From the Independent, March 20th, 2000:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
According to reports I’ve read, that is the Independent’s most viewed story of the past 10 years. It has become the modern equivalent of the famous “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus“.
Now, for the second year in a row, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales is covered with snow. Meanwhile, AGW proponents like George Monbiot are furiously spinning to make it look like AGW causes more snow, rather than less, as the CRU scientist said 10 years ago.
(Update) WUWT commenter Murray Grainger writes:
The very same Independent has already published the rebuttal:
Expect more extreme winters thanks to global warming, say scientists
It isn’t working. Give it up kids.
I was alerted in Tips and Notes to this image from sat24.com by WUWT reader Joel Heinrich, but found an even better one from the Aqua satellite. See below.
Here is the image from the AQUA satellite, as you can see, except for a small part in the Southwest, snow is everywhere.
Click image to enlarge.
The image above has been cropped and annotated. Original source here
See last year’s image here
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I guess you get a better level of debate at RC?
We did the “Vinter/Cold Winter” last year, thanks. Put it to bed.
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)
Dizzy Ringo says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:04 pm
John Hultquist:
“I seem to remember from the dim distant geography lessons of my youth that the west coast of the UK is rising and the east coast is falling – something to do with the tectonic plates – unless someone else knows better!”
More or less. The northwest of the UK is rising, due to isostatic rebound after the last ice age. and the south west is sinking due to to foreland basin formation caused by the continuing Alpine orogeny…
@ur momisugly Onion.
Try them with the “wind is coming from the north-east”.
They might understand that.
UL 🙂
JJohn F. Hultquist says:
December 24, 2010 at 11:26 am
There are local winds and pressure systems that seem to form in this manner, for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_breeze
“Lack of ice on the Barents and Kara seas might play a role in location – not the cause of – this High Pressure.”
I’m not sure why that would be the case as the ice in both seas is not much different to previous years. According to Cryosphere today the Barents sea is just about on the average. The Kara sea can’t get any more ice in as it’s completely covered. In any case a large part of the Barents sea is ice free all year round. So why would this year be any different? In addition the Barents and Kara sea haven’t been showing up as ‘hot’ on COAPS unless I missed it.
If this was how things worked then I would expect a high to sit over eastern Hudson Bay and western Newfoundland Bay as they are both well below average.
High pressure systems nearer the equator tend to be associated with hot weather, sometimes extremely hot, and high pressures higher up tend to be associated with cold weather, such as the Siberian high. This would imply that high pressures lower down are hotter because the stable slow outward moving air can’t get rid of the incoming solar radiation fast enough, and the higher latitude high pressures are cold because the slow outward moving air doesn’t bring any warmth in and there isn’t almost any from the sun.
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
Face it, we in SWFL have decided to keep all the Gulf Stream heat for ourselves. Our poor fish and crops need all the heat they can get. And then what will we do when they freeze over. Global Warming, just another bad joke in the rear view.
Merry Christmas, too bad about the cold … Ho Ho Ho.
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?
Don’t pull a fast one sunshine (as they say in the UK). You foreget Scandinavia, Germany, Russia, northern USA etc. A thousand eyes watch every word you say. Give it up, it looks silly now. If we are heading towards a mini ice age then imagine how foolish your comment will sound in 10 years time – just like “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” When you are in a hole – stop digging.
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.
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!)
=========================================================
onion, do you know you’re talking in circles?
The whole premise/guess/theory says that elevated CO2 will cause global warming. If we lower CO2, it will not cause global warming.
That is controlling the climate.
You just said so yourself.
“”Artificially elevating CO2 levels – will have knock on effects and the higher it goes the more risk there is.””
Controlling the climate is exactly what this whole thing is about.
and by your own admission, if we don’t understand the climate enough to control it, we don’t know enough to know if we are interfering with it either………….
onion says: 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.”
So if we have three more UK winters like the last three, you’ll still say it doesn’t indicate any problems with GCM’s? 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. Your logic is faulty when it’s not just plain irrelevant. Warm-causes-cold is blatant tripe and neither your hand-waving nor a dozen random results from a hundred climate models will turn it into Lobster Newburg.
onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Re Latitude:
“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!)”
Sir, your statements above clearly reveal that your topic is religion and not science. And that is a good thing for you because your other statements on this forum clearly reveal that your thought is entirely unencumbered by an understanding of scientific method. Scientits cannot juggle mutually contradictory hypotheses and choose one or the other to fit the moment. And no appeal to higher level theory can save these hypotheses from contradiction. If there is a higher level theory that incorporates both hypotheses then it must explain why and how they are not really mutually contradictory. Since neither you nor anyone else has offered such an explanation, even though you and others are desperately struggling to preserve both hypotheses, scientists can only conclude that your higher level theory is a dream and not a fact.
Well, Dr. Viner is correct about the exciting and unprepared.
Mike says:
December 24, 2010 at 2:22 pm
And your point is?
He was indicating that it would cause chaos because of its rarity; not because the lunatics in government have swallowed the AGW conjecture whole and failed to invest resources in anything related to weather at the cold end of the spectrum, including a failure to invest in reliable, cheap energy production.
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.
@Onion:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy?wasRedirected=true
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/
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
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.
———————
So please tell me, how can the Theory be falsified? As specifically as possible, please, e.g. “the average global temperature will have to hold stable or decline for a period of ten years while the concentration of CO2 continues to rise.”
I ask because there has been NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT WARMING since 1998 while the concentration of CO2 has continued to rise.
KD
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?
Today is the coldest for this year in Japan, and the northern part is expected to have much snow at least up to 31 December.
http://www.jma.go.jp/jp/bosaijoho/radar.html#a_top
Pressing the bottom-left orange arrow button gives an animation of the snowfall trend for past 3 hours with a 10-min step.
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
Scientists for Truth : I was so impressed with your comment above that I copied and pasted it with credits to you into comments at EUreferendum.com – it is brilliant piece of insightful writing – thank you for putting it so well!
tokyoboy,
Nice. Thanks for that animation.
But snow falls are a rare phenomenon in most part of the world, even in the northern hemisphere in the parts where it only snows for no more ‘an 40 days per year, so essentially it’s more rare ‘an sun shine even . . . . well maybe not in the british isles where you have to compare to slow micro droplet rain (come to think of it it’s more like supped up fog and mist really, like droplets on pre-steroids.)