From Tom Nelson – too good not to share.
More proof that Fraudster Al Gore doesn’t know how to use the Internet
Al’s Journal: June26th, 2011 Ice and Snow Disappearing from Mt. Rainier
The effects of the climate crisis are hitting closer and closer to home:
Deep Snow Delaying Opening of Sunrise Area at Mount Rainier National Park | National Parks Traveler
[June 21, 2011] Too much snow will keep the Sunrise area in Mount Rainier National Park closed through the Fourth of July weekend and until at least July 8, according to park officials. Also, the White River Campground won’t open until July 1.
As the accompanying photos show, there really is a lot of snow still waiting to melt away at Sunrise.
And it isn’t just Washington:
Western snow pack is well above normal, Squaw Valley sets new all time snow record
And here’s Willis complete and thorough debunking of another recent snowfall study claiming reduction in snowpack: Gotta Admire The Chutzpah
~dbs, mod said @ur momisugly June 27, 2011 at 11:33 am “[If Moderate Republican continues using pejorative comments regarding WUWT on other forums, such as: “you linked to a known denier site that references the usual denier bad science,” his future comments may be deleted due to bad manners. ~dbs, mod.]
Slip up on my part – you won’t see that elsewhere after that one reference above since the exchange w/ Anthony on the 14th. Understand the point being raised dbs.
Ken says:
June 27, 2011 at 8:11 am
It is pretty obvious to me that the photographer in the snow covered picture is at least 50 feet further away from the building and maybe 50 yards to the right of the building.
Perhaps you have the distances wrong, but I fully agree with the directions. Add this to the height difference – 2nd photo taken from atop of the snow – and the one year growth of the extreme tops of the trees, and it is reasonable to accept that the image is of the same area especially since the source says it is.
You can see the “roof line” in the second photo too, although we have no real idea how much snow is on the roof.
Is there disagreement over whether there is more snow there this year than last year or is that now an accepted fact?
As someone who worked at Mt Rainier National Park in my HS years, (’79, ’80, ’81), and as someone who lives 50 miles from Rainier and goes there often, I can tell you this is unprecedented in my time here on Earth. Sunrise routinely opens the last week of May, first week of June. Typically this time of year at Sunrise, snow is limited to drifts 2-3′ deep in shady regions. The meadows are always clear this time of year.
And no, the fact that Mt Rainier is an active volcano has nothing to do with the snowfall at Sunrise. Sunrise is 6500′ and the summit is 14411′. There is a very large valley with the Emmons Glacier between the summit and Sunrise. Sunrise is not on the mountain itself.
And a lahar would not affect Seattle. A look at a contour map would tell you that.
Once upon a time a liar cites: a group of other liars’ coverage of another group of liars’ study, which extolled the virtues of the Emperor’s clothes.
Unfortunately there was a dude with a cameraphone along the parade route who took a picture of the naked Emperor with No Clothes.
So, who are you going to believe, the Emperor with No Clothes and his entourage of slavish liars, or your own eyes and a rational brain?
Climate Majority says:
June 27, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Watts Up With That cites: random dude with a camera phone
How about the Washington State Climatologist…after all…Mr Rainier is in Washington State, not Washington DC.
http://www.climate.washington.edu/newsletter/2011Jun.pdf
How about the live cams run by the National Park Service.
http://www.nps.gov/webcams-mora/gh.jpg
http://www.nps.gov/webcams-mora/east.jpg
http://www.nps.gov/webcams-mora/west.jpg
I’m fortunate in that weather permitting, I get to see Mt Rainier almost everyday.
A couple of years ago it was admittedly looking not so snow-capped. But last year ‘summer weather’ lasted about a week…and this year is shaping up to be worse.
Smokey: nice metaphor, but I think it might be a slight exaggeration 🙂
USGS and other groups have been taking glacier measurements of mt rainier for years. The glaciers are receding AND thinning. Why? Warmer/drier conditions over the course of the last 40 years. [snip. You are using WUWT to advertise your new blog. Just say what you want right here. That’s what this forum is for. And it’s Anthony Watts or Mr. Watts. ~dbs, mod.]
Watts’ conclusion is not in line with the data. Make sure you read the study, the article, and google “Mt Rainier glacier measurements”.
Moderate Republican says:
June 27, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Johnny Carson had an app for that: famous women known for thier trains.
Al Gore is presently known for the blizzards that follow his AGW speeches, but previously had an association with hanging chad (complex courtesy of W). Somehow, I don’t see the GOP rolling out the red carpet for either Als blizzards or his chad.
harrywr2 says @ur momisugly June 27, 2011 at 3:55 pm “How about the Washington State Climatologist…after all…Mr Rainier is in Washington State, not Washington DC”
From the report you cited on the snow coverage made this observation “While unusual, it is not unprecedented. The winter of 1998/99 (water year 1999), for example, had similar snowpack growth through May at Paradise (Figure 4b).”.
Offering up any one year as evidence of a reversal of longer term trends remains iffy, since evidentially what happened in the winter of 1998/99 wasn’t enough to forestall longer term trends and what happened this year (unfortunately) isn’t like to do that either.
“About 14 percent of the ice and *permanent* snow atop Washington state’s Mount Rainier melted in the past *four decades*, a new study suggests.”
None of that can be contradicted simply by a photo of snow.
Moderate Republican is correct – a lot of skeptics on this site do link Gore to climate science as if Gore making a mistake means climate science has made a mistake. In this case however, I suspect this blog has made the mistake – confusing weather with longterm changes in permanent snow and ice cover.
Well, it would be, if only it weren’t.
We’re constantly being told that changes in a certain direction, even in multiple directions (more snow, less snow; floods and drought) are bad. This would imply that the climate should be unchanging, or that it should only get colder. Is that what you expect?
Besides, there’s no evidence that the rate or magnitude of change is any worse now that at previous changes during this or other interglacials. The vaunted hockey stick cannot be validated prior to 1500 ce, and even that validation is shaky due to the use of proxies which have not been shown to be valid temperature proxies. And then there’s the divergence problem…
So the strawman would seem to have a lot of flesh.
I wonder what the snowpack was like from say 900ce to 1100ce? Oops! We don’t know!
Take your own advice about short term trends.
“Why? Warmer/drier conditions over the course of the last 40 years.”
I’m sure it’s the drier and not the warmer part. It’s still friggin’ freezing up there.
Of course Western Washington doesn’t get as much precip as people think. Summers are usually VERY dry. Dallas gets more annual rainfall than Seattle. And as Harry mentioned above, last summer (and the one before that) have been extremely cool. So far we’re in for more of the same.
Global Warming aint global.
What happened this year is a continuation of what happened last year.
In the UK, it’s 3 years in a row.
This, I suspect, is the result of an external event, as it has sucessfully turned around the warming, and sent it back down the hill. Al comes tumlbing after. The whole Agenda is suffering from freezerburn and snowbound passes.
First, it is not just one year of heavy snow. There was a recent warm cycle, and we are now in a cold cycle. The effects are starkly obvious in our Puget Sound garden. The warmth loving plants thrived in the Nineties, and they have been ddying out in the garden in the past ten years. Even some of the Washington State native plants have been killed by the extraordinary low temperatures in the recent winters of the past ten years.
Second, the Mount Ranier glaciers have been retreating overall with interspersed brief advances ever since their most recent maximum glaciation in the Little Ice Age of the 14th to 19th Centuries. The 1950 to 1978 period was one of those cold periods during which the Mount Ranier glaciers had a tendency to stabilize and advance, while the warm cycle about 1978 to 1998 or later was their period of retreat during a warm cycle. These brief advances followed by renewed retreats have occurred about seven times since the 18th Century according to a geological report/s studying the terminal morraines resulting from these glacial cycles.
If anything, loss of glacial extent on Mount Ranier at the end of the 20th Century represents a confirmation of the same natural cycles that existed before anthropogenic influence and carbon dioxide emissions existed to any great measure. Hence, efforts to equate Mount Ranier’s glacial extent to anthropogenic activities lacks any rational basis.
Because the Earth’s climate is emerging from the recent Little Ice Age of the 14th to 19th Centuries. Mount Ranier’s glaciers were in retreat from their Pleistocene maximums, at which time they reached out to the seacoasts until the 14th Century advent of the Little Ice Age. During the Little Ice Age, Mount Ranier’s glaciers advanced again up to about 1850. With the end of the Little Ice Age, Mount Ranier’s glaciers resumed their post ice age retreats up to the present day, with the exception of about seven brief cold cycles during which they stabilized and/ormade minor advences before resuming their retreats in the subsequent renewed warm cycles.
Attempts to link Mount Ranier’s natural glacial extents to AGW are about as false, opportunistic, and contrary to scientific observation as linking blizzards and cold weather to Global Warming, Climate Change, and whatever the next oxymoron is to be used.
D Patterson – Thank you
The AGW theories would be less easy to refute if the LIA ended about the time when the last century C02 increases started.
@ur momisugly D. Patterson – citations otherwise it’s just a personal opinion….
Moderate Republican says:
June 27, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Offering up any one year as evidence of a reversal of longer term trends remains iffy
And 2007 and 2008 were ‘BBQ Summers’ in Seattle and indeed the summer snow pack on Mt Rainier looked to anyone with a view of Mt Rainier within a 50 miles radius using a mark 8 eyeball analyzer to be ‘sad’.
2007 and 2008 doesn’t make a trend anymore then 2009 and 2010 make a trend.
Our local press bombarded us in 2008 with endless stories about the disparaging future of Mt Rainier.
A good technique I’ve learned over the years is to consult the ‘local press’ when some national newspaper reports some ‘important news’ concerning the locality. I can’t find any stories in the local press as to the ‘horrible state of Mt Rainier’ due to global warming.
The photo of Mt Rainier that appeared in the Washington Post story is somewhat outdated. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/200291323-001/Photodisc
Here’s a nice u-tube video of some climbers climbing a snowbank at the Mt Rainier visitors center on June 13th so you can get an appreciation as to how deep the snow is this year.
“Gary says:
June 27, 2011 at 7:18 am
@Mike Lewis and Brian H;
I cannot agree with you….”
The “marker tree” isn’t what the circle refers to. The edge of the roof is in both pictures.
Citations? Why don’t you go out to Mount Ranier and check the positions of the moraines and their dates. The National Park Service and the U.S. Geological survey can help you with that. Direct observation is better than any citation. Of course, if you insist upon citations, we could just as easily disprove the existence of oxygen by citing the peer reviewed papers offering proof of phlostigon and ecotplasm. Eh? Or, perhaps you have a model from a peer reviewed paper you prefer to cite in support of the notion that glacial retreat is unprecedented since before Burma Shave?
lulu wrote
“And a lahar would not affect Seattle. A look at a contour map would tell you that.”
Not Seattle, but Orting and the Renton Valley, lots of Boeing facilities, could be hit.
I looked d on geologic maps when I lived there, and there were nice name s like “The Electron Mud Flow” where thousands of people live.
In their abstract, the authors suggest that the loss over the last 40 years was simply a correction of the unusually high accumulation of the previous 40 years due to the PDO. The entire article is behind a paywall and I don’t have spare monies to satisfy idle curiosity.
Note too, that this is a comparision of two “snapshots”, and not record of the annual extents over the entire time period.
The final sentence of the abstract, emphasis mine:
“Overall, Mount Rainier lost ∼14 vol% glacial ice and perennial snow over the 37 to 38 yr interval between surveys. Enhanced thinning of south-flank glaciers may be meltback from the high snowfall period of the mid-1940s to mid-1970s associated with the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.”
Judging by the amount of snow on the ground, it looks like the Northwest has been having a worst summer than we have here in the Sierra.
Gore did make a mistake by uncritically and erroneously asserting and misrepesenting an erroneous paper published in a peer reviewed journal was some kind of valid evidence linking the glacial extents on Mount Ranier to human caused changes in global climate. Moderate Republican made a mistake by failing to recognize the peer reviewed paper was erroneous and Gore’s uncritical acceptance of the erroneous conclusions of the paper was unwarranted and erroneous.
A single photograph in some circumstances such as this are sufficient to demonstrate reality is contrary to what is claimed in the erroneous peer reviewed paper and the gore blog quotations of ithe erroneous conclusion/s.
A strawman is to take a statement to an extreme not indicated with the initial statement and then debunk it – just as you attempted to do.
I stated a fact that is not in dispute. Therefore you are free to believe that Gore is gospel when it comes to AGW – but you cannot disagree (unless you are just a bald faced liar) with my statement of his failure.