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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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.
Murray;
The last part of the Potsdam study reads the best:
“If you look ahead 40 or 50 years, these cold winters will be getting warmer because, even though you are getting an inflow of cold polar air, that air mass is getting warmer because of the greenhouse effect,”
he said. “So it’s a transient phenomenon. In the long run, global warming wins out.”
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.
Met office short term weather forcast,
http://s446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/?action=view¤t=Spike2.mp4
@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.
“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.
What’s the problem?
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
Not being a scientist, but understanding enough to appreciate WUWT and disbelieve those cranks and con-men who tell me everything is settled I wonder whether any studies have been concluded showing whether the eruption of the volcano beneath Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier is having any effect on the current weather.
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.
KD says:
“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.””
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. That wasn’t always the case.
Your suggestion wouldn’t falsify it of course, because temperature over ten years could be flat even as CO2 causes warming over a 100 year period.
“I ask because there has been NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT WARMING since 1998 while the concentration of CO2 has continued to rise.”
No statistically significant warming doesn’t necessarily mean no warming, it can mean the variation in the data is too large and the time period too short to be able to tell.
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 Jimbo:
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.
——————-
Climate is a complex interconnected system. There are the things you mention above plus many many more. Thousands of properties, perhaps millions, and lots of links between them. Various weather systems, ocean currents, different habitat ranges. Changes to one can impact others in a cascade. CO2 is a property of the climate with a couple links to other properties (temperature, ocean pH) and in turn those have links to other properties. It’s not a wise move to whack CO2 up because we don’t know for sure how the whole system will cascade in response. There are so many properties out there that the risk is that a large shift will cause a fair few of them to go bad.
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.
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: variously/oft multi-consecutively
Chill, onion, man. This is the Xmas stuff: ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and the MG’s:
Hope this gets your bag….
“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…
“You don’t know there will be no negative consequences. Unless you have a perfect climate model. That’s why.”
If you knew anything about science and logic, you’d know that you can’t prove a negative.
We certainly know that CO2 is beneficial to plant growth, and therefore we could potentially feed many millions more people by increasing CO2 levels. We also know that CO2 has been much higher in the past with no obviously bad consequences. We also know that there’s no solid evidence that CO2 levels have any significant harmful effects on anything. We also know that eliminating fossil fuel use would have absolutely enormous harmful effects which would dwarf any possible harmful impact of increasing CO2 levels.
Humans did not get to be the most important creatures on the planet by being scared of small increases in trace gases. Why should we start now?
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………….
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.”
I disagree with your “former” view. I do agree with your “latter” view, and then recommend you to LET IT BE.
“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”.
Wonderful reasoning! Indeed, magical! May I use it to expound my Anthropogenic Gods of Climate Theory?
Theory: Anthropogenic Gods of Climate
Hypothesis #1: Gods of Climate will cause warmer UK winters
Hypothesis #2: Gods of Climate will cause colder UK winters
Cold or warm, or hot or cool… My Gods of Climate theory will never be falsified.
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
The area without snow is Cornwall, incase anyone wandered!
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.
AT LAST! – The BBC starts telling the truth about the weather.
25 December 2010
Winter weather: December “set to be coldest since 1890”
December is on course to be the coldest since records began in 1890, the BBC weather centre has said.
Christmas Day is likely to be extremely cold around the country, with overnight temperatures dropping to minus 17ºC at Worcester and minus 18ºC at Altnaharra in northern Scotland. A severe weather warning for western Scotland is in place due to ice, BBC forecaster Liam Dutton advised.
Some of the coldest overnight temperatures included minus 17ºC in Pershore, Worcs, minus 15ºC in Castlederg, County Tyrone and minus 11ºC in Leeming, North Yorkshire. On Christmas Day, parts of Scotland and possibly north-east England were the only places likely to see snowfall, Liam Dutton added. With December likely to be the coldest for over a century, the rest of the country will be dry and bright with patchy freezing fog, he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12078425
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?