Breaking news! December can still be cold and snowy over parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Don’t look to the American media for much information about European weather; it’s about as foreign as driving on the wrong side of the road. But, in Britain, Italy, and the rest of Europe, the past several weeks have seen “the Arctic refrigerator door” swing wide-open. Here are some example headlines:
Arctic freeze to last another month as AA warns of ‘worst driving conditions imaginable’ for Christmas getaways: Mail Online: “With temperatures expected to fall to -15c (5f), the Met Office said this is ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest December since records began in 1910.”
Europe travel mayhem as arctic freeze strikes again: AFP: “In Italy, rare snowfall disrupted the tourist destinations of Pisa and Florence, forced both airports to close and severely disrupted traffic and the region’s rail network.”
Thankfully, Dr. James Hansen has this figured out: Europe is one-half Rossby wavelength downstream from a partially frozen Hudson Bay, which causes Europe to become colder, or something: from NASA’s government funded blog:
Back to the cold air in Europe: is it possible that reduced Arctic sea ice is affecting weather patterns? Because Hudson Bay (and Baffin Bay, west of Greenland) are at significantly lower latitudes than most of the Arctic Ocean, global warming may cause them to remain ice free into early winter after the Arctic Ocean has become frozen insulating the atmosphere from the ocean. The fixed location of the Hudson-Baffin heat source could plausibly affect weather patterns, in a deterministic way — Europe being half a Rossby wavelength downstream, thus producing a cold European anomaly in the trans-Atlantic seesaw. Several ideas about possible effects of the loss of Arctic sea ice on weather patterns are discussed in papers referenced by Overland, Wang and Walsh.
However, we note in our Reviews of Geophysics paper that the few years just prior to 2009-2010, with low Arctic sea ice, did not produce cold winters in Europe. The cold winter of 2009-2010 was associated with the most extreme Arctic Oscillation in the period of record. Figure 3, from our paper, shows that 7 of the last 10 European winters were warmer than the 1951-1980 average winter, and 10 of the past 10 summers were warmer than climatology. The average warming of European winters is at least as large as the average warming of summers, but it is less noticeable because of the much greater variability in winter.
This is the trap that statistical/data manipulators like Hansen have fallen into: in the past, they would freely say: “of course you cannot attribute one weather event to global warming, but the likelihood of that event has become higher because it’s the extremes that are going to increase the most”, or something like that. Now, there is no pretense to equivocate about what the atmosphere is doing: weather has become climate, and necessarily so for the continued narrative of global warming alarmism. The trap is that they do not understand the underlying meteorology or climatology from basic dynamics — instead giving hand-wavy explanations with some citations thrown in from their colleagues.
To adequately attribute an ongoing weather/short-term climate event to AGW, considerable data analysis and time must be invested into researching many different avenues. It is a disservice to those interested in climate variability for senior scientists to supply hand-wavy, reflexive out-of-their-behinds explanations to the media to further their obvious political agenda. This actually goes for both sides of the climate aisle.
In the meantime, Europe continues to enjoy the effects of global warming or the Arctic Oscillation or the North Atlantic Oscillation, or something. It’s hubris and arrogance to think you have the Winter of 2010-2011 all summed up before it even starts.
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jheath says:
December 17, 2010 at 6:12 pm
“Come on the UK opposition – Labour, Trades Unions and the anti-poverty lobbyists – lets have some action on behalf of the oppressed. Down with feed-in tariffs.”
Didn’t Brown introduce the feed-in tariff for solar when he was still in office? IIRC it started on April 1st, and he was prime minister until May. Ok, he got replaced with one of the Milibands as boss of Labour, right? Hmm… that doesn’t look like much help for the oppressed to me…
There’s a purposeful engendering disquiet becoming in the UK. Not because of the recent succession of hard winters – older folks amongst others remember the snowfalls of the 40’s thro’ the 70’s – but on how our (separate) governments have consistently refused to address the question since of affordable and sustainable energy. Now it is put to us the saving graces of renewable technologies and nuclear.
What is starkly apparent is not just future delivery of immediate energy requirement, but future energy security.
Well, it’s not news, Scotland – there’re proven 200+ years of reserves of coal awaiting centrally, too – just as soon as EU alignment and self-styled carbon capture gets the treatment – and not by Royal Order.
Poor Hansen: Being American he is probably infused with neo-pragmatism which for anyone who has read Rorty you soon realizes leads to either nihilism or sollipcism. Faced with such a bleak future Hansen has drifted off into a world of narcissism. His entire thesis is predicated on the assumption that this man made cooling … er I mean man made global warming … oops I now mean man made global cooling … can be solved by some great social engineering program. If Hansen is capable of influencing climate I would have thought he would have taken a day and skipped over to Louisianna and fixed up the mess caused by Katrena.
“global warming may cause them to remain ice free into early winter after the Arctic Ocean has become frozen insulating the atmosphere from the ocean”. What caught my attention was “insulating the atmosphere from the ocean”. Shouldn’t that be…. insulating the ocean from the atmosphere? When the air is colder than the water it is the water that cools. I have believed for a long time that on an annual basis open water contributes more to global cooling than to global warming.
Sorry, it made me chuckle……..”I can’t argue with FREE HOSTING, so live with it. I’m bolding this”…….so I can try not living with the other part of free. (passerby that wonders why there isn’t a preview.)
Sorry A, you’re stuck with it! Although, it should be seen as a good annoyance. When asked, it is obvious that they’ve never seen the explanation before, which = a good thing.
Is an extended period of negative Arctic Oscillation characterized by comparative warming of the Arctic north, and cooling south of 75 degrees, such as we have seen the past two years, the critical climate phase needed to allow inception of major Northern Hemisphere ice age events? To date, to my knowledge, there has been no satisfactory demonstrable mechanism reported in the literature which allows the prerequisite combination of temperature and precipitation to initiate these events.
The keys to glaciations include both temperature and precipitation. In particular, there must be enough snow in the high latitude continental regions to allow it to accumulate year over year. If it is too cold, precipitation is limited. If it is too warm, it melts. If one looks at maps of the negative Arctic Oscillation, one sees relative warming in the Arctic which will allow for greater humidity – snowfall, accompanied by greater cold in the adjacent continental masses where it must accumulate and over-summer.
As the Earth should be nearing the end of the Holocene, and moving toward the next major ice age, could the current climate/weather phase be similar to that which occurred at the initiation of previous continental glaciations? This is just a reflection, any comments?
This is a GREAT thread. It really helps to inform people of the news about current continental weather patterns. It would be good to see postings from as many people in as many different countries as possible reporting their local conditions (warm or cool!). This is EXACTY to sort of conglomerate weather news the AGW alarmists don’t want you to see.
Dave Beach says:
December 17, 2010 at 6:56 pm
…………..
As the Earth should be nearing the end of the Holocene, and moving toward the next major ice age, could the current climate/weather phase be similar to that which occurred at the initiation of previous continental glaciations? This is just a reflection, any comments?
=====================================================
I think its a bit of a stretch and not worth bothering about. When speaking of ice ages and Holocene or any other comparable period, I think it important to keep time in proper perspective. I’m more concerned about seeing the temps of the 60s and 70s return than I am about the glaciation of present day Russia and Canada. The way I see it, trends are over played. If one looks for a trend, they should look for a trend of cycles, not linear trends. A circle of circles, if you will. Sine waves are fun, but they always leave me wanting. Sorry, but you asked for comments. 🙂
Don’t look to the American media for much information about European weather
But they couldn’t stop talking about Russia.
Who can believe 2010 hottest year ever?
Record cold in China as well
Many other parts of China were also suffering from record cold temperatures Wednesday.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/record-cold-hits-china/
pwl @ur momisugly December 17, 2010 at 5:24 pm:
Oh and -30c with wind chill factors is about -40c with a small breeze and much worse with any serious wind…
pwl, you touch on one of my favorite peeves, mistakes about wind chills. I send a note yearly to the local CBC station in the hopes that they will stop saying things like “the wind chill drove the temperature down to minus 20” and the like. Of course the wind chill has zero effect on the temperature. A thermometer will read the same in wind or calm. The wind chill is properly a , so the wind will cause air of a given temperature to cool an object (like a face or hand) faster than still air. But the ultimate temperature will still be the same.
I could pick fault with the Wikipedia definition of wind chill, but I’ll end the pedantry here!
IanM
It does appear there is record cold is across the entire Northern Hemisphere. It is global. It is not ‘localized’. Global warmers cannot claim this is ‘weather’ as they always do when record cold happens.
Warming ended in 1998.
In reply to David Beach, Dec. 17th at 6:56 pm.
As the Earth should be nearing the end of the Holocene, and moving toward the next major ice age, could the current climate/weather phase be similar to that which occurred at the initiation of previous continental glaciations? This is just a reflection, any comments?
“The past interglacials (there was been roughly 22 glacial/interglacial cycles) lasted roughly 10,000 years and all ended abruptly. It appears there is a forcing function that ends the interglacial periods. (Contrary to urban legend climate is stable, not a random walk. It appears Lindzen’s hypothesis that planetary cloud cover functions as an iris to resist change is correct.)
It has been known for some time that there are cosmogenic isotope changes at the same time as these sudden abrupt cooling events. As cosmogenic isotope changes are caused by a change to the solar magnetic cycle, it seems clear the sun is causing the abrupt changes. There is not agreement as to how specifically the sun is causing the cooling.”
As most are Solar cycle 24 appears to be an abrupt change to the solar magnetic cycle.
http://www.probeinternational.org/Livingston-penn-2010.pdf
“Figure 2 shows the computed magnetic PDF for the sunspots in cycles 24 and 25, using a linear decrease of the magnetic field of 65 Gauss per year and a duration of 11 years for each cycle. This is meant to represent an upper limit, and the magnetic change corresponds to the most steeply sloped line in Figure 1. We can see that the PDFs for Cycle 24 and Cycle 25 vary dramatically from that observed in Cycle 23. If we assume that the appearance time of sunspots during each cycle is similar, we can use the total number of spots in each cycle to compute the maximum activity level of that cycle, using the fact that Cycle 23 showed a peak smoothed sunspot number (SSN) of 130. The linear decrease of 65 Gauss per year predicts that Cycle 24 will peak with a smoothed SSN of 66, and Cycle 25 will peak with a smoothed SSN of 7. Using a value of 50 Gauss per year suggests a smoothed SSN of 87 for Cycle 24 and 20 for Cycle 25.”
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/Resources/Holocene.vs.Stage5e.html
“Abrupt climate change Holocene
– The Holocene was punctuated by irregular 1500±500 year cooling events which have correlatives in the North Atlantic (deMenocal et al., 2000; Bond et al., 1997).
– When compared to the Holocene sequence at Site 658C, the results suggest we are overdue for an abrupt transition to cooler climates, however orbital configurations These results are consistent with other high-resolution records of the Last Interglacial from the North Atlantic and support the view large-scale climatic reorganizations can be achieved within centuries.”
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
“Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years.”
“According to the marine records, the Eemian interglacial ended with a rapid cooling event about 110,000 years ago (e.g., Imbrie et al., 1984; Martinson et al., 1987), which also shows up in ice cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. From a relatively high resolution core in the North Atlantic. Adkins et al. (1997) suggested that the final cooling event took less than 400 years, and it might have been much more rapid.”
“Following the end of the Eemian, a large number of other sudden changes and short-term warm and cold alternations have been recognized; apparently many or all of these occurred on a global or at least a regional scale (Fig.3; Ice core record). The most extreme of these fluctuations are the warm interstadials and the cold Heinrich events. These are most prominent in the ice-core record of Greenland, deep-sea cores from the North Atlantic, and in the pollen records of Europe and North America, suggesting that they were most intense in the North Atlantic region (e.g., Bond et al., 1992; 1993).”
The travesty of CAGW scare mongering is warming is beneficial and cooling is truly scary and we should have been spending billions in planning and preparing for the cooling eventuality and how to adapt and survive !!!
Robinson said: December 17, 2010 at 5:53 pm
[]
quote
Still, if there are any meteorologists present, I would be interested to know why East Anglia seems to have avoided the bad weather, when all areas around it have taken such a beating.
unquote
IANAM (!) but I can answer this. You’re too far inland. The snow showers are building over the sea, drifting onto land and dumping their load, then fizzling out before they get near you — they need the warm sea underneath to trigger the vertical development. We’ve not had more than a fraction of an inch this week because the big cumulus clouds are staying out over the North Sea — you could see them yesterday afternoon from fifty miles away — driven by a westerly.
Unstable to sea temps, stable to land temps.
Once things get really cooled down and a warm front comes through you will get your wish. I’m sitting here checking the forecast for the south coast — I’m meant to be there today but I doubt it the way things look.
Weather, not climate. Strange, though, how it feels like it did thirty-two years ago yesterday when we moved into our little cottage and the bedroom was colder than the fridge.
JF
A sad illustration of natural selection: I’ve seen a couple of hedgehogs out foraging during the recent warmish spell (well, it thawed a bit). The trend to later breeding is being selected out.
I live in south eastern Australia and the local weather ground station has recorded Sept, Oct and Nov at around -0.5 below the long term average. December is currently at -3.5 below the long term average.
My prediction is that Solar cycle 24 should peak in mid 2012 at around 60. Solar cycle 25 will be of similar amplitude, based on the 10th harmonic. This is one reason why NASA GISS needs to cook the books to show “continual warming”, to dispell any theory that solar activity might have something to do with global temperatures.
Almost a year ago, I predicted this nonsense in a widely-linked post called “Noise”.
Okay, I’m still trying to parse what Hansen said. Maybe I’m particularly dim (I studied English Literature in University, though most of my friends were in the sciences) but I just can’t make any sense of it. I think I understand what a Rosby Wavelength is but the “Trans-atlantic Seasaw”? Did he just make that up?
Does anyone understand what he’s trying to say?
In the UK Chris Huhne, our ‘energy’ minister, in an attempt to avoid subsidising nuclear and renewable energy, plans to tax energy from fossil fuels so much that nuclear and renewables will seem cheap! A third of our power stations are due to go out of service in the next 5 years so nuclear and renewables will be the only options as replacements!
This should wipe out our remaining industry, or have the jobs exported to India or China. It is unlikely the replacement power will be created in time so blackouts look to be on the cards, which should cause the City of London jobs to move to saner climes.
The UK could end up like Iceland or Zimbabwe – I suspect the climate of Iceland with the inflation of Zimbabwe!
It is irritating that the civil servants in charge of energy have no idea of the carbon footprint of using renewables [with standby generators]. The label of ‘renewable’ seems adequate reason to spend 100 billion pounds plus on wind and solar, both dependant on rare earths and so will need to be imported from China. In winter here the sun don’t shine [at least not for very long] and the wind don’t blow!
Even more irritating is the shale gas revolution which has reduced the price radically, and probably the lowest carbon footprint is to use gas fired plants as combined heat and power [district heating using the waste hot water] which can be 80% efficient.
Of course it could just be a subtle way to reduce the costs of looking after the elderly and the unemployed as hypothermia takes its’ toll!
http://www.thegwpf.org/uk-news/2065-green-madness-electricity-bills-to-double-by-2030.html
PS. ALL the main political parties are absolute believers in AGW, no opposition at all.
PPS. Have you ever been in an unpleasant situation where you realise ‘This is REAL – this is REALLY HAPPENING’!
Just curious. Anyone in the UK or Europe having any difficulty getting coal (if they’re lucky enough to have a coal heater or stove)? Any danger to people from current Green Laws making it hard/expensive to burn coal (or peat) in this weather?
nice post..
I was wrong global warming will be measured in feet rather than inches this year.
Very strange how our hyper alarmist media are reporting the snow and cold, suddenly its weather again, if they do not ignore it. An example was coverage of South America’s winter this year.Like the CRU emails it never happened according to CBC.
CET vs NAO:
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/NAO_CETw-copy-2.gif
current NAO:
http://ioc3.unesco.org/oopc/state_of_the_ocean/atm/nao.php
Get used to it UK. It looks like 1940 all over again if you are lucky. Thirty to forty more years of this. Property in Spain is really inexpensive right now.
Meanwhile, in California, a normally La Nina “dry” winter is turning awfully wet and stormy as subtropical moisture plows into the state.
Upwards of 15 FEET of snow predicted in the Sierra above 7,000 feet between now and the middle of next week.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA