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?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
From the CA charts, it appears that on average, where we are at now (31-MAY) is where it goes into an exponential decay form. By the time we get into July, the melting / sublimation could really be expected to slow. Fascinating.
@R. Gates,
You are seeing everything backwards, sadly. Ice core data is not showing you what you think it does.
During an ice age, the glaciers extend way down into the continental United States. Obviously snow is accumulating and packing on them very nicely in these COLDER conditions. Snow builds the ice and protects the ice from melting, allowing glaciers to extend. And all this requires much colder temperatures than now.
But what happens during those times to the areas were, during our current warm climate, the glaciers have survived for us to get ice cores from? As glaciers move southward, they scour all the precipitation from the air, due to the sharp temperature gradient, long before that air can reach the site of the ice cores — now miles away from the growing edge of the glaciers. So, of course accumulation DECREASES at the SITE of the ice cores. But this isn’t due simply to temperature, it’s due to the glaciers that are soaking up all the moisture being miles southward now. It’s a SHIELDING effect.
As temperature heats up, the glaciers start to melt. Snow accumulation DECREASES, and can no longer feed, nor protect the glaciers. As they melt, they do things like carve out the entire Pacific Northwest, a place of very little snow accumulation in the present day. But once upon a time, when it was much colder than now, the entire Puget Sound was buried under glaciers, and this requires snow accumulation.
But, also, as temperature heats up, as the glaciers retreat, the moist air can now move northward and once again can reach the site of the present day ice cores in the first place. NOW it can snow there again, whereas before all the snow was happening down south and not much moisture could get up to the ice core sites due to the shielding effects and long treks over glaciated ground the air had to cover.
Cold increases snow fall and snow accumulation, not warmth. Precipitation occurs at a temperature gradient; and those gradients are going to be sharpest at the glacier edges, making them precipitation sponges in comparison to the middle region of the glaciers, well embedded in homogenous cold temperatures with little gradients to drive precipitation of what miniscule moisture has managed to survive its trek up there.
That’s how it works. That’s what the ice cores show.
Snow level’s coming down. They’ve got a Winter Weather Advisory up for the Northern Sierra and other northern ranges.
SteveSadlov says:
May 31, 2011 at 1:39 pm
That makes 3 Winter Storms in the merry month of May. The danger for California now is the full reservoirs. High 90’s percentage-wise. There’s a lot of water content up there just waiting for a warm storm to strike. This being a rather extraordinary and downright weird year, it’s not out of the range of possibilities.
Still doing research on mid-latitude glaciers and snow accumulation and will have more to say about that later, but did come across this which confirms the nearly simultaneous retreat of northern and southern hemisphere mid-latitude glaciers at the end of the last glacial maximum:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/312/5779/1510.full.pdf
What this tells us is that mid-latitude glaciers responded nearly in unison as the last glacial period peaked.
Ged,
I’m not sure we are talking about the same thing here. I’ve not really been addressing the dynamics of glaciers, but rather, the entire issue of snowfall accumulation and its general relationship to temperatures as displaying in the ice core record. Everyone knows it takes snowfall to make glaciers, but it wasn’t until about the year 2000 that it was shown that in fact, during warmer periods, heavier snow falls (i.e. greater accumulation) even though this accumulation doesn’t last an entire year because during these warmer periods, more snow also melts. So that, in simple terms, when it is warmer you might get 100 new inches of snow in the winter, yet because it is warmer, all that new snow melts and perhaps even some of the older ice, so the mass balance of the glacier actually might decline year to year, even though the snowfall accumulation for the season was high. When it is colder, you might get less snowfall accumulation, say 80 inches, but you also have colder temps so less snow melts, so maybe 30 of that 80 inches stays around for the next season and the mass of the glacier actually increases. This surprising results is shown across thousands of years in the ice core data for Greenland (see the link I gave earlier) and I’m doing a bit of research to see if it is true for mid-latitude glaciers as well.
The take-away from all this is simply that increasing snowfall (and rainfall) are generally associated with a warmer planet (in general), so increasing snowfall amounts during a single season are not indicative necessarily of any coming glacial advance, and in fact, the ice core data show the opposite. The MWP, for example, saw greater yearly snowfall accumulations than the Little Ice Age, but because the Little Ice Age was colder, that snow stuck around and we know we saw glacial growth in Greenland and at mid-latitude glaciers during the Little Ice Age, but (at least for Greenland) it wasn’t because of heavier snows, but because of less melting.
Gates, words like “generally” are ‘generally’ a cover-up for lack of data. Go to the NOAA website and look up USA temp and USA precipitation. Cooler and wetter. How much of the earth’s landmass is that “generally”?
R. Gates says:
May 31, 2011 at 4:54 pm
Did it ever occur to you that the accumulated heat from warming will act as extra fuel to make more snow as the climate cools?
Once again, you’ve managed to rule out nothing, and we are left with what we have: progressively colder and wetter winter/spring.
R Gates,
Last time I looked the heat of fusion was a huge barrier to overcome to get snow to fall. The heat loss to produce snow at 32 degrees is about 100 times the heat loss from 33 degrees to 32 degrees. That is a lot of cold air that must be injected into the storm. It has to come from somewhere. Warm years just do not have the cold air to do that.
It takes lots of cold air to drive snowfall and it takes a lot of heat to drive snow melt.
If you do not have cold air advection or strong upper low with cold upper air support, it will not snow. Furthermore, a lot of heavy moisture will tend to warm the cold air causing the snow levels to rise.
At high altitudes, snow melt is driven primarily by solar insolation. If it stays cloudy, then a lot less snow melts versus sunny days. Cloudy winters and cloudy springs mean a delay in snow melt and growth of glaciers. Stable high pressure systems mean sustained snow melt. Unsettled weather means little snow melt.
We’re getting hammered here in Norcal this AM. This would be impressive in January let alone June. June! This is unreal.
Got a twister in Yuba City from yesterday’s event. Today there is weak ridging and poor thermal recovery. Lots of low and mid level moisture with a massive Bering Sea system on its way, prog’ed to start activity here tomorrow. I saw a comment about how a last blast of Winter on or around Memorial Day was normal here. I will grant that in my nearly half century of life I’ve seen the odd cut off or outlier cold front drop rain this late, at these latitudes. But in my life, I have never seen this sort of systemic ongoing “winter” type pattern last this long, so close to the Summer Solstice. It’s a conveyor belt of systems, unheard of in June let alone even late in most “normal” rainy seasons. This would even be abnormal in April. The other notable thing setting this apart from previous late events is the extreme cold aloft.
Someone asked if there is proof that human co2 has an effect on the global clima.. How about during the plague? Temperatures dropped for a long time after the massivly deaths of the plague, sending Europe in to a mini ice age as result. Check in to that
Dan Kevin Johnsen,
The plague was in the 14th century, well before CO2 began to rise. There is no evidence that CO2 causes global harm.
Do you think its the heat from the peoples bodys that had an effect to the clima in the 14th century? 50% of europes population died to it and thats alot of people. One person creates 70kw-870kw. 50 million people that stops emitting this heat suddently. Will this effect the clima?
From the National Park Service website, they state the Tioga Pass will open on June 18 this year. That’s Fathers’ Day here in the US. Happy Fathers’ Day!
“Tioga Road (Highway 120 through the park)
Opens June 18 at 8 am”
http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/conditions.htm