Hundreds of new cold and snow records set in the USA

Anthony, my Aunt has just sent a bunch of pictures from Russia (don’t know where she got them) of snow. And I don’t just mean “snow” like you and I understand. I mean S…N…O…W! Email me and I will forward them to you. Trust me, your eyes will bug out.
[Note: Pamela, please post these requests to Tips & Notes, where Anthony is sure to see them. Sincerely, ~dbs, mod.]

Tony says:
December 13, 2010 at 5:13 pm
I’ve found a few articles but was wondering if there were any that are better at explaining and documenting this than others?
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Tony, google “CO2 800 year lag”
JoNova has a good webpage on it too.
“CO2 didn’t cause the temp rise in the first 800 years, but it’s responsible for all the rise after that”
That’s the other explanation.
Yeah right….

Tony says: at 5:13 pm
if there were any that are better at explaining
Try this:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/07/carbon-dioxide-and-temperatures-ice.html

“Manmade global warming” predicted that winters would start later and end earlier. But winters are starting sooner. More evidence that the “manmade global warming” hypothesis is wrong.

E.M.Smith says:
December 13, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Oh, and R.Gates:
You’ll need to explain how extra heat input, with retained excess heat, to our heat engine is showing up as a colder “hot side” as well as a colder “cold side”…
Explanations? Global warming don’t need no stinking explanations!
;O)

Alexander Feht says:
December 13, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Strange: the map shows a red dot (High Temp) in South Colorado, right where we are, but it has been very cold here in the end of November, and kind of normal in December, no unusual warmth to speak of. What’s up with that?
It’s been so cold homeless folk probably have a fire in a barrel next to the temperature station.

R Gates
In the eastern half of Australia, cold means wet and hot means dry.
And yes, I’m also old enought to have experienced the full cycle, like EM Smith.
More than that, my family have been farming since 1855.
There’s good family stories about fire and drought and flooding rain.
What comes around, goes around.
And the long term trend for rainfall at Sydney town is flat, ziltch, nil, nothing.
And temperature at Observatory Hill was also flat until the Cahill Expressway opened in March 1958, taking the UHI right up to the thermometer.
The earth is just not heating up – its the measurements that are soaked in the petrol of UHI that are the problem.

Fun webcam link
Banner Elk NC at 3800 ft. Currently 8 degrees.
http://www.highcountrywebcams.com/webcameras_BannerElkLIVE.htm

Dear Anthony,
I know how you feel about consigning R.Gates to the basement. However, since he prompted a slew of engaging and informative comments by E.M. Smith, perhaps we’d be better off to realize that he has his uses. 😉
Here in the Willamette Valley of western Oregon, we had some shirt-sleeve warmening today, thanks to a lot of Pacific air and moisture sloshing in from the southwest. Tomorrow, thank heavens, we’ll be back to coldening. Speaking of coldening, we had snow slosh in before Thanksgiving; to my memory the first that’s happened in the 40 years I’ve lived here.

R. Gates comments might have some merit if facts would support his theory, but they do not. Accelerated hydrological cycle starts with the idea that warmer water leads to more evaporation . . . . However, water vapor is not uniformly distributed across the world. The origin of the water vapor in the December 2010 storms did not come from oceans where the anomoly was positive, rather where it is negative. Likewise, last year, the origin of the water vapor for those storms was again from ocean areas with negative anomolies. These snow storms are not happening because the oceans are warmer, but rather because land areas are cold.
Regarding the LA Times article, we are a long ways from certainty in long term river flows, but we should also pay attention to the impact of pavement and land use development on river flow. One of the biggest problems with the CAGW movement is that the rush to blame global warming on problems that need attention from a non-climate solution. Often, we should address land-use practices instead of putting the blame on CO2. Many communities and nations try to escape responsibility by blaming the CO2 bogeyman.

Wow, I go out for dinner and a bit more Christmas shopping and things get a little interesting. Well, I obviously can’t answer all these “reactions” to my posts, but I would like to give a further explanation of the hydrological cycle and carbon-rock cycle, as some of you seem a bit confused on this. To start out, let’s take a look at a perfect example of this confusion:
latitude says (referring to the Hydrological Cycle):
December 13, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Gates, I’m not sure I can follow your train of thought on this one.
If temperatures rising drives the HyC, and causes it to speed up.
The HyC puts CO2 into the atmosphere.
If the HyC is speeding up, then it’s putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere.
_______
Let’s break this down into a bit more detail, just so everyone can follow. To remind everyone, the hydrological cycle is the cycle of water moving from oceans and seas (and also of course other bodies of water) into the atmosphere through evaporation and then precipitating out of clouds as snow, rain, hail, sleet, etc. The engine of the hydrological cycle is of course heat which has primarily (though not entirely, i.e. think of thermal energy) come to earth from our sun.
The other big cycle that I’ve been referencing is the carbon-rock cycle on earth, and specfically the cycle of carbon dioxide moving from the atmosphere into the oceans which occurs as part of the hydrological cycle. Here’s how it works…when it rains, or snows the CO2 from the air interacts with water in the air to form a very weak form of carbonic acid. The formula is:
CO2 + H2O -> H2CO3
That weak carbonic acid weathers the rocks and interacts with precipitated water and the silcates of the rocks to form bicarbonates. The formula is:
H2CO3 + H2O + silicate minerals -> HCO3- + cations (Ca++, Fe++, Na+, etc.) + clays
These bicarbonates flow to the sea and are precipitated from the calcium in the sea water to eventually end of as limestone on the bottom of the ocean, through a chemical reaction similar to this:
H2CO3 + H2O + silicate minerals -> HCO3- + cations (Ca++, Fe++, Na+, etc.) + clays
In this way, contrary to latitudes confused post above, it is the hydrological cycle working in conjunction with the carbon cycle of rock weathering that REMOVES CO2 from the atmosphere and returns it to the ocean. This is very interesting cycle, and provides a natural negative feedback process to keep the CO2 levels within a range that doesn’t allow the earth to get too cold or too hot. What we see, and have seen for millions of years on earth is that when CO2 increases, the earth warms, and since heat is the engine of the hydrological cycle, the hydrological cycle acclerates to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere. As the CO2 levels begin to come down (through the weathering process decribed above), the hydrological cycle slows down, less CO2 is removed, and so a natural feedback process is established.
This hydrological cycle/carbon-rock weathering cycle is a fundamental cycle on the earth, and the only real problem with our current CO2 levels is that this cycle normally operates over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, not the few hundred years it’s taken to increase carbon dioxide levels by some 40% to levels not seen in 800,000 years.
Finally, for those who are insisting that the current cold spell on the east coast proves the earth is in for a cold spell, one really ought to take a closer look at the facts. Cold air is being funneled directly from the Arctic, but as a whole, the Arctic is not colder than normal, nor is the N. Hemisphere. Certainly, nearly everyone here admits this is an anomalous situation (much like the Russian heat wave of last summer), but what we all seem to disagree about is the cause of the anomaly. At least one recent study predicted this, and and the cause had nothing to do with some new cold period othe earth was entering, but someting quite the opposite:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AF3C720101116
But even last summer we had suggestions of this:
http://www.physorg.com/news195485722.html
So, even though the arctic right now is not seeing record cold temps and Arctic sea ice remains below the 30 year average, the AGW skeptics would like to believe that we are heading back into some very cold period, even though, 2010 remains as one of the warmest years on instrument record (perhaps not the warmest, but close). If the entire N. Hemisphere were seeing anomalously cold temps I might even pay attention to these fears, but the latest full monthly and 3-month data simply does not support fears of an impending global cooling:
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Global/.Atm_Temp/Anomaly.html
The simple truth seems to be that atmospheric pressure anomalies have opened up the arctic freezer door and unforunately, the eastern U.S. is currently right in the line of fire…

One slight correction to the previous post (and a dumb mistake at that!). The reaction for the precipitation of calcium carbonate in sea water to form limestone should look more like this:
Ca++ + 2HCO3- -> CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O
Sorry for any confusion…