That’s from the avalanche center in the Tetons, and here is a current web-cam view up Yosemite Valley towards still-closed Tioga Pass (in the left background):
AP has a nice roundup of late snow and snowpack news (including the Teton quote). Just weather. No mention of climate. Nothing this time about snow and cold being caused by global warming. Now if we could just get the press to do the same when there is a regional hot spell. Still, it’s progress. Remember the spinning on last winter’s snowzilla?
Most amusing was Al Gore’s quote from “the scientific community“:
A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.
A click on Gore’s link showed “the scientific community” to be Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. Gore should also have quoted Page’s credentials, which Page listed in his next line:
That’s simple science even for me, a guy whose scientific education pretty much ended with the old “Watch Mr. Wizard” TV show and a subscription to Popular Mechanics.
Unfortunately, Gore could have quoted some actual scientists to the same effect, as Andrew Bolt quoted the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research:
The overall warming of the earth’s northern half could result in cold winters… Recent severe winters like last year’s or the one of 2005-06 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it.
But as Bolt also quoted, the Potsdammer’s IPCC bible had predicted the opposite:
Fewer cold outbreaks; fewer, shorter, intense cold spells / cold extremes in winter” as being consistent across all model projections for Europe
What, are there no takers this time around? Are they tiring of the ridicule?
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“muckdog says:
May 29, 2011 at 12:44 am”
While Camping is indeed out there he doesn’t have the potential to harm the economy the way Gore and his ilk do.
Having considered many, if not most, of your posts over the last few months – and the responses to them – may I politely suggest that your above post could best be summarized as: “Corvus corvo nigredinem objicit”?
The only thing deeper than the snow is global warming b.s. And it’s shovel ready! (yes, that kind of shoveling)
;O)
Last night ll the local (LA) weather forecasters mentioned ‘February’ weather in late May, but none dared bring up the idea of its rarity, less alone how incompatible it is with the AGW religion.
As the Little Ice Age strengthens, look for such winter storms to become the So-Cal norm for May and even June.
Then look for the warmists to double down on their shrill alarmism as their re-adjusted models blame it on CO2.
“R. Gates says:
May 29, 2011 at 10:11 am
But look on the bright side…heavy snow and rain is the planet’s long term feedback to cleanse the atmosphere of excess CO2 through rock weathering. All that snow will melt and carry carbon rich sediment that will eventually wind up in the ocean and some of it will become limestone someday, sequestering some CO2.”
As someone who has a passing knowledge of chemistry I decided to try and think through this statement. So here goes.
1. Does some amount of carbon dioxide dissolve into liquid water in the atmosphere? Yes. Some of it will even be converted to CO3(2-) based on principles of chemical equilibrium
2. Can that be carried to the to the earth while dissolved in snow/rain? Yes
3. Can that be involved in the processes of chemical and physical weathering of rocks?
Yes. But given that it is the chemical weathering of the rocks that is of interest we would already be forming carbonate sediments prior to them be washed into the ocean. And some of that weathering would be occurring to carbonate sediments reversing the equilibrium and freeing CO2 into the atmosphere. Also rock weathering by rain is an accidental by-product not a cause (maybe I am just in a foul mood and misinterpreting what you mean).
4. Is this a feedback mechanism of the atmosphere to cleanse CO2? The only thing I see going on is that the laws of chemical equilibrium and physical and chemical solubility are being followed. That will happen as regardless of the state of the atmosphere. So attributing it to a feedback state is a stretch as I see it. If you define a feedback as what I talked about then fine it is a feedback.
Current warming trends according to four main temperature series:
HADCRUT3: 0.22C per decade
GISTEMP: 0.19C per decade
UAH: 0.19C per decade
RSS: 0.24C per decade
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/offset:-1365.2/scale:0.5/to:2006/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/plot/gistemp/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/plot/uah/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/plot/rss/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/trend/plot/uah/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/trend/plot/rss/from:1986/to:2006/mean:60/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1970/mean:132
Including the exceptionally long and deep solar minimum of recent years gives a slightly misleading cool bias to three of the four trends –
HADCRUT3: 0.19C per decade
GISTEMP: 0.2C per decade
UAH: 0.18C per decade
RSS: 0.18C per decade
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/pmod/offset:-1365.2/scale:0.5/to:2011/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/plot/gistemp/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/plot/uah/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/plot/rss/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/trend/plot/uah/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/trend/plot/rss/from:1986/to:2011/mean:60/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1970/mean:132
Unfortunately global warming is showing no sign of any deviation from its accelerating trend –
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/0/7/6/2/8/5/GISTEMP-with-trendline-v2-39958758927.jpeg
We’re on course for exceeding 2C of warming by 2050, and possibly by a large amount as land and ocean carbon sinks become sources in the next few decades, and ice albedo declines (it appears that the Arctic ocean will be essentially ice-free in September by 2015, give or take a year or two).
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/0/7/6/2/8/5/GISS-C21-projections-46692507757.jpeg
It looks likely that we will be left with no alternative to massive carbon sequestration and albedo restoration efforts, as well as reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions essentially to zero, if we are to have any chance of averting many degrees of warming by the end of the century.
Pilkington Bros developed a low iron glass, followed by other companies such as Guardian.
This is a whiter glass, not having the green tinge that earlier glass did. The theory is that it lets more SW light in to a house but, with low E coatings lets less IR out.
A few problems.
1) The silica required is found in very few places, one being Spain.
2) The temperatures required to melt the silica & form the glass is about 1000°C higher than to make normal glass
3) More layers of glazing have more effect than low Iron glass + low E coating
3 suggests that conduction is a bigger loss than radiation, 1 & 2 mean wasting energy to no real effect
DaveE.
Oh yes, the real point.
Multi-layer glazing has a very distinct point. 20mm seems to be the optimum gap but why?
Up to 20mm losses are minimised, thereafter convection starts to play a rôle and losses increase!
Who’da thunk that?
Conduction & convection are the major players, radiation, not so much.
DaveE.
Damn! Didn’t close the bold properly. Can a kindly mod fix that please? Thanks in advance. 🙂
DaveE.
[It wasn’t you, it was a WordPress glitch. Fixed. ~dbs, mod.]
R. Gates says:
May 29, 2011 at 11:44 am
…..”Some of you may need to read up a bit on the carbon cycle and rock weathering as it pertains to CO2 levels to fully grasp the signficance of this question, but your research will pay off…”
==
I agree, let’s send all our elected officials back to school on the subject.
Maybe even take them on a “field trip”, and show them a rock.
Water absorbs approximately 2400 joules per gram to evaporate. So when the sun heats the tropics – I think you’d have to agree this region is the area where solar radiation is a maximum – it is hitting mostly water – the land mass is far less than the ocean in the tropics.
So water evaporates, taking some 2400 joulses per gram with it and rising in the atmosphere. Some energy is also absorbed by the sea surface setting the currents in motion.
The atmospheric currents caused by the thermals rising carry the energy laden water vapour to the cooler regions of the earth. The energy is released when the water vapour condenses in the upper atmosphere and radiates into the surrounding air and ultimately into space.
Water vapour is 2 % of the atmosphere.
Contrast that energy transmission capability with CO2 which is a gas at all ambient temperatures.
CO2 has a specific heat of about 1 joule per gram. It currently constitutes less than 0.04 % of the atmosphere. For 1 gram of CO2 to transport the same amount of energy it would have to be superheated to some 2400 C – I think we might notice that !
R Gates;
I can stop right there? Really? Are you giving me permission to stop or telling me to stop? Have you been appointed the keeper of the rules for online debate? Or just for Anthony’s blog?
1. Your explanation re snow accumulation vs melting is confusing to the point that I can’t tell if what you said is right or wrong. Snow accumulation can exceed snow melt in warmer than normal years and in cooler than normal years. The opposite is also true. The number of factors that go into if that happens or not, and what is cause and what is effect would be miles long. You can’t just draw simple conclusions from any given year or years without understanding all the other factors.
2. You claim that if someone published a paper showing that the bulk of the warming was due to other factors, you would accept it. I long since lost track of the number of papers that show the warming we’ve seen in the last 100 years is well within natural variability. Each of which you have poo poo’d.
3. You repeatedly point out that the recent years have been the warmest on record. You’ve been hanging around this blog long enough to know that the earth has been in a warming trend for the last several hundred years. It started long before co2 emissions became significant, and EVERY decade would have been the warmest on record up until that decade had we records going back that far. If we had records going back even further, we would have records both colder and warmer than we have now, and multiple times, and no human factors to have caused them, and well beyond the variability we’ve seen since we started shooting up the atmosphere with CO2.
4. I never said that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 40% would have no effect. I said the effects of CO2 are logarithmic which is why the IPCC et all keep quoting the effects of CO2 “doubling”. Do you understand at all what that implies? It means that if going from 280 ppm (the supposed natural baseline) to 560 ppm (double) results in a one degree C rise in temperature, then to get a 2 degree rise in temperature would require 1,120 ppm. At our peak fossil fuel consumption ever, that would require another 500 years at full bore to achieve. 3 degrees would require 2,240 ppm and would require several millenium to achieve. Which is why all the arm waving and hand wringing about the effects of CO2 are bogus. Whatever the number is (and observational evidence suggests it is a lot less than 1 degree per doubling) almost all the effect that increased CO2 can have on temperature has already been put in place by the 40% increase so far. More is increasingly less significant on temperature, and FAR more beneficial for the biosphere as a whole. Why we would curtail something that can’t do very much more to temperatures than it already has, hasn’t pushed the climate anywhere near beyond natural variability, and has major benefits in regard to everything from quality of living to the abundance of food is beyond me.
As are your petty arguments.
In reply to Icarus:
Icarus says:
May 29, 2011 at 8:34 am
tallbloke: What’s remarkable is that the world has still been warming even during the deepest and longest solar minimum for 100 years –
Icarus the 20th century warming was caused by reduction in low level clouds. Check out the current topic at Real Climate.
The reduction in low level clouds was caused by solar wind bursts that create a charge differential in the ionosphere which removes cloud forming ions by the process called electroscavenging. (Brian Tinsley’s attached review paper for details.)
We will fortunately or unfortunately have a chance to see which scientific hypothesis is correct. The sun is rapidly moving to Dalton or Maunder minimum. There are cycles of warming and cooling of the planet that correlate with changes in cosmogenic isotopes that are modulated by the changes in the solar heliosphere. The solar magnetic cycle was at its highest level in 10,000 years during the later half of the 20th century.
Based on the paleo climatic record the planet will now cool.
http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf
Once again about global warming and solar activity K. Georgieva, C. Bianchi, and B. Kirov
We show that the index commonly used for quantifying long-term changes in solar activity, the sunspot number, accounts for only one part of solar activity and using this index leads to the underestimation of the role of solar activity in the global warming in the recent decades. A more suitable index is the geomagnetic activity which reflects all solar activity, and it is highly correlated to global temperature variations in the whole period for which we have data.
In Figure 6 the long-term variations in global temperature are compared to the long-term variations in geomagnetic activity as expressed by the ak-index (Nevanlinna and Kataja 2003). The correlation between the two quantities is 0.85 with p<0.01 for the whole period studied.It could therefore be concluded that both the decreasing correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity, and the deviation of the global temperature long-term trend from solar activity as expressed by sunspot index are due to the increased number of high-speed streams of solar wind on the declining phase and in the minimum of sunspot cycle in the last decades.
See section 5a) Modulation of the global circuit in this review paper, by solar wind burst and the process electroscavenging where by increases in the global electric circuit remove cloud forming ions.
The same review paper summarizes the data that does show correlation between low level clouds and GCR.
http://www.utdallas.edu/physics/pdf/Atmos_060302.pdf
Icarus,
Of course! Accelerating…except for that pesky cooling bias.
Now I feel better about the Cubs. Champions I say! (Except for that pesky recent losing bias.)
And I note that all of your “non-biased” data that purport to show accelerating are from GISS. Amazing how that works. One out of four datasets shows what you want, and that’s the “non-biased” one.
Icarus says:
May 29, 2011 at 5:34 pm
It looks likely that we will be left with no alternative to massive carbon sequestration and albedo restoration efforts, as well as reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions essentially to zero, if we are to have any chance of averting many degrees of warming by the end of the century.
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Interstellar Bill said: “Last night the local (LA) weather forecasters mentioned ‘February’ weather in late May, but none dared bring up the idea of its rarity, less alone how incompatible it is with the AGW religion.”
Actually this weather pattern is pretty normal for late May in southern and central California. The short cold and snowy blast usually signals the ‘last gasp’ for the winter weather pattern. As a weekend warrior, Memorial Day weekend is usually our first chance to ‘get out’ for a long weekend and we do it almost every year (though not this year for me). Last year it dropped into the 20’s in the mountains of coastal Ventura County. Three years ago it snowed then dropped into the low teens in the mountains east of Bishop, CA (the lowest temp in the conus that day was 8F at S. Lake Tahoe). In the 90’s, we got snowed in in the southern Sierra for a day. For me this just means it’s time to get ready for the inevitable three months of summer bake here in So Cal.
As for the TV weather ‘forecasters’ (and all the other news folk) here in LALA land, I don’t even think they realize their bias. They just don’t know any different. They’re just talking heads regurgitating the AGW party line fed to them by their editors.
If this summer is the same as the last two summers, not a lot of that high snowpack will melt. Last summer I had to wear a light jacket when mowing my lawn, in August.
I meant to say in the PNW…
An acceleration is an acceleration, no matter the direction the vector alters in. It is a change in velocity over time. One can claim acceleration in a car that is speeding up, slowing down, or turning.
One can as easily say that global warming is accelerating even as the vector increases, or decreases. It is only not accelerating if it remains unchanged in its direction, and its speed. The default state is an acceleration, which leaves it an accurate, but misleading term in common understanding.
….and cats and dogs living together…
John M says:
May 29, 2011 at 6:09 pm
“Now I feel better about the Cubs. Champions I say! (Except for that pesky recent losing bias.)”
John, as I’m a Cubs observer (not a fan), that is the funniest thing I’ve read in a while!
I should note that the 2003 “Steve Bartman incident” has its own entry in wikipedia…
F. Ross says:
May 29, 2011 at 4:38 pm
“R. Gates says:
May 29, 2011 at 8:20 am
…
Everything is interesting to me, except those who regurgitate talking points without thinking for themselves.
… ”
Having considered many, if not most, of your posts over the last few months – and the responses to them – may I politely suggest that your above post could best be summarized as: “Corvus corvo nigredinem objicit”?
===========================
Yeah. No kidding! Latin prototype for the “pot calling the kettle black.”
Besides that being 100% true, notice when things start to heat is turned up, R Gates always….ALWAYS….flees the kitchen because he can’t take it!
This is a pattern that happens over and over and over again.
And over and over and over. LOL Like a slippery, spineless eel through the fishing net.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Icarus says . . . “we will be left with no alternative”
At that point, I think, Icarus lists several steps or alternatives that might “. . . avert many degrees of warming . . .”
So, if the meaning is what I think it is then my response as to those alternatives is: Not in my lifetime. With luck that will be another 20 years. I do not see the technology or the willingness of developed civilizations to return to the pre-fire/pre-stone age. With exceptional luck I might still be here 30 years from now. Your alternatives are still not possible in that time frame – if ever.
Pick your sequestration method. Pick your albedo restoration technique. Pick an energy plan that gets you to zero gaseous emissions. Establish all the numbers you need, then do the arithmetic. No magic allowed.
Well, Gates. It think you have been totally and absolutely debunked. The fact that you continue to make the same claims only proves you are stubborn.
So it is necessary, but unfortunately probably won’t be effective, to repeat what another poster said. When I say that there has been no increase in temperature since 1998 what is important is the trend. We are after all talking about climate CHANGE. In what way is pointing this out a sound bite?
Icarus;
Nice cherry picking bub. Let’s put all those graphs in proper context, using the same sources of data. Let’s do a simple comparison of the 90 years post industrial age (1920 to now) in which CO2 emissions became significant, and the 90 years before.
Temp rise over 90 years before CO2 emissions were significant: 0.5 degrees
Temp rise over 90 years after CO2 emissions were significant: 0.6 degrees
If we were to attribute 100% of the difference to CO2 emissions, that’s 0.1 degrees over the last 90 years. Just as smidge over .01 degrees per decade due to CO2, all other factors being equal.
If you extend all the way back to the end of the LIA, you get about the same number. We’ve been in a long warming trend that is absolutely natural, and not a darn thing we can do about it, and the CO2 is at best…insignificant.
Sequester all you want. Just use your own money, not mine.