Snowfall "…a very rare and exciting event"

Now that Anthropogenic Global Warming or Anthropogenic Climate Change or Anthropogenic Climate Disruption is the explanation for everything, it is clear that we have seen the birth of a new religion.
Science it is not.

Wonder if that gray “smudge” in east-central England is just less snow, or black-carbon from industrial plants.

The very same Independent has already published the rebuttal:
Expect more extreme winters thanks to global warming, say scientists
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/expect-more-extreme-winters-thanks-to-global-warming-say-scientists-2168418.html

Anthony? Turn your computer off, go and enjoy Christmas with your family.
Do it NOW
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you and your family
Take care
Warren in NZ

Well, a Happy Merry White Christmas and New Years to all the folks in that beautiful land. (Here too; 355 mm or 14 inches on the 24th with a bit more each day — big storm coming in about a week)
I wonder if GB is sinking into the sea from all that extra weight?
———————————
I wrote a bit for Tips & Notes about sea level after seeing photos in the WSJ regarding villages in GB. Could we have a discussion during Anthony’s sabbatical on an open thread. Doesn’t have to be technical. Those that live near or visit coastal places could relate info from family.
What I wrote earlier is short so I’ll repeat it here:
TIPS & NOTES 12/7/2010
Sea level?
In its Sat/Sun edition (Nov. 27-28) the Wall Street Journal had a review (by Ferdinand Mount) of a book titled “Villages of Britain” authored by Clive Aslet. An accompanying photo (b/w) of Tobermory, Isle of Mull (56.622691, -6.06716) shows a row of seaside buildings (very colorful in Web images). One web reference claims ‘Tobar Mhoire’ (Well of Mary) has been a small settlement here from the earliest times, while the modern Tobermory was established in 1789. This coast seems to be rather fixed relative to sea level. See the masthead photo here and the photo below that:
http://tour-scotland-photographs.blogspot.com/2010/04/old-photograph-tobermory-scotland.html
Another WSJ photo shows the ruins of Saint Andrew’s Church on the Suffolk coast at Covehithe (52.376516, 1.705589). This site has pictures, including of the hogs and their houses. Covehithe seems to have been a much larger settlement at one time, apparently washed away by the sea. This site
http://www.aboutbritain.com/towns/covehithe.asp
explains:
“The village of Covehithe was previously known as North Hales, in which time it was much larger than it is today due to the sea encroaching more and more each year, the extent of this can be seen with ordinance survey maps.”
There seems to be little on the Web regarding Covehithe but for this coast there is a long history and much information; here is a link to everybody’s favorite “don’t use” site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich
This place is 12.3 km south of Covehithe (52.277197, 1.632324).
“Dunwich was the capital of East Anglia 1500 years ago and was a prosperous seaport and centre of the wool trade during the Early Middle Ages, with a natural harbour formed by the mouths of the River Blyth and the River Dunwich, but the harbour and most of the town has since been lost to coastal erosion. The town’s decline began in 1286 when a sea surge hit . . . ”
Examining these two places it is hard to draw the conclusion that one of Earth’s biggest threats is sea level rising because of the combustion of carbon based fuel.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/expect-more-extreme-winters-thanks-to-global-warming-say-scientists-2168418.html
“The researchers used computer models to assess the impact of the disappearing Arctic sea ice, particularly in the area of the Barents and Kara seas north of Scandinavia and Russia, which have experienced unprecedented losses of sea ice during summer.”
I wonder how the Russian convoys of WWII got on with all the sea ice in the Barents sea? If we have lost the ice now then I would expect there to have been at least some ice back in the 1940s. A bit odd then that convoys ran from June 1941 to May 1944 in almost every month.
“The model simulations show that, when you don’t get ice on the Barents and Kara seas, that promotes the formation of a high-pressure system there, and, because the airflow is clockwise around the high, it brings cold, polar air right into Europe, which leads to cold conditions here while it is unusually warm elsewhere, especially in the Arctic,” he explained.”
Is that really how high pressure systems are formed?

E.M.Smith I have that ancestry on my mom’s side-Her family- Anderson, were from the
highlands of Sutherland, Scotland.
descendants of the Vikings that saw that the Scots women were good looking but going to the bother of dragging one to the longboat without her putting up a fight wasn’t worth
it so they stayed..
Here’s one of my favorite Kipling poems;
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/thorkilds_song.html
had that one taped to the bulkhead on my old DC-7 Retardant Tanker.
After along fire season, it fit well….

John F. Hultquist says:
“I wonder if GB is sinking into the sea from all that extra weight?”
Don’t forget places like Winchelsea and Rye that are now a couple miles inland from their original positions on the coast.

Fools, fools, anyone would know that it is all due to declining ice cover in the Artic as the spin doctors explain.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1341388/Global-warming-Britain-longer-colder-winters-melting-sea-ice-plays-havoc-weather-patterns.html
The problem is that this spin reaks of desperation and the public is unlikely to buy into it.
Now what were their model, a few years back, predicting? Oh yes, CO2 causes warming particularly at the poles, thereby leading to melting of the ice caps (and catastrophoic sea level rises). This will causer warmer, shorter winters in the Northern Hemishpere with less snow. Hence the 2000 article.
Now they say a warmer artic with less ice leads to a colder Northern Hemishere.
Funny that when (during the recent instrument record) the Artic ice was at a minimum a few years back, the jet streams were not altered and UK and Europe did not experience such a harsh winter as was experienced in 2009/10 and as is presently beeing experienced in 2010/11. Could it just be that a reduction in the extent of summer ice does not lead to the climate shift the warmist now suggest.
All of this merely etablishes precisely how bad the models are at forecasting.

Given their failed predictions at this rate they’ll have to resort to a multi-verse theory of warming; yes it isn’t warming here but our CO2 emissions are teleconnecting to the parallel dimension and won’t somebody please save the Zezgher’phrwts!

I enjoyed the “Yes Virginia” article, and how fitting it is.
“Not believe in Global Warming! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch all the weather radars on Christmas Eve to catch Global Warming, but even if they did not see Global warming on the radars, what would that prove? Nobody sees Global warming, but that is no sign that there is no Global Warming. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.”
That’s it then, Global Warming exists just like Santa.
p.s. It’s 4:20am Christmas day here in Brisbane. Still no sign of Santa. I musta bin a bad bad boy.
Merry Christmas to all and I hope you all have a happy and healthy new year.

Matter of Priorities
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/12/matter-of-priorities.html

Do they mean this extreme,
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/1947winter.gif
Has anyone watched The unforgettable Spike on UK ITV, there is one hilarious ten second sketch with Spike pretending to be a MET OFFICE weatherman, it says it all.

A very distinct change has occurred over the past few years in how the average person sees the climate debate.
Even in my work, which is for a government environmental agency, only a few die hards still try to push the official line. Most just don’t want to talk about it.
Those outside of work, with very few exceptions (usually progressive ideologues), say they don’t believe a word of the official line and see climate as a natural process.
With this change in the popular perception of climate, I cannot see how western governments can continue for much longer on their current campaign of throwing ever larger amounts of money at a problem that most see as a waste of money.
In the US even prominent Democrats are balking (such as West Virginia’s Senators) at the EPA’s heavy handed regulatory approach to CO2.
I suspect we will see a reversal of course beginning in the new year. This will be accompanied by wails from the green left, but with the American people (and even labor left) turning away, the wails will be muted.
I don’t think it is time yet to put down our guard, but the momentum appears to have genuinely shifted. It is time to start becoming more optimistic.
Damn shame though that our economy has been so damaged by this madness.

Phillip Bratby says:
December 24, 2010 at 9:07 am
It’s very unusual for Ireland to be mostly covered in the white stuff.
————————–
Bl**dy hell Phil, that’s what I was going to say!
latitude says:
December 24, 2010 at 9:16 am
Isn’t this the second time in the same year too?
—————————
Yes it is! It’s like all my Christmases have come at once! I like to snowkite and I’ve had three sessions within 15mins walk of where I live (east coast Scotland) at an elevation of only 100m, in the first month of winter. I was able to ski back to my abode on each occasion.
Unprecedented!

Beng, I don’t think there actually is a whole lot of industry left in Sheffield and Leeds. Most of it has gone to India and China by now.
I think they just missed the snow this time around. During the first burst, last week in November, I know from a friend there they got around 15in of level white stuff.
For the record I’m in Lower Normandy, France, we’ve had about a foot during the last week. That’s after 2 1/2 feet last winter. OK, my house is at around 600ft, but that’s silly numbers for this part of the world.
Happy Christmas to all here, especially Anthony – and enjoy your break, you deserve it!

So models indicate that due to anthropogenic CO2, winters will be warmer and snow a rare event. Models also show that due to anthropogenic CO2, winters will be colder and snow more profuse.
There is no question about it – if we hadn’t had three cold winters there certainly wouldn’t be any models showing colder and snowier winters – that would have been suppressed at peer review as ‘wrong’, and would not have seen the light of day in the press as it would not have chimed in with the propaganda and the groupthink.
But now the models have to be revised to account for the facts, which otherwise are looking like an episode that should only happen every 10,000 years or so under the traditional modelling (upon which IPCC AR4 and UKCP08 were based).
This report referenced in the Independent states that global warming will win out in the end, but it could get a lot colder for a few decades. Oh, how convenient that a new revised model comes to the rescue just when the existing ones are discredited. So now we are expected to reserve judgment on these new models until 2050 or so – just as we were saying the last rites over the current models, we are now expected to believe that we have to wait another 40 years or so to see whether global warming will win out.
This is simply the religion of charlatans. When cults predict an apocalyptic event on a certain date and it doesn’t happen, they revise the date – the explanation: they made a numerical mistake or didn’t read things quite right. Alternatively, they become like the Delphic oracle, where they pronounce the future but you can never be quite sure the meaning of it. We now have a priesthood of cultists posing as scientists scrabbling around trying to keep us believing in their religion now that it has been falsified. And falsified it has. In 2008 when they compiled UKCP08 the Met Office would have given odds on a string of three severe winters in a row as 1-in-8000, i.e. a once-in-8000 years event. That this episode occured six months later takes it (IMO) into the realm of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that their models are fatally flawed. They keep on lobbying that they need better supercomputing capabilities and that they are under-resourced in software engineering, but improvements in these will not get them a right answer, only the wrong answer quicker.

Claude Harvey says:
December 24, 2010 at 9:42 am
Being wrong about most everything carries no penalty in a world where mainstream media assists in reinventing reality. In a world where folks will substitute a media account for what they can see outside their own windows, “truth-telling” is a lonely and impoverished profession.
—————-
Wow. Well said.

Mate in U.K emailed me this
“I’m in North of England and it has been snowing heavily for three days now.
The wife has done absolutely nothing but stare through the window.
If it doesn’t stop soon, i guess i’ll probably have to let her in.”

ScientistsForTheTruth:
“So models indicate that due to anthropogenic CO2, winters will be warmer and snow a rare event. Models also show that due to anthropogenic CO2, winters will be colder and snow more profuse.”
Yes that’s it, and while it contradicts that’s to be expected of uncertainty in this area. It’s not obvious that either result is wrong. The latter study has focused on the response to sea ice decline. It was submitted before winter 2009, so didn’t take into account the cold winters of 2009 and 2010:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2009JD013568.shtml
The reason this theory gets focus now is because the subject of cold winters is currently topical. The paper isn’t directly stating that man-made global warming causes cold winters in the northern hemisphere, but that they find sea ice decline results in cold winters in the northern hemisphere. But logically of course man-made global warming is expected to result in arctic sea ice decline so…
The mainstream theory is still that a warming world will see warmer winters in the UK though. These side theories (like the solar minimum – jetstream one and the gulf stream fresh water shutdown one) are fringe ideas and not widely accepted. They do all represent possibilities though, and therein lies the risk of climate change.

TheTempestSpark says:
December 24, 2010 at 9:55 am
What is going on? am I losing my freaking mind?
————-
Well, no you’re not. This is just a necesary phase you have to go though after you realise all that you are told by the mainstream media is BS. And that applies whichever subject it is they are talking about.
After this phase you begin to expect this outcome, learn to look at things (media presentation) differently and – most importantly of all – learn to do your own internet-based research on all matters that impinge on any aspect of the well-being of your self/family/community. In short: you learn not to trust the lying media scumbags.
Journalists? My arse.

A very Merry Christmas to all!
And thanks for all the fish!

Independent – 16 September 2005
Global warming ‘past the point of no return’
A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/global-warming-past-the-point-of-no-return-507030.html

It’s already Christmas morning in Aotearoa New Zealand and its going to be a sunny barbecue day. Maybe 22 degrees in Purakanui.
Merry Christmas everyone and a happy New Year.

Real Climate is in a panic over the negative NAO
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/12/cold-winter-in-a-world-of-warming/#more-5596
They know this will likely stick around for thirty years and falsify the AGW theory that positive NAO is here to stay. They desperately are clinging to the newly floated reduced arctic ice extent creating this weather theory but are dreading that likely sea ice volume buildup will likely result this year as it has in the past during negative NAO.
Looking at GISP2 ice core temperature reconstruction, the little ice age was the coldest period of the Holocene.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GISP2_ice_core_eng.svg
Looking at the current CET:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/
We may speculate that The current UK winter could become the coldest in 10,000 years. It is hard to stop the trend of unstoppable Holocene cooling.

@ Doug in Seattle
“I don’t think it is time yet to put down our guard, but the momentum appears to have genuinely shifted. It is time to start becoming more optimistic”
It’s just a change of direction, with effort going into world domination by another route !
Since the blogosphere has played a major part in turning global warming into ridicule we can now expect to see some sort of attempt to control what people put onto the internet. After all, we can’t have innocent persons being corrupted by uncontrolled and unscientific dialogue, can we ?
We have the “free” press demonstrating (very well) that it isn’t free at all, just another arm of Big_Biz.
We also have scientists demonstrating (very well) that having your bread buttered on both sides is preferable to having clean hands.
Roll-on 2011, when we will have Global Climate Insinuation coming out of our orifices, and at high cost.

GUESS WHAT?!?!?! The planet’s got a fever. And the only prescription in more cowbell!
Warm globally, cool locally.

This winter and last has seen ice floes on the river tay at dundee.

Does that look like the ice sheet getting closer to Iceland? Or is it just a visual illusion?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_bm_extent.png

“If the theory can “predict” mutually contradictory outcomes, without anyone knowing which one is “true”, then it’s nowhere near as “robust” as it claimed to be so widely and so often.”
That’s not the case. Logically the theory that human activity is warming the earth can be robust even as the theory of what that means for UK winters is not.

That Petoukhov and Semenov Study Independent is discussing and Realclimate is covering does not apply to this winter at all.
It discusses cold NAO+ winters and links the cold in europe to sea ice cover changes in arctic. Results are based on computer modelling.
The study does not cover NAO- winters at all. Nor does it link arctic warming to NAO- conditions. Thus it is very misleading to link 2009-2010 or this winter to the conditions covered by this study.

How about this? I have a theory that if I flip a coin, it will come up heads or tails. No matter what happens, my theory is right.
Here’s the AGW theory: (evil) mankind is burning more and more fuel, and making more and more CO2, which will irrevocably alter the climate and reach a tipping point where we cannot stop it, and we all die. If temperatures go up or down, or there is more or less snow cover, and polar ice increases or decreases, then it proves AGW. Now, shut up and hand over the $$$Billions that we promise to give a tiny bit to the 3rd world.

Re Latitude: “Since we now know that CO2 causes colder weather, shouldn’t we be increasing CO2?”
The idea of reducing CO2 emissions is to stop tampering with the climate, just let nature do what nature is going to do.

Re jorgekafkazar:
That’s the opposite of my point. My point is that man-made global warming is not dependent on what UK winters do. What we have here is one theory and two hypotheses:
Theory: Man-made global warming
Hypothesis #1: Global warming will result in warmer UK winters
Hypothesis #2: Global warming will result in colder UK winters
If UK winters warm then hypothesis #2 is falsified. If UK winters cool then hypothesis #1 is falsified. So something does get falsified, but not the theory. The theory is not dependent on either hypothesis. It would be illogical to claim the theory is falsified because one of those hypotheses have been falsified.
Additionally of course neither of those hypotheses have yet been falsified.

onion says on December 24, 2010 at 12:46 pm

“If the theory can “predict” mutually contradictory outcomes, without anyone knowing which one is “true”, then it’s nowhere near as “robust” as it claimed to be so widely and so often.”
That’s not the case. Logically the theory that human activity is warming the earth can be robust even as the theory of what that means for UK winters is not.

Let’s be more specific. Which human activity? Sex? Breathing? What?
Secondly, scientists deal in mechanisms. Tell us about the mechanism. Please be specific.

Moonbat’s AGW Progress Report: Not Weather Underground.
There’s heat in that water, no? That’s where the warmistas hide the heat.
It’s not fair.
…-
“Water temperature in pipes to homes reaches record low today (Friday)”
“THE TEMPERATURE of water going to people’s homes today (Christmas Eve) from reservoirs in London and the Thames Valley is the coldest on record.
According to Thames Water, due to sustained freezing weather since November, the water has cooled down to a “staggeringly chilly” 1.8 degrees Celsius – far below the comparatively balmy Christmas Eve average of 7.3 degrees.
The previous coldest recorded December 24 water temperature was 4.9 degrees, in 2001.
A spokeswoman for the company, Becky Johnson, said this was “a big problem” for Britain’s biggest water supplier.
“Whenever water below five degrees Celsius enters the company’s 20,000-mile network of supply mains, there is always a marked increase in bursts and leaks,” said Ms Johnson.
“This is because cold water makes the pipes, especially the century-old cast-iron ones, contract and this can make them break if there are hairline weaknesses.”
At this time of year Thames Water would normally expect to receive 75 new leak reports a day but it is currently getting nearly 300.
Jerry White, Thames Water’s head of operational control, sai it was the coldest start to a winter anyone at the company could remember, including staff with 40 years’ service.”
http://www.newburytoday.co.uk/News/Article.aspx?articleID=15480

Re Richard Sharpe:
“Let’s be more specific. Which human activity?”
There’s a good graph here of the main human activities contributing:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.html
“Secondly, scientists deal in mechanisms. Tell us about the mechanism.”
I recommend this:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

“””Peter H says:
December 24, 2010 at 9:25 am
It’s been gloriously cold, sunny here today, in Devon, SW England, crisped snow lies on the ground glittering in the Sun and tonight is likely to be *extremely* cold. And, I don’t deny that reality (or the recent years of warm weather) for a second.
I also know what the global temperature trend is…”””
And Urban Leprechaun says:
And I am here in Devon, England, too, and it is taking all my driving skills to get home, a half mile of single track, slightly uphill, and smoothed to icy glass by my neighbour’s tractor. Seriously cold. -6C outside. So cold a fox ate my bird food.
BUT, I do not see this as the end of climate change. I see it as being the result of the wind coming from the north east for ten days. Look out the window! NE wind.
“The North wind will blow
And we shall have snow.”
(A doggerel taught to wee school kids in England)

I’m enjoying watching onion spin and spin and spin….

Oh do stop this “it’s cold in England” stuff, as if this puts the boot into ACC.
It’s f*cking boiling in Greenland right now. The polar bears are lathering on the sun-cream and sitting at the poolside drinking pina coladas.
This is Newton. First (?) Law, can’t destroy energy – or no such thing as a free lunch. The energy has to go somewhere. And it’s gone to Greenland.

onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 1:37 pm
No-one decided it, it just is that way.
==================================================
onion, did you believe in global warming 10 years ago?
If you did, was it because you believed that scientists knew what they were doing 10 years ago?
Do you think that those scientists believed that they knew what they were doing because it looked like the temperature of the planet was actually increasing a little bit?
Now that the climate has not cooperated with their theory, do you still believe that they know what they are talking about?

Re Latitude:
“Since we now know that CO2 causes it to get colder too, how much is too much, how much is too little. How in this world are we going to jiggle it so the temperature stays exactly on that thin little “normal” line?”
The idea is to leave nature alone. Artificially elevating CO2 levels to 390ppm and rising is not a wise move. It will have knock on effects and the higher it goes the more risk there is.
The desire isn’t to control climate, we can’t, we don’t even understand it well enough. The plan is to not interfere with it (especially given that we don’t understand it well enough!)

“Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said. ”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

Mike says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:22 pm
“Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said. ”

In my mind 3 years out of 10 is not occasionally but what looks like the start of a trend. I could be wrong though. The fact remains that snowfalls are not a thing of the past but a thing of the present. ;O)

@ Onion.
Try them with the “wind is coming from the north-east”.
They might understand that.
UL 🙂

onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 11:10 am

Give it up onion, you want to make me cry with you grasping at straws. People in the UK are more likely to side with us than you. They are struggling with cold and snow and not with milder winters. Give it a break and admit AGW GOT IT WRONG.
By the way are you related to THE Charles Onians? He said:
“Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html

ScientistForTruth says:
December 24, 2010 at 10:53 am
“So models indicate that due to anthropogenic CO2, winters will be warmer and snow a rare event. Models also show that due to anthropogenic CO2, winters will be colder and snow more profuse.”
“There is no question about it – if we hadn’t had three cold winters there certainly wouldn’t be any models showing colder and snowier winters – that would have been suppressed at peer review as ‘wrong’, and would not have seen the light of day in the press as it would not have chimed in with the propaganda and the groupthink.”
Wonderful summary argument on the methodology. Everyone should read the entire post twice, at least.
As for the AGW folk who are putting out this tripe that ScientistForTruth criticizes, I wonder if one or more of them would like to give us the genealogy of this “new theory” that the extent of arctic ice melt explains the present cold in Britain. Why have we not heard of it before now? Of course, there are other problems, such as the fact that arctic ice extent has been this low for a decade or so and that raises the question of why this effect kicked in for just the last two or three years. As for this “new theory’s” companion, the “old theory” that arctic ice melt causes milder British winters, what is its status at this time? Is it falsified? Are the two theories sort of a tag team, as in American wrestling, where each substitutes for the other as needed? Are they similar to the two conscious minds that inhabited the body of Dr. Jekyll? What does it take to embarrass the British media?

Onions,
Further to my last comment in which you tried, unsuccesfully to limit snow to the UK here is a visual for you.
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/prvsnow.gif

onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:10 pm
“The idea is to leave nature alone. Artificially elevating CO2 levels to 390ppm and rising is not a wise move. It will have knock on effects and the higher it goes the more risk there is.”
You first.

If I may, I have some background info here.
http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/23/potsdam-climate-instutute-now-says-to-expect-warmer-colder-winters/

Re Latitude:
“Since we now know that CO2 causes it to get colder too, how much is too much, how much is too little. How in this world are we going to jiggle it so the temperature stays exactly on that thin little “normal” line?”
The idea is to leave nature alone. Artificially elevating CO2 levels to 390ppm and rising is not a wise move. It will have knock on effects and the higher it goes the more risk there is.
The desire isn’t to control climate, we can’t, we don’t even understand it well enough. The plan is to not interfere with it (especially given that we don’t understand it well enough!)
—————-
So we know the climate well enough to know that we shouldn’t increase CO2, but not well enough to control it. But if we know that, decreasing CO2 will cool the climate, doesn’t that mean we know enough to know how to control the climate?
Can you not see the circular logic you are applying? Or are you just regurgitating the talking points?

Dizzy Ringo says: “distant geography lessons of my youth
at 2:04 pm
My youthful lessons did not include tectonic plates. Continental drift was the idea then. Nevertheless, the UK is not near a plate boundary so I think we have to consider isostatic rebound (glacier related). But I’d still like to know how/why Tobermory seems to stay where it is. Is it rising at just the same amount as sea level? That would be a lucky circumstance. Not having to replace docks and the like.
———————————————————
Urban Leprechaun says:
December 24, 2010 at 1:55 pm
The energy has to go somewhere. And it’s gone to Greenland.
Note that it is temperature that is high over Greenland and adjacent areas. It took no heat from any place else to cause this elevation of temperature. The concept of an adiabatic process causing a temperature increase in descending air is useful in explaining these temperature anomalies.
http://daphne.palomar.edu/jthorngren/adiabatic_processes.htm

tokyoboy,
Nice. Thanks for that animation.

onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:10 pm
“The idea is to leave nature alone. Artificially elevating CO2 levels to 390ppm and rising is not a wise move. It will have knock on effects and the higher it goes the more risk there is.”

What risk? Colder winters in the northern hemisphere? Warmer winters in the northern hemisphere? Average winters in the northern hemisphere? Drowning atolls? Glaciers melting?……… CAUTION: on these and many other alarmist calls you will find plenty of evidence to the contrary which shows reality against fantasy. Here are just a few.
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/river-sediment-may-counter-bangladesh-sea-level-rise.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627633.700-shapeshifting-islands-defy-sealevel-rise.html
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2010/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2010/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/to:2010
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5734/600.abstract
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6835/abs/411287a0.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6838/abs/411675a0.html
You are tying yourself in knots. Stop digging! Where is your evidence over the past 10 years of the higher risk? Be honest and give up the spin. It is totally unbecoming.

It didn’t “go” to Greenland, it was pushed there by a negative AO. This vortex is wider (and yes weaker) when negative, thus piling up warm water south of the wider Arctic Circle. This pile of warm water warms Greenland.

@Jimbo says: December 24, 2010 at 2:27 pm,
No one predicted the warming would be uniform spatially or temporally. Cooling for a month or two over a small part of the global where you happen to live does not refute the general warming trend.

onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Re jorgekafkazar:
That’s the opposite of my point. My point is that man-made global warming is not dependent on what UK winters do. What we have here is one theory and two hypotheses:
Theory: Man-made global warming
—————————————————————————————Onion. Since when was the notion that man has made ‘global warming’ established as a Theory?
It is understood that co2 is a ‘greenhouse gas’ and man has contributed to the amount of co2 released into the atmosphere but this is a long way from a theory asserting that man has made global warming.
Douglas

jorgekafkazar:
“Sorry, onion, but have you looked at the Northern Hemisphere today? There’s a lot more record cold weather happening besides that in the UK.”
Sure there’s also a lot of warm areas too. For the global picture I look at the overall trend. 2010 is of course looking to be a particularly warm year.

Re MarkG:
Onion: “Artificially elevating CO2 levels to 390ppm and rising is not a wise move.”
Why?
“If the Climate Disruptionists are right, then it could be the only thing preventing a new ice age. If they’re wrong, then it will mean faster plant growth with no negative consequences.”
———-
You don’t know there will be no negative consequences. Unless you have a perfect climate model. That’s why.

Re KD:
“So we know the climate well enough to know that we shouldn’t increase CO2, but not well enough to control it.”
We need far less knowledge to know we shouldn’t increase CO2 than the knowledge we’d need to control climate. We have the former but not the latter.

“onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 5:58 pm
…
You don’t know there will be no negative consequences. Unless you have a perfect climate model. That’s why. ”
Actually, we have tons of literature on injecting CO2 into an atmosphere. Even at levels as high as 1000ppm. No warming, no deleterious effects to speak of – commerical greenhouse growers have been doing it for ages… There’s even some literature online…

onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 6:12 pm
When was the last time CO2 rose from 280ppm to 390ppm in the space of 200 years? Probably never. These are untested changes we are making, we can’t point to the past and say “yep it’s happened before” because we don’t know when that has happened. The risk is in this kind of uncertainty.
=====================================================
onion, do you really believe that those are big numbers?
An increase of 100ppm?
I’ve seem past recreations of CO2 levels that were around 3000ppm.
And guess what?
The planet crashed into another ice age…………..
Don’t worry over how fast it has increased, the planet doesn’t care, and 200 years is plenty of time to see if it had any effect.
It obviously didn’t………….

“The theory is “man-made global warming”. It would be falsified if it could be proven that CO2 levels aren’t rising. That humans aren’t elevating CO2 levels (or any other greenhouse gases). Or that CO2 doesn’t absorb infrared (that it’s not a greenhouse gas). Any of those things would falsify it, but of course they are settled science now. ”
Actually, you’re out of date. The current term is “man-made climate disruption”, because the damn disrespectful planet has refused to warm for more than a decade.
But at least you seem to accept that there’s no way for “man-made global warming” theory to be falsified because it makes no actual predictions that can be compared to the real world. You see, most people, when they hear “man-made global warming” would think, you know, that it required some actual proof that humans were actually, you know, warming the globe by harmful amounts.
And, frankly, when I’m outside shoveling snow and the temperature is more than fifty degrees below zero, I would really welcome some of that “man-made global warming”.

onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 6:16 pm
We need far less knowledge to know we shouldn’t increase CO2 than the knowledge we’d need to control climate. We have the former but not the latter.
===========================
Huh?
And at 150 ppm YOU would cease to grow. (You….meaning….an onion.)
Plants cease photosynthesis….that is they shut down at 150 PPM of CO2.
In the last glaciation, the Earth got down to 180 PPM, dangerously close.
Your comments…and your arguments…are spurious.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
—————–
Well considering that no one has seen snow in the UK for a while and that now we have had snow it’s seems we have proof that:
A. Snow falls are rare.
B. Everyone is excited by it,
I say Viner’s prediction is spot on.

Merry Christmas to all,
Up and down temperatures.
I seem to remember watching a program about climate change a few years ago now, in which they stated that during the transition from warm periods to ice ages the global temperature would have some very nasty oscillations (a few decades of warm followed by a few decades of cold).
I do start to wonder if we have confused AGW with the warm part of this cycle towards a new ice age!
Thoughts anyone?

LazyTeenager says:
December 24, 2010 at 11:52 pm
within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
—————–
Well considering that no one has seen snow in the UK for a while and that now we have had snow it’s seems we have proof that:
A. Snow falls are rare.
B. Everyone is excited by it,
I say Viner’s prediction is spot on.
But 3 years in a row is not rare and I can’t see the travellers stuck in airports being too excited.
And why if it is consistant with AGW was it not forecast by the senior AGW modelers in the MET but was by weather forecasters who do not follow AGW.

Re Latitude
December 24, 2010 at 7:10 pm
“onion, do you really believe that those are big numbers? An increase of 100ppm?”
Yes! But not because 100 is a big number but because 280ppm to 390ppm is a 40% increase and that’s happened so fast! While CO2 has increased by 40% throughout history it isn’t known to have done so in just a few centuries. There really is no good comparison with the past to ensure these changes are safe.
“I’ve seem past recreations of CO2 levels that were around 3000ppm.”
Sure, but as per above it’s the change that matters, including the rate. A corresponding situation would be CO2 levels increasing from 2100ppm to 3000ppm within a few centuries. Even then it’s important for the purpose f comparison that the 2100ppm world is similar to the modern one.
Sadly this isn’t the case. When CO2 was 2100ppm this was long ago before our species even existed, even before chimpanzees and apes existed, before grass existed. Long long ago. Comparison with the modern day changes are stretched to breaking point even overlooking the rate.
“And guess what?
The planet crashed into another ice age…………..”
I thought most of the periods of glaciation are associated with low CO2 levels. Remember also that in the past the Sun was fainter according to the standard solar model, so everything else being equal the Sun should have been cooler, which allows for CO2 to be much higher than present without temperature being particularly higher.
“Don’t worry over how fast it has increased, the planet doesn’t care, and 200 years is plenty of time to see if it had any effect.
It obviously didn’t………….”
It’s very important how fast it has increased, in fact a 40% increase over a million years would be irrelevant. Plenty of time for various sytems to adapt – like species and ocean chemistry. But cram that 40% increase into just 200 years and well…this is the untested experiment we are running.

Re Paul Coppin:
“Actually, we have tons of literature on injecting CO2 into an atmosphere. Even at levels as high as 1000ppm. No warming, no deleterious effects to speak of – commerical greenhouse growers have been doing it for ages… There’s even some literature online…”
Not into *the* atmosphere though. A commercial greenhouse doesn’t contain oceans and millions of species or 6 billion humans.

Realclimate
Did the Sun hit record highs over the last few decades?
Alec Rawls says:
10 August 2005 at 2:04 AM
Nice post, but the conclusion: “… solar activity has not increased since the 1950s and is therefore unlikely to be able to explain the recent warming,” would seem to be a non-sequitur.
What matters is not the trend in solar activity but the LEVEL. It does not have to KEEP going up to be a possible cause of warming. It just has to be high, and it has been since the forties.
Presumably you are looking at the modest drop in temperature in the fifties and sixties as inconsistent with a simple solar warming explanation, but it doesn’t have to be simple. Earth has heat sinks that could lead to measured effects being delayed, and other forcings may also be involved. The best evidence for causality would seem to be the long term correlations between solar activity and temperature change. Despite the differences between the different proxies for solar activity, isn’t the overall picture one of long term correlation to temperature?
[Response: You are correct in that you would expect a lag, however, the response to an increase to a steady level of forcing is a lagged increase in temperature and then a asymptotic relaxation to the eventual equilibirum. This is not what is seen. In fact, the rate of temperature increase is rising, and that is only compatible with a continuing increase in the forcing, i.e. from greenhouse gases. – gavin]
===========================================================
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/reconstructedTSI.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/irradiance.gif
For me, the evidence above is clear, a ramp up of TSI from around 1900 and then a steady high from 1940 to 2000 leading to the slightly higher temperatures we see today, no room for CO2. Now the sun is quite and it`s cold, while CO2 still increases.
Gavins response is utter rubbish if the two graphs above are correct.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/did-the-sun-hit-record-highs-over-the-last-few-decades/

Let us assume that the AGW proponents are right. Warmer northpole gives colder winters in Europe and Amerika. That means that warmer north pole will result in a far higher albedo in areas that actually are on lower latitude, which refects far more sunlight then areas on higher latitude. Also, snow cools the atmosphere drmatically, as anyone can notice once you have a clear frost night over fresh fallen snow. That means that snowy winters will function as a very strong negative feedback.
Now it seems to me you AGW proponents have managed themselves in an odd corner. Either they are spinning this winter, which means they practice politics rather then science, or they have just proven that the climate has a strong negative feedback, which would be a refute of doom predictions.

Anthony I hope you are enjoying your break.
To be picky it’s the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (plus Ireland, an independent country, of course) mostly covered by snow. Scotland and Wales are part of Great Britain geographically (and politically too for the last few hundred years). (Wales since 1282, Scotland since 1707 after that unfortunate business in Darien)

Onion – some background on the Keeling cherry picking: http://newsbuster.org/node/12737
..the only anthropogenic global warming I see is in the rise of hot air from the exponential increase in AGWScience from cooking the books.
A fraction of the CO2 production in the atmosphere above the Hawaiian islands, nice pics: http://www.travellady.com/Articles/article-volcano.html
Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the world: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/HCV/maunaloa.html
Thousands of earthquakes a year Hawaiian islands: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/earthquakes/ and http://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitorying/anss/regions/hi/

The “Independent” rebuttal is hilarious! It’s falling apart and they are starting to
dance like cats on hot bricks.
This summer on the sea ice threads I pointed out once or twice that a larger area of open sea in the Arctic – combined with well below average summer Arctic air temperatures – results in a big increase in heat loss from Arctic ocean to air / space. I used the analogy of a dog hanging its tongue out and panting to lose excess heat. In this way excess ocean heat from el Nino events ends up in the Arctic and is lost over the open Arctic seas.
However the warmists argued againt this – that instead open water had a darker colour and thus absorbed more solar photon energy. Combined with reduced albedo from decreased ice cover, low ice extent was argued to add heat to the oceans.
Now someone is doing a 180 turn and accepting that low ice extent combined with low air temperature causes ocean heat loss – just to provide a narrative to “explain” the
freezing NH winters while preserving AGW.
Increaingly the public will recognise this for what it is – as Scientist for Truth eloquently put it – the religion of charlatans.

Mike says:
December 24, 2010 at 4:53 pm
@Jimbo says: December 24, 2010 at 2:27 pm,
No one predicted the warming would be uniform spatially or temporally. Cooling for a month or two over a small part of the global where you happen to live does not refute the general warming trend.

No trend visible over the past decade. Just aks Dr. Jones.

The caption from the Independent article reads as follows:
“Some experts believe the Arctic ice cap will disappear completely in summer months within 20 to 30 years”
In an effort to be “fair & balanced” maybe it should read:
Some experts believe the Arctic ice cap will disappear completely in summer months within 20 to 30 years. Other experts believe that’s hogwash!

During the last colder winter period for CENTRAL ENGLAND , UK ,namely 1962-1987 , 13 of the 26 years had average winter temperature of 4C or less. The past warm winter period of 1988-2008 had only 2 such winters , 1991 and 1996. So over the next 20-30 years snow like Uk just had the last 2 years could become a more common event . Possibly at least 50 % of the time?.

Jimbo says:
“Yet ppm of over 4,000 did not lead to runaway.”
It doesn’t have to be runaway to be a problem.

Re Myrrh
December 25, 2010 at 5:40 am:
Mauna Loa is far from the only CO2 monitoring station in the world. Here is a very interesting animation that plots all the CO2 monitoring stations and their readings over time:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/history.html

Myrrh says:
December 25, 2010 at 5:40 am
Keeling cherry picked this 280 ppm figure for CO2, he was against coal in the fledgling environmentalist movement. He then put his measuring stick on top of the worlds most active volcano surrounded by active volcanoes, pumping out CO2 with great abandon.
Myrrh, while Mauna Loa is at the flanks of an active volcano, the CO2 measurements that are influenced by the outgassing (+4 ppmv) are not used to calculate the averages. In fact these are used to calculate the amount of degassing of the volcano. Neither are the CO2 levels with upwind conditions (-4 ppmv) used, because these are somewhat depleted by the vegetation at the valleys. But even including or excluding these outliers, that doesn’t change the average or trend with more than 0.1 ppmv over a year. The measurements are rigorously controlled by different persons, different organisations and different labs with different methods. See:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
Further, as Onion already said, there are lots of places (some 70) nowadays which monitor CO2 from near the North Pole (Alert, NWT, Canada) to the South Pole, all as far as possible away from local sources/sinks. See the carbon tracker at:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/iadv/
The measurements at the South Pole even started before these of Mauna Loa. Yearly averages of all stations are within 2 ppmv within each hemisphere and within 5 ppmv between the hemispheres (due to a NH-SH lag, as most of the emissions are in the NH). For an in-depth study, see my web page at:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/co2_measurements.html
Thus whatever the personal opinion of C.D. Keeling (I have no knowledge that he was involved in some anti-coal movement), the CO2 measurements since 1958 were and are reliable.
The pre-industrial 280 ppmv was based on a selection of older measurements, based on a-priory selection criteria, over which one can have a firm discussion. First by Calendar, later by Keeling. But even if the criteria may be discutable, their selection was confirmed 40 years later by Antactic ice cores…

Hijack of Met
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/12/hijack-of-met.html

Re Matt G says
December 25, 2010 at 12:51 pm:
“The planet is not showing increasing CO2 levels are dangerous”
It’s not what’s happened so far that’s the issue, but what will unfold over the next century (and beyond)

“I wonder how the Russian convoys of WWII got on with all the sea ice in the Barents sea? If we have lost the ice now then I would expect there to have been at least some ice back in the 1940s. A bit odd then that convoys ran from June 1941 to May 1944 in almost every month.”
Not odd at all. The Barents Sea never freezes completely, due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. Murmansk was built exactly because this is the only part of the north coast of Russia that is always ice-free. During the very coldest years of the 1860’s and 1870’s the ice nearly reached Murmansk a few times, but never since.
On the other hand the Kara Sea always freezes over in winter.
So to say that the Kara Sea and Barents Sea were frozen in the past and ice-free now is quite wrong. At the most one can claim that the Kara Sea freezes slightly later in the season now and that there is a bit more open water in the Barents Sea in winter, particularly in the area west of northern Novaya Zemlya.

Onion says:
December 25, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Changes in cloud cover might not impact sea level but they could modify weather patterns just as changes in temperature could. Maybe the change in humidity will be enough to impact things. It’s a bit like a how a world with both a CO2 forcing of 4wm-2 and an aerosol forcing of -4wm-2 wouldn’t equal a world where both were roughly zero.
There is an about 6% increase in inflow from the Siberian rivers into the Arctic Ocean over the past 60 years, due to some warming of the oceans. Not really problematic, and difficult to attribute to CO2 or natural causes (PDO, NAO) or both. Compared to earlier warm periods (the Holocene Optimum) not even enough to get the tree line back to the same latitudes.
And the balance of cooling aerosols and the impact of GHGs is an interesting one: if the influence of aerosols is (probably) overblown, the impact of GHGs is overblown too, which is more and more visible in the deviation of the temperature forecast (sorry, “projection”) from reality. This was discussed at RC some years ago:
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=245
with my comment at #6
And here a comparison for different estimates of the aerosol impact:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html
One can halve the impact of GHGs, with a similar retrofit of temperature simply by estimating a lower impact of aerosols. Thus halving the effect of 2xCO2 in the future…

To get more extreme weather in terms of hot, dry and more severe storms (especially convective or tropical) then more zonal/poleward jets is fine. That could hold true and that is just what was suggested.
AGW claimed that human induced warming was making the jets more zonal.
The trouble is that the jets have now gone more equatorward/meridional despite CO2 still increasing.
With more meridional jets one can include more cold episodes too but you cannot do so for more zonal jets.
So what we have here is a complete volte face.
30 years of telling us we would have more zonal jets with more heat drought and more convective storms then just as the CO2 link with jet positioning collapses they start telling us to expect more meridional jets with cold extremes in the mix.
We have a choice of two possible scenarios:
i) AGW theorists have now got it right despite the obvious fact that jetstream behaviour is unaffected by CO2 quantities and despite reversing their previous position.
ii) The world is doing its own thing and is in the process of changing to a cooling trend.
I know which I think is more than 95% likely to be correct.

Spinning onions are a rare and exciting event only if you’re impressed with PITAs. Do you enjoy the PITA-patter of overblown tweets?

Onion
Dec 25, 2010 at 11:41
Mauna Loa is far from the only CO2 monitoring station in the world. …
From what I have read, all stations are adjusted to fit Mauna Loa – The Poster Child Station for AGW – which is always presented as a “pristine” site for measuring “background CO2 levels”, with “pristine” defined as being without contamination from local sources. Quite regardless that it is situated below the summit of the worlds largest active volcano, surrounded by active volcanoes with all the associated volcanic activity, thousands of earthquakes every year, vents etc., above land and below in the sea, and, over one of the earth’s greatest hot spots creating volcanoes from the earth’s crust, and, in a warm sea which releases CO2 to the atmosphere which is aided and abetted by the strong wind systems in play around these volcanic mountains and islands. “Pristine” it certainly isn’t. It is utterly ludicrous to call it a “pristine site” for measuring, this so called, “background” CO2 levels.
Your link gives a graph of CO2 levels over time, from 800,000 years ago. Again I’ll ask, if the levels of CO2 remained practically unchanged over that huge length of time and didn’t begin to rise until the Industrial Revolution, then CO2 played no part whatsoever in the great and dramatic changes every 100,000 years during this period; when temperatures began to rise quickly putting an end to the glacials and bringing in the hot interglacials, such as we are coming to an end of now, which melted the vast and deep ice in the northern hemisphere which caused the sea level to rise around 350 feet. For example, the North Sea did not exist until this happened in our present interglacial, we could have walked to France and Ireland from England. That’s Global Warming.
Hippos used to live in the Thames estuary 100,000 years ago, the climate was like East Africa now. http://onlinegeography.wikispaces.com/Changes+in+the+amount+of+ice
Joanne Nova has a page on the Vostok graph in greater detail chunks making it easier to see these changes: http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
But, again, another weird graph from AGW, where’s the 800,000 year span exactly?
There’s also another piece on a Nova page worth reading to help appreciate the reason for the paucity of actual information conveyed by AGW graphs, as the one you linked to which says nothing. Sometimes they’re fudged with so much detail that only with concentrated effort can one see that the information on the graphs does not match the spiel. There’s one showing a spaghetti of different colour lines from various surveys which are hard to distinguish between, and mixing up temperature using K and C on the same graph – but, with the famous tick at the end of ‘instrumental data’ prominent, the overall impression at quick glance is that temperatures have never been higher, even though that’s not actually what the graph is saying.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/10/is-the-western-climate-establishment-corrupt-part-9-the-heart-of-the-matter-and-the-coloring-in-trick/
Jump to “The Theory of Man-Made Global Warming Failed an Empirical Test” for the problem AGW had because it had falsified its own claim, and its solution by use of colour to fudge the fact.
If this was one example from one scientist in any genuine scientific endeavour, he would lose all credibility in the scientific community. This kind of sleight of hand is only used by con artists. AGW is rife with it.
But here remember, that the AGW claim is that CO2 has only just begun to rise after hundreds of thousands of years of being practically flat. That this shows categorically therefore that levels of CO2 played no part in the great changes every 100,000 years in the dramatic rises and falls in temperature, going into interglacials and back to ice age conditions, it actually means that CO2 is irrelevant to global warming.
Why then after 800,000 years of it being irrelevant should we care what’s it’s doing now?
You might just as well be saying that it’s the rise of electric power and it’s increased usage which is causing global warming.
This, I’m sorry to say, is at the level of superstition. So likewise the elite wielded authority over the populations in South America by claiming they kept the sun in the sky and rain in due season by ripping out hearts of sacrificial victims.. It works until the climate changes and they are shown to be incapable of controlling it, and so losing credibility the societies implode. Let’s not encourage this..
.. forcibly decreasing CO2 emissions and the payment of green taxes in recompense for the elite’s dedication to saving us from ourselves will not make any difference.
And also note the sleight of hand as presented in this “unprecedented rise in CO2”, it does not mean unprecedented rise in temperatures any further back than the LIA. A lot of effort went into brainwashing people to believe that the MWP and LIA didn’t exist which is actually a distraction from the fact that CO2 has been shown by observation to have been irrelevant in even greater changes from hot to cold.
I’ll come back later today to reply to the other posts addressed to me.

A warmer planet has always been better for humanity. Historically a colder planet has been catastrophic and brought nothing but misery for humanity. For the past 15 years science, politics and the MSM have been lamenting our good fortune of living in a warming period. Those pursuing the filthy lucre of CAGW and its weird science may get some nasty personal surprises.
I suspect the good times are over and we are going to have to actually start using our intelligence to adapt to the coming cooling period. I never thought I would be witness to such an example of global delusion as CAGW, incredible.

Here is the historical AO data to 2010
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/JFM_season_ao_index.shtml

Before the AO flipped to cold, many AGW web sites heralded the fact that while the AO had undergone normal fluctuations in the past, “since the 1970’s the AO has been primarily positive” as the author speaks of the growing heat around us. And several researchers proclaimed that models showed increased radiant heating due to increased greenhouse gases led to a positive AO/NAO:
http://www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/papers/jfyfe/PDF/FyfeBoerFlato1999a.pdf
But this set of papers says that the negative phase of the AO will become more extreme due to global warming.
http://www.ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/arctic-oscillation-ao
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/earthandsun/arctic_changes_prt.htm
So, either we will continue to freeze because AGW has pushed the Arctic pressure system to the cool phase, meaning the Arctic itself will be warmer leaving us wet, colder and buried in snow, or AGW has pushed the Arctic pressure to stay in the warm phase for longer periods of time, leaving it colder but us toastier and dry.

Thanks for those other links, Pamela. My link seems to be broken but I set out the most relevant bit.
I first noticed the cessation of the poleward drift of the jets around 2000 but did not enter the debate until about 3 years ago when I pointed out that very fact to a barrage of disbelief.
AGW theory having invested so much in the assertion that a warming world produced more zonal/poleward jets the reversal of trend has led to increasing panic and thrashing about in confusion as the reversal became more pronounced over the past ten years and especially since 2005.
Then the extended very low solar minimum has ‘coincided’ with a very negative AO.
We can also see from the records that the more positive era of AO was roughly in tune with the high solar cycles 21, 22 and 23 and that AO was generally more negative during slightly weaker cycle 20.
The exceptions to the solar fit would be occasions when opposing oceanic cycles such as ENSO affected the width of the tropical air masses from below sometimes opposing and sometimes supplementing the top down solar influence.
The jets just get bounced around between the polar and tropical air masses as the polar(solar) and oceanic influences interact.
The trend in ocean heat content will be found to be closely linked to the degree of cloudiness and global albedo and they will be found to be dictated by the behaviour of the jets at any given time.
Thus around 2003 the jets became sufficiently meridional for ocean heat content to begin to fall.
I think we now have enough persuasive evidence to diagnose what has been going on and suitable investment should be directed to that area of research.
Anyone who has been following my work over the last 3 years will know exactly which parameters need to be investigated most urgently.
Needless to say AGW had nothing to do with those poleward shifts and had nothing significant to contribute to the present situation either.
Similarly the evidence is becoming overwhelming that there is some sort of top down effect on the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere which appears to correspond to changes in the mix of wavelengths and particles as the level of solar activity varies.
In a sense it is primarily a matter of internal system variability BUT such internal variability is provoked by small external changes. An internal amplifier no less.
The amplification arises from albedo changes as the jets switch between polar/zonal and equatorward/meridional behaviour. The former produces significantly less global cloud cover than the latter as evidenced by the Earthshine project which reveals a change in trend for both albedo and cloudiness in the late 90s which is around the same time that the poleward shift of the jets went into reverse.
I don’t think that this is good news for Svensmark either. On that basis the cosmic ray variations would just be a proxy for solar variability with no necessary climate effect although there may be some.

Yes, the Mona Loa “pristine” meme almost rises to the level of a Big Lie. Outrageously false, but repeated so often and authoritatively that it has become The Trooth.

(Before I continue, hopefully, with B) – A fascinating and, very much, must read re CO2 estimates and volcanic sources and monitoring stations, (with a mention also of Keeling’s methodology, “Keeling (1979) concurs with a bizarre emphasis on “formulating models rather than surveying and interpreting data”), in which the author says that volcanic CO2 is indistinguishable from industrial: Volcanic Carbon Dioxide Timothy Casey http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/
As you can see, volcanic systems are diverse and unpredictable. They cannot be statistically second-guessed for the same reason that lottery numbers cannot be statistically second-guessed. This in itself raises serious doubt concerning the reliability of volcanic carbon dioxide emission estimates. This is especially problematic when significant elelments of the estimates, such as passive submarine volcanic emission, all active volcanic emission, and at least 96% of passive subaerial emissions, are based on statistical assumptions rather than on any actual measurement.

Ferdinand – re B)
I haven’t been able to find the analysis of Keeling’s choice for the base CO2 ppm re the available data at the time, but you might have come across it anyway. Keeling’s choice was arbitrary, a particularly low number and from papers where the method of collection was, already well before his time, considered flawed. This doesn’t matter to someone who has an agenda, which in the beginning movement of ‘environmentalism’ in the 20th century Keeling was very much a player, to prove that the burning of fossil fuels was bad and that man’s production of it was getting into the atmosphere, etc.
In 1958 Keeling was included in this fledgling agenda and he began measurements at Mauna Loa. He promoted the idea that this site was “pristine” for measuring such “background atmospheric” CO2 and devised a complex set of parameters as a distraction from the real value of Hawaii to him, that he had there abundant levels of CO2 to play with. And in less than two years, less than two years, he claimed that he had proved there was a definite rising trend of man-made CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere.
That every part to this claim is actually nonsense in real scientific terms wasn’t a problem, they were selling it to people who didn’t look too closely when touched for funding.
The beginning history is an alliance of people in the early green movement in the 30’s, which from memory is when the first scare stories were concocted that CO2 from fossil fuel use would cause global warming and a runaway greenhouse effect, melting all icecaps, etc., and whatever they could use which would give a veneer of scientific credibility to their claims was used, whether actually credible or not. This pattern continued in the following decades as the early players were joined by others, bringing Keeling on board. Later of course others came on board and cleverly manipulated this movement and its obviously faked science, when it’s examined, to further their own aims.
Even as it was growing it became imperative to maintain the fiction established at Hawaii, Keeling’s son at Scripps co-ordinated the various stations to fit with Mauna Loa.
There’s a potted history by Coleman on http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/global-warning-junk-science-is-hazardous-to-your-health/question-1396663/?feed=2085567&new=1&page=3
The problem is that we still have now what Keeling et al created then, but the noise of support has just got louder and, of late, nastier, and now with taxes in place to enrich the elite and make life miserable for the poor by hiking up fuel prices.
Keeling’s measurements and associated claims about CO2 do not have any scientific credibility because as above, they do not come from a pristine site as claimed; because he in less than two years of measurements could not possibly have shown any trend, let alone any trend relating to man-made burning of fossil fuel, no methodology was even bothered to be concocted for this; that there was anyway no actual proof that CO2 was even capable of such effects and no further work was ever done to check this.
It began as a con, by deliberate manipulation of ‘science’ to further an agenda, but not at all scientific. Nothing has changed, the claims are still made as if it was fact, constantly repeating the same basic mantra.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1933780/posts
Bearing in mind what I’ve written and with the contrast as you can read in the above, how confident are you that the figures you gave of CO2 ppmv as being very precise measurements of averages between stations and hemispheres, actually means anything?
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sHx says:
December 25, 2010 at 3:06pm
Thanks, but I had read it a while back (several times!), during another discussion. I found it very helpful in visualising the setting and understanding the process used there as he is very good at giving detail. From which I then began exploring such things as the wind patterns and comparing their equipment with those used in other surveys and so on. One interesting thing found was that there are several recent surveys which dispute the idea that the flora can be discounted, but I’ve no idea now where all the pages are that I found. But suffice to say, I became sure by the end of my exploration that all the statements made were smoke and mirrors. There’s no way, etc., as I’ve explained above.
I didn’t get to see Big Island when I was there many years ago, but my ‘instruction’ after a holiday with my partner was that when it became time for me to be cremated, I wanted my ashes thrown into Kiluaea -we both loved the place and any excuse to go back. I think I should change that to Mauna Loa..

Thank you Dave, I’ll have a trawl, sounds interesting.
Ferdinand – I found the analysis of re Keeling/Callendar method of choosing the CO2 base line v available data, posted on:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1806245/posts
The Real History of Carbon Dioxide Levels Dr. John Ray
Shows the same paradigm as the choice for Mauna Loa. They stopped being scientists at this point for certain, and the continuation in Hawaii of unsubstantiated claims about CO2 and trends and composition and downright lie re pristine merely building on that cherry-picked figure to suit their agenda.
I wonder what the Piltdown Man hoax would have led to if there had been the same level of interest in promoting it as that achieved by the greens’ forays into desire to change the world according to their creation via AGW? They would have been marginalised fairly quickly I think, genetics would have seen to that. Odd though the rapid success of AGWScience in achieving the reverse, against well understood basic physics it’s succeeded in marginalising real science.
I can understand how it happens, and how difficult I found it in the beginning to try and make sense of it all through the arguments about it. I remember when I first started exploring the subject my first objection was that AGW always presented temperature rise from the end of the LIA and discovering that the MWP had been flattened out to fit this point as a supposed ‘normal’ temperature which led to learning about the hockey stick and so on, but I would often be swayed to consider it real from discussions in areas I didn’t know anything about. That became a sort of anchor for me, if the AGW hypothesis was true, there would have been no need to expend so much effort on destroying the past, really well known, history of great variations in our climate, from all kinds of sources – historical, travellers accounts as well as the growing knowledge through such sciences as biology and geology.
It’s such an amazing thing, this earth, I wonder, maybe those leaders who try to impose their own idea by control of everyone else are actually rather frightened of it? We have such a long history of conquering and exploiting others, dressing it up to make the process sound honourable and glorious, giving out medals.. Perhaps in the end AGW is just another variation on the theme, the desire to flatten out diversity and creativity of our dynamic system of life and making others conform to it no different from the ’emperors’ in our societies through the ages, subjugating others through power and religion by restricting their world view to what they thought acceptable, what they could handle.
Anyway, that’s really going off topic.