New winter temperature proxy in UK: "grit"

Winter.
A season for True Grit.
Won’t the Met Office be proud!

“resources would be used carefully”, presumably means “We won’t be gritting your road.” Down here in Surrey the B road that links us to the outside world was not gritted at all in this snowfall nor in the last one.
Presumably the local councils have been continuing to believe the Met Office.

So instead of snow, it is the road salt which is ‘disappearing fast’. Sure, Dr Viner predicted exactly this.

It always pays to take what Boris says with a little pinch of salt. His style is not the calm, considered bureaucrat.

“Road salt is ‘disappearing fast’, Welsh councils warns”
Blame it on global warming, everyone else does 🙂
Meanwhile in my own hometown an announcement from city-council
http://www.maassluis.nl/index.php?simaction=content&mediumid=2&pagid=13&stukid=39185
“Door schaarste momenteel geen strooizout voor particulieren” – wich says, we are running out of salt so we are not giving it to the locals anymore, wich is good because last week we made the headlines in national papers because of improper behavoir by those same locals when they found out that free salt means only a single bucket of free salt.
Must be civil unrest caused by Global Warming, what else could it be?

@James Bull
Ah well, that’s the old UHI effect – from the depths of rural Surrey to the Metropolis
(And if anyone’s ever been to Ashford Middx, they’ll appreciate
the irony ).
But really, Hounslow is required to keep the Heathrow Airport approach roads clear, despite there being no planes.

And here is the National Grid page for windpower, no doubt somewhere in the site is the current amount generated by same but you’ll have to dig.
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/WindPowerOperation/
Here is the current demand data, updated regularly, with various national/international interconnectors shown:
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/

tonyb says:
December 19, 2010 at 12:38 am
Breaking news-on the BBC
Chief Scientist of UK has been asked by British Govt to re look at climate models bearing in mind the successive cold winters.
A Chink of light or merely the excuse to blame global warming for the global cooling?
Tonyb”
Not a chink of light. Notice how they are saying “step change” and “climate change”. Handily they’ve already primed the public awhile back by shifting from global warming to global climate change. They’ll rework their models to say the northern hemisphere’s “global” climate will get colder and everyone else will get that much hotter. Damn the data, full steam ahead with the models!

In the UK.
Channel 4 news last night reported that emergency services were asking owners of 4*4 vehicles for assistance in ferrying staff, nurses and doctors, to their places of work as there was a serious problem with staffing levels at hospitals due to the snow.
Those of us that own these ‘poluting’ vehicles pay double the amount of road tax than a standard vehicle because the government wants to reduce their numbers on the road!
I have no problem at all in helping out at a comunity level and will gladly assist when needed. I only ask that government policy be re-evaluated in order to ensure that emergency services are provided with the vehicles required to meet their needs in this cooling climate and the taxation classes adjusted back to the pre green hysteria levels.
Simple request, no pressure!

Well our politicians are framing all this in public as:
– our power stations need replacing
– we won’t let the lights go out
– we need to attract business to invest in building new ones
– we’re raising taxes, carbon prices, etc. to help bring business in, and tackle climate change
Well I don’t know how the world works, but I wonder:
Carbon emissions seems to be a cover. It is ideal because everyone accepts it politically so nobody can dispute it. The lights have to stay on, but we “have to be green”, and we need business and subsidies to build the plants, and we can’t have the public questioning big business, nor getting in the way of planning applications, nor questioning why prices are going up.
On the plus side it sounds like all those wind farms are softening people up for new nuclear. I mean, once you’ve allowed your sacred conservation principles to be sullied with bird killing natural beauty destroying windfarms, what’s a few nuclear plants here and there? They look positively neat by comparison.
And all those subsidies for “green” can open the door for subsidies for nuclear.
The snow is perfect timing in that respect. It reminds the people that staying warm is vital to our nation.

There is an interesting take on Can-con in the Daily Mail from AGW fanatic Fred Pearce –
18th December 2010
Sandal-wearers won’t save us from global warming – but greed and the U.S. Navy will
FRED PEARCE,
Environmental Consultant to New Scientist
His steely eyes and jutting jaw speak of his determination. His medal-festooned uniform underlines his power. Rear Admiral David Titley is a sea warrior, but also a scientist with a passion. He is the U.S. Navy’s chief oceanographer and director of its climate change task force. Yes, the U.S. Navy has a climate change task force. With 450 staff.
“We in the U.S. Navy believe climate change is real,” Titley says. “It’s going to have big impacts, especially in the Arctic, which is changing before our eyes.” He predicts an ice-free Arctic in late summer by 2020. Without a shield of permanent ice, the fabled north-west passage, the graveyard of Arctic seadogs for centuries, will become a maritime superhighway. And, with the shallow Arctic seabed cluttered with oil rigs, he predicts the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia “will have the same strategic significance at the Strait of Hormuz” – the entry to the oil states of the Gulf.
As a military strategist, Titley is planning for this. But he also fears a warmer world. He fears more failed states, chaos if the monsoon switches off and hundreds of millions of Asians go hungry, and rising sea levels resulting in millions of angry migrants washing round the planet like environmental flotsam. He said all this in the U.S. government pavilion during the climate negotiations in Cancun earlier this month. The U.S. Navy top brass showed up in force in the Mexican resort.
Whatever sceptical Republicans back in Washington may think, the Pentagon is deadly serious about global warming. It even has its own targets for cutting emissions of the greenhouse gases. Titley says he is fighting a new war – to protect America from climate change.
Somehow, that is reassuring. At least someone in authority seems to be taking climate change seriously – because over two weeks in Cancun, the diplomats charged with putting together a new UN climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol’s current emissions targets, which expire at the end of 2012, seemed to be living in a cocooned universe, where words were all that were needed to save the world.
They don’t get the science in the way Titley does. For them, it was a triumph to fly home from the Moon Palace, a sprawling golf resort near a lagoon outside Cancun, with a piece of paper everyone could sign. Climate peace in our time – even if the agreed text ducked all the controversial issues, promising to discuss them at some future date. In Cancun, nobody agreed to do any more than they promised in the disastrous talks last year in Copenhagen. And Japan and Russia will do less, having announced they will accept no more targets. Now, none of the six biggest polluting nations – China, the United States, Japan, Russia, Indonesia and India – will accept legally binding targets on their emissions. Unless that changes – and nobody in Cancun could say why or when it might – then the UN climate negotiations, which have stumbled along for 18 years since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, are doomed.
Yet somehow, the climate diplomats convinced themselves, as the sun rose over the lagoon last weekend, that they had conjured up a triumph to make the world forget about Copenhagen. The conference chairman, Mexican environment minister Patricia Espinosa, basking in 5am applause, called it “a new era of international co-operation on climate change”.
Nonsense. This was worse than Copenhagen. It was Copenhagen without the sense of failure. Without a sense of reality. Plan A, the UN plan for new legally binding emissions targets, looks headed down a blind alley.
So are we doomed? Does Titley have to tell the Pentagon to prepare for war against future generations of climate terrorists? Maybe not. Because, as Plan A stumbles, Plan B is up and running. And Plan B may save us.
Plan A, the UN process, assumes that fighting climate change is a big, expensive burden that all countries must share. But divvying out burdens is hard. Nobody wants them. That’s why negotiations grind on year after year. Plan B is not about burden-sharing. It is about profit-making, green growth and new technology. It is built on optimism rather than pessimism. And Plan B is taking off.
I was in Cancun for the talks. But as the days passed, I spent less and less time chronicling the blather of the diplomats. It was moonshine at the Moon Palace. Instead, I cruised the numerous side meetings, where experts were discussing deeds rather than words. And what I heard was staggering. People you would never suspect of being wedded to fighting climate change – rear admirals and farmers, shipping magnates and loggers – were all discussing their plans to cut their pollution and create a new low-carbon world, without the UN or any other global agreement. Because they wanted to, and because it will make them money. Many environmentalists hate them for it. They want burden-sharing and hair shirts. They insist we must all suffer to fight climate change. But the truth is we are at a tipping point where green burden-sharing gives way to green profit-seeking. Green technologies will soon be cheaper than dirty technologies. Consumer power means companies need a clean image to sell their products. And governments are making big pledges to cut their emissions unilaterally, regardless of the UN.
Take China. It won’t accept legally binding UN emissions targets because it can’t stand the rich world telling it what to do. But it is doing more right now to cut its carbon dioxide emissions than the UN would dare to demand. In Copenhagen, it promised to improve the carbon intensity of its economy by 45% by 2020. That means it will cut by 45% the amount of carbon dioxide it emits into the air for every dollar of GDP. Now that target is cemented in the next five-year plan, which starts next month. China is now the world’s biggest producer of wind turbines and solar panels. Green technology is its entry point into another global market. Soon it will be top in electric cars, too.
You won’t spot it from the rhetoric coming out of Washington, but the United States is racing to catch up. President Barack Obama’s hopes of getting climate laws through Congress are dead, but America is the world’s top spender on research and development for low-carbon energy technologies. And the world’s largest wind farm is in the oil state of Texas. Spinning windmills are replacing nodding donkeys.
OK, Americans haven’t given up their gas-guzzling cars. But California and many other states have their own anti-carbon legislation that is making them a lot cleaner. Two years ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger passed into law “cap-and-trade” legislation – providing economic incentives for reducing carbon emissions – that comes into force in 2012.
Then there is Brazil. After China, it is the world’s fastest growing economy. Brazil is a staggering economic success story built on wrecking the nation’s natural resources – such as trashing the Amazon rainforest and ploughing up its vast grasslands, known as the cerrado. But here is a statistic you probably won’t know. In the last six years, Brazil has reduced the rate of destruction of the Amazon by 70%. It has satellites surveying every hectare and public prosecutors taking action against every fire-setter, illegal logger and chain-saw-wielding cattle rancher. In Brazil, there is a hugely influential zero-deforestation campaign. Manufacturers and retailers of everything from leather shoes to beef steaks and garden furniture are demanding raw materials untainted by deforestation.
Last week, the country’s largest bank, Banco de Brasil, announced it will refuse credit to soya bean farmers invading the forests. Brazil is the cutting edge of a global transformation that has seen deforestation decline by 40% in the past decade. Its contribution to carbon dioxide emissions may now be below 10%.
In Cancun, I heard Brazilian ministers give the details of a government plan to cut CO2 emissions to 39% below business-as-usual levels by 2020. They will do it by ending deforestation and turning tens of millions of hectares of farm soils from carbon emitters to carbon absorbers. Environment minister Izabella Teixeira’s boffins detailed schemes for absorbing carbon by rehabilitating cattle pastures and growing crops without ploughing – just planting the next crop in holes drilled into last year’s stubble. Brazil has probably the best agricultural researchers in the world. They have turned the country into the world’s biggest exporter of sugar, coffee, soya, beef, poultry and orange juice. So they will probably do it.
What else is coming down the track? Europe has already passed into law its 20% emission cut. Mexico, Ethiopia, Indonesia, South Korea and many others have serious carbon reduction plans.
During the economic slowdown, shipping line Maersk, the company with the huge container ships that bring our Christmas presents from China, started sailing its vessels slower. There was no hurry. Slow speeds turned out to cut emissions by 20%. Now Maersk says it will stay slow even as the economy speeds up. Cutting emissions also cuts fuel use – just one example of how carbon efficiency equals economic efficiency.
In Cancun, an organisation called the “Carbon War Room”, set up by Richard Branson, published the emissions figures for almost the entire world fleet of commercial vessels – 60,000 ships. With the UN talks again failing to find a way to include international shipping and aircraft in future national emissions targets, the aim is to get the world’s shipping lines to go green by showing it is more profitable. Next up at the war room: aviation. Then other energy-guzzling industries such as steel, aluminium and cement. Branson, with his nose for the essentials, says we have to prevent 17 gigatonnes of carbon emissions by 2020 to keep the world on track to stop two degrees of warming. Only big business, acting in its own self-interest, can close that “gigatonne gap”. Plan B says it will.
British climate economist Lord Stern says the world is entering an era of “low-carbon growth”. A UN deal could help provide sticks and carrots – like a carbon trading scheme to boost the market forces needed to close the gigatonne gap. But it could also hinder.
The endless talk from the UN roadshow as it has moved from Nairobi to Bali to Poznan to Copenhagen to Cancun, with Durban next year and probably Doha the year after, seems to be getting in the way of progress. And we badly need progress. For the nightmare scenario is that, if we face millions of starving people and billions of climate refugees on the march, not all the ships and missiles in the U.S. Navy will save us.
Fred Pearce reported on the Cancun conference for New Scientist magazine.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339475/Global-warming-Sandal-wearers-wont-save-greed-US-Navy-will.html#ixzz18Y5tlowI
You can have your say about this article here:
MailOnline, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday
Associated Newspapers Ltd, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT
020 7938 6000
Publisher: Martin Clarke
Managing Director: James Bromley
Editor: Paul Dacre
Managing Director: Guy Zitter
Online editorial: editorial@dailymailonline.co.uk
News and features: news@dailymail.co.uk
Send letters to the Editor: letters@dailymail.co.uk

@JinOH: Peak Salt

‘Transport Secretary Philip Hammond said he had asked the government’s chief scientific adviser to assess whether the country was experiencing a “step change” in weather patterns due to climate change and whether it needed to spend more money on winter preparations.’

This means that the brutally cold winter needs to be due to Global Warming for there to be a need for grit preparedness. So . . . wait for it . . . if they conclude there is a need for grit preparedness, Global Warming must be the culprit! Obviously this is the ‘grit proxy’ for AGW measurement.

We had about 3 and a half inches of snow yesterday here in West London, and very pretty it looks too (until Monday morning comes along, that is.)
Here’s the link to that classic article in the Independent (sadly the comments have now been deleted):
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
And here’s the poem London Snow by Robert Bridges that was quoted at the end of the article. I think this was published in 1890 (?), which would coincide with a rather chilly period here in the UK:
http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Bridges/london_snow.htm
According to this site, the winter of 1890-91 was execeptionally cold:
http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=6544&start=1
Re warmer winters and early springs, here’s a useful reference by Steven Goddard:
http://arcticsnap.com/index.php?id=58
I notice that the Potsdam Institute are theorising that the current cold winter, and the one before that, could be due to melting ice in the Barents-Kara Sea:
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/global-warming-could-cool-down-temperatures-in-winter
That sneaky global warming! First it causes warm winters and sinister early springs. Then it shrinks the Arctic ice and gives us freezing winters (as revealed by computer models.) What will it do next? My greatest fear that it will start to give us a long series of boring average winters. That would be the worst scenario, because we’d know that it was just lurking somewhere, planning its next move. :o)

Cold Englishman, when the met office says -6 for Oxford, we generally get -10 or colder 4 miles outside. Last night was -11 (when I got up at 7) and Benson was -12 at 8.
you can check the actual weather station temps here
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/teachers/latest_weather_data_uk_rolling_archive.html

Yep, differences between weather and climate taken as a given, the possibility of a step-change is really there in the last five years data, but, it must be only one possible model amongst many being explored in paralell.
The trouble is, the media like to leap from one hobby horse to the next, certain that they are certain this time.
A true statistician is comfortable with uncertainty.

Grumpy old Man says:
BTW, does anyone have the figures for windfarm output as a % of maximum planned power production for the last 3 weeks?
You may find some of the information you require here
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm

“Fred Pearce reported on the Cancun conference for New Scientist magazine.”
Fred Pearce doesn’t live on the same planet as most of us. Where to start with this drivel? The only reason corporations want to ‘save the planet’ is because they see government subsidies and rigged markets which they are adept at exploiting. China loves AGW baloney because they have learned to game the system. Applying basic economic decision tools, they have made a major industry out of creating HFC 23, then destroying it. If anyone seriously believes that wealth is created by digging holes and filling them in, I suggest reading one of the many excellent discussions of Bastiat’s ‘Broken window fallacy.’ Google it.
In the meantime, China has threatened to release the HFC 23 – 18,000 times more potent than co2 – into the atmosphere if the UN doesn’t come up with the protection money. Sitting here in subzero England, I say – yes, please do.

One of the things to remember is that English roads are not designed to be ploughed; this takes long range planning. Here in Ottawa, Canada, the road allowance for housing estates, is 6 chains (66 feet); I did say long range planning. You need 30 feet for cars to travel on, and this leaves 15 feet on either side of the road to dump snow. If you want a fence for your front yard, it has to be 15 feet from the road. This sort of situation hardly exists in the UK.

We had about a foot of snow here in our part of the Cotswolds…..very pretty, all this Global Warming! It reminds me of the winters of ’47 and ’63, not to mention ’87. The thermometer just outside the back door was reading -6 not long ago.
I’m sick to the back teeth with the way the warmists now interpret every type of weather we receive as due to global warming, alias climate change, alias global climate disruption. Whatever do they think the planet’s climate has been doing for all of its existence?
I do believe we should not be polluting and wasteful; there is a lot of room for improvement in mankind’s behaviour; especially in regard to clearing forests. I believe that the planet’s climate has far larger influences from natural occurences than from anything we do. I also think there is far more to fear from cooling than from a smidgeon of warming.
We are not alone in waiting for more heating oil deliveries. Our level has dropped at a rate we have never seen before while living here, despite trying to be careful in our use. Thank goodness we have a little stove in the sitting room and some coal (anthracite) to fuel it! We deliberately chose a flat top one in case we need to cook on it, as our cooking stove is an electric one (no gas where we are). We also keep plenty of candles and have a little camping gas stove for emergencies, and some stores of dry and tinned food.

A couple of miles inland from the coast in Merseyside, a fairly mild place temperature-wise, I spent yesterday and some of this morning digging my way through 9 inches of white, frozen global warming. At the nearby Met Office station in Crosby, a record low of -17C was recorded overnight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12031709
Admittedly the records only go back to 1983, so this must be an example of weather, not climate. Despite that, even the most dense politician must surely be asking the obvious question. Perhaps our Transport Secretary has spotted that the global warming game is up.

Verity Jones says:
December 19, 2010 at 3:45 am
“For school closures, blame the “safety nazis” and “who can I sue?” culture. My daughter’s school closed becasue they did not have the manpower to clear all the path of snow and were concerned about the risk of children falling.”
Make that the risk of children tipping over. The climate system has hundreds of tipping points. Hundreds of them (i read it in an interview with the late Dr. Schneider).
And we might be passing one of them right now without even noticing (except for the ones that tip over).