Excerpt:
In 2003, Putin amazed scientists when he speculated that a global warming by “two or three degrees” could be a good thing for Russia as its people would no longer need fur coats.
A press conference hosted by the RIA Novosti state news agency ahead of Cancun provided some indication of official attitudes. Called “Climate Change: myth or reality?” it gave a platform to a leading climate sceptic academic.
“Climate is a concept that has existed as long as the Earth exists… several hundred million years ago the temperature was 10-13 degrees higher than now,” said Yury Israel, director of the Institute of Global Climate and Environment at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“What is happening now is not some kind of unusual special case,” he said, adding that life flourished on Earth at the time of dinosaurs.
Full story here
h/t to WUWT reader Jorge Kafkazar
Let me understand, Central Russia has a one in a hundred year temperature high, in a hundred years, and that is proof of AGW? Seems to me proof that the weather is normal.
Back to the same picture as July, warmer in Russia, colder in Pakistan and west Europe:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/regional_monitoring/wctan3.gif
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/regional_monitoring/wctan6.gif
Lets put it into context as some parts of Russia had cooler than average conditions. This probably explains the circumstances although there is the inevitable punch line
“Jeff Knight, a climate variability scientist at the UK Met Office, attributed the situation in Moscow to a number of factors, among them greenhouse gas concentrations, which are steadily rising.
The recent El Nino, a climate pattern that occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean and affects weather around the world, and local weather patterns in Russia may have also contributed to this summer’s abnormal conditions.
“The Russian heatwave is related to a persistent pattern of circulation drawing air from the south and east (the very warm steppes),” said Dr Knight.
“Circulation anomalies tend to create warm and cool anomalies: while it has been very hot in western Russia, it has been cooler than average in adjacent parts of Siberia that lie on the other side of the high pressure system where Arctic air is being drawn southwards.
“Some long-term records have been broken – for example the highest daily temperature in Moscow. We expect more extreme high temperatures as the climate changes. This means that when weather fluctuations promote high temperatures… there is more likelihood of records being broken.”
tonyb
Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia, predicts that a new “Little Ice Age” could begin in just four years. http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=608
Antony, why did my post on UK temperatures and the Met. Office disappear?
Fab pdf on how a weak polar vortex has identifiable stages and can be used to predict cold weather events geographically:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/824263/Kolstad2010.pdf
And right now, the vortex is just about in need of CPR:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/hgt.shtml
From the gist of the paper, Russia appears to be in the center sites of this event every time it happens. And CO2 has nothing to do with it. No wonder there is a growing backlash against consensus. The “consensus scientists” forgot to consider that fact that Russia can see the Arctic from their house!
Anthony,
You must be a part of a vast subterranean natural gas-funded climate change disinformation campaign network that fuels Cuccinellis’s efforts against Michael Mann.
Don’t you realize that the Tea Party is a vast orchestrated capitalist assault engineereed against the state sponsorship tendencies of the current government by the capitalist Russian natural gas fossil-fuel companies?
🙂
If a Russian says it won’t happen, believe them. If there’s anyone on this planet who knows anything about cold weather and climate, it’s a Russian.
The dear old Guardian newspaper must require ALL journalists in it’s employ to make a nod to Globull Warming in EVERY story, no matter how irrelevant to that story. Eddie Butler, a writer on the sport of Rugby Union (not a literary genius, by the way), remarked in a story about the game, apropos Scotland’s winter weather, wrote that even that country ‘couldn’t guarantee disgusting weather, particularly in this age of global warming’.
Sorry, Antony, I have now found it.
Mike Restin says:
November 27, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Well, you’re certainly wrong to bring this up given the title of this post has nothing to do with Climategate.
You made no comments at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/20/climategate-still-the-issue/ which mentions Harry in the post itself and in five subsequent comments. Please read that post and make comments there, backed up by quotes from the readme file and other sources.
Ah, I see you did post at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/16/the-jones-rehabilitation/#comment-530619 . “Where did it go?” I think the main answer is it added to the knowledge of people looking at HADCRUT data trying to understand some of the odd things in it.
It may be that errors affect few enough observations in small enough ways so that results are not made much worse. Steven Mosher at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/07/a-lazy-rainy-metadata-sunday/#comment-525148 concludes that “The harry file is meaningless …. In the end those errors get fixed and you find out that even with errors the answer comes out generally the same.” From some of the multi-year programming and porting projects I’ve worked on, engineering Email and journals focus on what’s wrong and all but ignores what’s right. That’s one reason why knowledgable high-tech salesmen don’t want engineers talking to customers – we’ll talk about current work and future plans and forget to talk about how the existing product can help the customer.
What makes you say Harry’s readme is being ignored? Don’t answer here, answer at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/20/climategate-still-the-issue/
“The UK Met office have just announced that 2010 has been the hottest year on record.”
This does not apply to Uk .
A below normal year for Central England to the end of October.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
I found in garbage container 5 hand-written diaries of Kostroma wheat mercant Chumakov, beginning from 1881. He had a habit to describe in great detail all wheather events, wheat prices, Volga navigation conditions, from which his business greatly depended. I published this as a book. The year 1882 is described here, too, and all wheather patterns of that year closely repeat what we have seen in Central Russia this year: extremely high July temperature, peat bogs and forest fires, severe drought that ruined crops across all Central Russia and South, no rain for 2 month and so on. Volga river became so shallow that wheat barges could not navigate up from Nizhniy Novgorod, and there was a famine in central provinces. CO2 levels were these times still pre-industrial, so it is impossible to connects this atmospheric pattern – a blocking anti-cyclon – with CO2.
Michael, the Russians all but stripped their own first responders bare over decades of budget crunching and forestry services for their whole country is less than that of the Province of Saskatchewan.
The offset for record dry in parts of Russia was the exact opposite happening in Western Canada who in many parts saw record shattering rainfall. Now we’re looking at November being the coldest one in decades and a forecast for an even colder December through February. We were so counting on AGW…
Say what you will about the russians, but you will find objective discussions on RT news broadcasts regarding climate change that simply can’t be found on the BBC, CNN, CBC, or ABC (oz).
Sergey
Do you still have your book? Is it in Russian? It would be interesting to link to it from my site here where I collect historic records.
Tonyb
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
The fact that heating fuel availability is no longer linked to reported temperature should raise the average winter temperatures by at least 3-4 degrees C. Until I see a 5 degree rise I think I am safe to assume they have had no rise.
In addition an average increase of even the rediculous projected 6 degrees C across Russia would still be massively beneficial. Anyone who can convince themselves that warming kills more than cold in Russia is not rational.
Russians are like those of us who live in northern Wisconsin, they have difficulty being frightened by the idea of a warmer climate. I’ll believe warming is a problem when I see the suburbs around Phoenix emptying out because they are all moving to Houghten.
Clarrisa;
“-It [Russia] also doesn’t need anything to stand between the oligarchs and their oil.
———————————————————————————–
Ooh… Evil oil, It has absolutely no beneficial qualities aside from enabling mobility and prosperity for the human race. On the other hand the AGW crowd is offering nothing but a deleterious burden on mankind with no demonstrable benefit to anyone except the “oligarchs” of AGW like Algore and Goldman Sachs.
Unprecedented. In the 1878 onwards CET max record, today has a good shot at being the coldest November day ever. That record shows 4 sub-zero November days: 2 in 1890, 1 in 1904, 1 in 1993. But the lowest was -0.5 degC. Today in Pershore, a member of CET’s set of stations, the max was -3.5. Possibly some of the other stations will be warmer (I mean less cold), but surely a new record is very much on the cards. I wouldn’t rule out an unprecedented 3 negative November days in a row, either.
Rich.
Mike Haseler says:
November 28, 2010 at 1:09 am
Michael says:
November 27, 2010 at 9:17 pm
It seems to me, with modern man’s fire fighting capabilities, have we not altered the earth’s climate by extinguishing fires in the modern age? It would be nice to see a good scientific study on this issue.
That is a fantastic observation! I’ve often said that the apparent rise around 1970 in global temperature just happens to coincide with the advent of clean air acts around the world, but it never occurred to me that we may actually be using fossil-fuel powered fire engines to reduce atmospheric pollution levels beyond the “natural” level pre-fire-engine technology fire-planes, etc.
Fortunately, nature being nature, you can reduce the number of fires for a while, but sooner or later the critical level of burnable brushwood makes it virtually impossible to contain any fire and eventually the whole backlog of burnable material goes up in one go – evening out the score!
—————–
Actually, environmentalist initiatives to protect so-called ‘old growth forests’ have probably significantly overcome any reduction in forest fires via modern fire-fighting technologies. By stopping the practice of clear-cutting followed by tree-planting, and leaving the forests in a natural state, environmental initiatives have led to an increased amount of underbrush and naturally felled lumber that acts like tinder to fire, whether naturally started or started by pyromaniacs or human carelessness. The number and size of serious forest fires per decade has increased since the methods formerly espoused by scientific forestry managers were rejected and abandoned in the late 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, environmentalism may have indirectly caused an increase in the atmospheric byproducts of combustion than otherwise would have been the case. This gets a fun treatment in Edward Tenner’s Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences .
To Tonyb: Yes, the book is in Russian. Here is the link:
http://www.books.ru/shop/books/426613
matt v. says:
November 28, 2010 at 9:26 am
A below normal year for Central England to the end of October.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
Possibly heading for the first below normal year since 1996 in the UK.
Sergey
Thanks. So if its in Russian I could claim it says anything then couldn’t I 🙂
Do you intend to publish in English?
tonyb
But on Friday the Huffington Post (Johann Hari) said the Russian heat wave was proof of global warming (and Obama has said skeptics should read HuffPo).
I responded on HuffPo with this link: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/Russia2010.htm which documents the atmospheric blocking (1972 had a similar event when temperatures were cooler).
There’s always fires on earth. Smokey the Bear can handle these: