEEKS, and STILL have enough cold air in ther Arctic left for a close recovery of the sea-ice cap against all odds?
There must have been one helluva lot of really cold air up there, to achieve all these “goals” at a time last winter, methinks! But where did it come from? Looks like this “peer-reviewed paper” doesn’t explain much, but only dislodges the source of their dilemma up North, instead.
So again: How was this humongous mass of really cold air cooled down so much, as to be able to achieve all that SIMULTANEOUSLY?
Unlikely Skeptic: A Liberal Environmentalist challenges Global Warming Theory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWVXarkPOAo
jorgekafkazar (July 26, 2010 at 12:15 pm) “Note also that heat input at point A to vaporize x megatons of seawater doesn’t equal the heat removed to create x megatons of snow at point B. Additional heat must be lost to turn x megatons of rain into snow.”
That those take place in different places is proof enough that there is no such thing as a balance in energy except to some extent over long periods of time with constant forcing and feedback.
Michael Schaeger asked:
“So again: How was this humongous mass of really cold air cooled down so much, as to be able to achieve all that SIMULTANEOUSLY”
Obviously because it’s part of a recently begun cooling trend. The writers of the article are just trying to explain it away for as long as they can.
Although they have noted a basic truth they wont accept the implications.
The fact is that global warming wasn’t involved. Global cooling was but because we are near the top of a 500 year warming part of the cycle with ocean temperatures still relatively high it is still difficult to prove that the turn has begun. Indeed we might still see a couple more upward steps before the real long term downturn but it’ll take another 25 to 30 years to see one.
It’s old news that the -NAO/+ENSO create epic East coast winters. The October NP/PNA pattern precurser during El Nino years can actually have an effect on the DJFM NAO blocking..
See My Post:
http://www.stormvista.com/forum/index.php?s=0518e223c09e17e01125430f44be2e9b&showtopic=5277
GeorgeGr said:
“My take is that this paper is more about disproving that the extreme winter is not evidence against AGW, is is “only weather”.”
That was an unfortunate double negative. Of course I meant to write “proving” or asserting, not “disproving”. Clearly this paper is by warmists trying to “defuse a bomb”. Sorry about the typos!
Some people are so confused by this “global warming / climate change” bit.
To the normal intelligent person climate change is when things in weather are no longer what they used to be years ago and never return. Such as: “It used to rain frequently but now we hardly ever see rain” or “It was always so cool at night but now we have to run our air conditioner all night”. And this has to prove true over at lease one or two decades to stick. If the apparent change reverts back to what was deemed normal years ago that was just a warm spell. If it become rainy again after a dry decade, that was just a dry spell. This bit of tracking 1/10th of degrees and inferring climate change or in the ’90s as global warming is just a figment in some climatologists imagination.
They understand that people have built where they shouldn’t have and so floods are going to affect them. They have built up coasts so of course hurricanes are going to affect them.
The truth is that the people you converse with around the globe are not seeing any lasting or long-term change that has happened. That is what makes your normal intelligent person to think this “global warming” or “climate change” is but a bunch of malarkey. They see right through the political aspect. It’s crumbling. The more they yell, the more it becomes apparent. Keep up the good work trolls, we can’t convince all people that everything is normal but you can by the words between your lines and you are doing such a great job.
Thanks Jimbo for the new link.
BTW: In another blog, MGmirkin, writes about: In Slumber, Sun Reveals Effects on Earth’s Climate!
Kristian Birkeland wrote: With a constant magnetization, the zones of patches will be found near the equator if the discharge-tension is low, but far from the equator if the tension is high.
The Discovery Channel article wrote:In an upcoming paper, Haigh’s team provides evidence that when the sun is more active, Earth’s jet streams weaken and shift toward the poles, taking with them storm tracks and weather systems that carry heat. The result is a subtle warming around Earth’s mid-latitudes.
All the snow storms of last winter were caused by global warming, short term spurts of warming from the Sun. It was cold enough beforehand for the precipitation to arrive as snow rather than rain. Winter precipitation is always driven by temperature uplifts, summer rainfall is driven by temperaure drops.
Kate says:
July 26, 2010 at 12:51 pm
This is nothing to do with climate, or science. This is all about doing serious violence to the English language, and mangling the meanings of words. After a while, nearly every word will have several meanings and can be interpreted in any way anyone wants, the significance or relevance of any particular word or phrase being lost.
I don’t know what you mean!/smiles Fortuneately for Post Normal Science’s purposes, everyone will still “understand” the might which makes right and at the same time tries to eliminate the function of thought, words, and real Science which instead aim at real, evolved human understanding of things.
The very same “might making right” is the ultimate functional meaning of Post Normal Science’s “climate change” and its machinations. It’s nothing else, nothing new, and actually more of an atavistic or evolutionary “throwback”, or at least a rather obvious “dead end”.
Michael Schaefer says:
July 26, 2010 at 1:51 pm
“Q.: How can it be, that cold air was rushed from the Arctic into Northern America AND into Europe – AND into China, too, for that matter! – causing enough snow on it’s way to bring the western as well as the eastern World almost to a grinding halt for WEEKS, and STILL have enough cold air in ther Arctic left for a close recovery of the sea-ice cap against all odds?
There must have been one helluva lot of really cold air up there, to achieve all these “goals” at a time last winter, methinks! But where did it come from? Looks like this “peer-reviewed paper” doesn’t explain much, but only dislodges the source of their dilemma up North, instead.
So again: How was this humongous mass of really cold air cooled down so much, as to be able to achieve all that SIMULTANEOUSLY?”
I’m will you on this one. For some reason the sun has gone into quiet mode and is failing to put enough heat into the oceans to mitigate the effects of winter. These weather regime oscillations can be seen in the historic temperature record, with a cold period appearing as expected:-
1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold???) – (LSA???)
Caution: These are only quasi-cycles and various processes in our deterministically chaotic climate can effect the timing and size of each 100(ish) oscillation. Having a good stock of non-perishable food and plenty of fuel for heating is a wise precaution for this coming winter, which is likely to start much earlier than we’ve seen in recent years.
Enneagram says:
July 26, 2010 at 2:23 pm
How quickly they forget the jet stream loops that stretched 2-3000 miles N-S, carrying the heat up to the Pole from whence it escaped.
And that’s how all that snow and cooling got accomplished in the middle of an El Nino.
After the S. America stunt the Weather just pulled, and a lagging solar cycle, guess what’s for Winter?
David Robinson, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the research, said the study fills an important role in educating the public about the difference between freak weather events and human-induced climate change.
So, they’ve actually come out and said that extreme heat events are global warming and extreme cold events are weather. Morons.
Enneagram says:
July 26, 2010 at 2:23 pm
……The Discovery Channel article wrote:In an upcoming paper, Haigh’s team provides evidence that when the sun is more active, Earth’s jet streams weaken and shift toward the poles, taking with them storm tracks and weather systems that carry heat. The result is a subtle warming around Earth’s mid-latitudes.
___________________________________________________
This “discovery” will no doubt be used to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and Roman Optimum again, and to explain away the severe cold in the coming winters The cold is all local but it is the warmist year EVAHhhh
With warmist pscyhentists playing a shell game with the real temperature data we can not know what is actually happening.
Graph of raw vs “adjusted” temps for the USA: http://i31.tinypic.com/5vov3p.jpg