By Steve Goddard
As La Niña takes hold in South America, we are seeing something I’m not sure I have ever seen before. Temperatures in some parts of the Andes Mountains of Bolivia are forecast to average below -5C this week. The entire country of Bolivia is located inside the Tropic of Capricorn.
Closeup below :
Temperatures are 6-10C below normal in much of South America.
The image below shows Unisys SST anomalies combined with NCEP forecast anomalies. Note how sea surface temperatures affect the land temperatures.
Our friend Joe Romm is very focused on the Northeastern US, but there is a whole big world out there.
Cold Weather Proves Killer in Parts of South America (Source: Time newsfeed)
Strange but true: despite blazing hot temperatures, sometimes in the triple digits, sweeping across the United States, the opposite is true in much of South America where a cold front has actually claimed more than 400 lives in parts of Peru and Argentina. The temperatures, which have hovered in the upper 30s in the southern part of the continent qualify as a rather typical winter by North American standards. But in some places, like the Andes mountains the thermometer has dropped as low as -11 degrees F and decimated alpaca and cattle herds. The usually subtropical areas affected are particularly vulnerable because the populations are largely poor, live in conditions that are not equipped for cold weather and the governments do not have the infrastructure to handle winter conditions.
As La Niña develops, climate alarmists will soon be seeking shelter from the storm.
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stevengoddard says:
July 30, 2010 at 11:11 am
John,
I removed the trend lines so that we can see the trick you pulled.
I didn’t pull any trick. I plotted the trend lines to the graph that Geoff Sharp posted.
Now, let’s do the right thing El Nino peak-to-peak to see just how screwed up GISTEMP is
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2010/offset:-0.4/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1998/to:2010/offset:-0.45/trend/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2010/offset:-0.18/trend/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2010/offset:-0.25/trend
I’ve calculated the trend for UAH (Jan 1998 to June 2010) and it’s positive. This may have something to do with using monthly rather than annual data – not sure. However differences in trends are to be expected over relatively short periods. There are different response times to ENSO etc. The trends for all 4 main datasets are in close agreement over 25 -30 years. If GISS are fudging data to show more warming that than there is they’re doing a pretty poor job of it.
That picture of ocean temperatures is quite striking: much warmer than normal in the North Atlantic, but significantly cooler in the South Atlantic and Eastern Pacific in both hemispheres.
Now where are the most ardent warmists??
Why: in Europe and on the East Coast of the USA, of course.
Are there any ardent warmists in Buenos Aires right now?
John Finn says:
July 31, 2010 at 3:30 am
I take it you wouldn’t dream of using a trend since 2007 to show “arctic ice recovery” this autumn.
Does this mean you deny there has been a recovery since 2007?
Don’t forget, 2007 was supposed to be evidence for a “death spiral” of arctic sea ice.
How’s that coming?
Roger Carr says:
July 31, 2010 at 12:25 am
booze for cars
bubbagyro says: (July 30, 2010 at 8:58 am) I really believe that the unprecedented number of deaths in S. America could have been avoided if the governments had not been bamboozled by the warm-earthers. …
All you say in this comment has continued to go around and around in my mind for some time now. Anyone, and in particular governments, promoting “global warming” without a balance of concern and preparation for cold events such as those in South America and lands above China right now must accept responsibility for the deaths and despair that cold has brought.
For governments, again in particular, tunnel vision is not an virtue; it is a crime.
___________________________________________________
Yes and it is about time they were brought to book for their crimes. For example:
Biofuel starvation wasn’t “unforeseen consequences”
“The U.S. corn crop, accounting for 40 percent of the global harvest and supplying nearly 70 percent of the world’s corn imports…
Congress required that biofuel use increase five times…
wheat prices have tripled, corn prices doubled and rice prices nearly doubled…
…. there were real warnings about possible starvation as a consequence of the law Sarasohn refers to (the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 ).
The possible consequences were clearly communicated in a Senate briefing a week before initial passage of the Senate bill and 6 months before final approval of the final House-Senate bill.
Here’s a bit from a June 13, 2007 Senate briefing given by Lester Brown from the Earth Policy Institute:
The U.S. corn crop, accounting for 40 percent of the global harvest and supplying nearly 70 percent of the world’s corn imports, looms large in the world food economy. Annual U.S. corn exports of some 55 million tons account for nearly one fourth of world grain exports. The corn harvest of Iowa alone exceeds the entire grain harvest of Canada. Substantially reducing this export flow would send shock waves throughout the world economy.
In six of the last seven years, total world grain production has fallen short of use. As a result, world carryover stocks of grain have been drawn down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. (See Data.) “
To add insult to injury Congress did not even see if biofuel actually saves on the use of oil. It does not! David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell found it takes more fossil fuel to produce biofuel than is recovered:
* corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
* wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
* soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
* sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
But that is alright Monsanto and Cargill posted record breaking profits, while President Clinton appointed the VP of Cargill to write the Agreement on Ag for the soon to be ratified World Trade Organization, appointed the President of Monsanto as his Senior Trade Adviser, and appointed Monsanto’s lawyer to a high position in the FDA.
Biofuel starvation “unforeseen consequences”??? Greed without a conscience is more like it.
So was there starvation? A study published in 2007 by two US scholars, Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, calculated that biofuel production will cause the doubling of starvation figures in the world: by 2025. They estimate there will be 1.2 billion people starving. http://people.clarkson.edu/~kvisser/hp200/docs/StarveThePoor%3F.pdf
In 2008: “We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”
I can not find any solid figures on starvation but there were certainly food riots around the world in 2008 About a month ago [May 2010] Bill Clinton sat in congress and admitted that he played a vital part in the willful destruction of the agricultural base of Haiti…” And we let these amoral people lead our countries.
Gail Combs (July 31, 2010 at 12:24 pm)
Thank you for that expansion, Gail… it is all rather too shocking to comment on beyond noting that we are all guilty, too, if we do not each make some effort (as you are doing here) to make this an issue which people can see and judge.
I do not think they will judge kindly those who cynically exploit their fellows.
Bruce Cobb says:
July 31, 2010 at 8:59 am
Does this mean you deny there has been a recovery since 2007?
In the same way that there is no evidence to suggest the world is cooling there is quite definitely no evidence to suggest arctic ice extent is increasing. There will always be year to year fluctuations about a trend. Weather conditions in 2007 caused an unusually large ice extent loss in 2007.
Unless there is an obvious uptick in minimum ice extent it will be several years before we can say wiht any certainty that the downward trend has reversed or stopped.
I notice in another post you implied I was a “whinging warmer”. I would suggest you are too quick to jump to conclusions regardless of the topic.
John Finn says:
August 1, 2010 at 1:50 am
Unless there is an obvious uptick in minimum ice extent it will be several years before we can say wiht any certainty that the downward trend has reversed or stopped.
Indeed. Nor did I say that it had. But, I guess you were just jumping to your own conclusion.
I notice in another post you implied I was a “whinging warmer”. I would suggest you are too quick to jump to conclusions regardless of the topic.
No, I wasn’t implying any such thing. You asked what might happen if the warming reoccurred after the La Nina, and I suggested a possibility.
But, if the shoe fits…
Rhys Jaggar says:
July 31, 2010 at 7:49 am
Now where are the most ardent warmists??
Didn’t you know it?….looking for warm massages…:-)
sarc on/
I’ve decided that the strange hot and cold regions are due to Anthropogenic Conspiracies and corruption. We are now paying the consequences of “harvesting” the Energy from the Wind. We are stopping the wind from doing what it was meant to do which is to “Equalize Temperatures”.
Once again evil Man and other corrupt Capitalist Pigs who build Wind Mills are destroying the World, while they revel in their Profits!
Idiots of the World Unite! and fight these corrupt evil doers! Tax them into Oblivion.! We must liquidate the Kulaks! (Oops, wrong Party line) .
Wait a minute, the government subsidizes Wind Mills; there are No Profits! After sponsorship and urgings by the WWF, Sierra Club and us all… We have met the Enemy and He is… US !?! It can’t be. We are Virtuous and building an Utopia here.
Nevermind…
sarc/off
Yeah, a bunch of environmentalists and ‘evil liberals’ are in a conspiracy to PROVE global warming but all of the oil companies and Republicans have NOTHING to gain by disproving it and are offering objective science.
You people are so silly! No one event can indicate climate change but there has sure been a lot of heat waves and floods if you look at the whole globe.
Enjoy your political suicide, it will be fun watching all these people get torn apart when it becomes too obvious to ignore what is going on. Too bad by then it will be a lot harder to fix the problem.
[REPLY – Well, you can go further than that. EVERYONE has a HUGE AMOUNT to gain by disproving it. Oil Companies, Republicans — and everybody else. But no one more than those who are living on the brink of starvation in the third and fourth world, many millions of whom will die prematurely if world economic growth is cut by a third to half.
And, yes, I confess it has been tremendous fun watching politically suicidal partisans in the debate getting torn apart. (Not that they didn’t have it coming.) ~ Evan]
just a question i said id ask ye experts as i have an iterest in weather. will ireland experience a very cold winter with heavy snowfall or will it be mild and damp like we usually get? me im hoping for snow)