Inches of "Global Warming" Get Dumped on NASA-GISS HQ

This is rich!

A show where people fret and dramatize about nothing, where we laugh over their silly ways and kooky ideas. And then there’s Seinfeld.

Lots of snow on the roofs visible in NY webcams.
http://wirednewyork.com/webcam4/

Man that is funny as crazy as Kramer seemed to be he might as well have been one of them scientists. Just look at his hair in the Seinfeld series

What I find most interesting according to NOAA’s National Climate Data Center is that continental US winters are cooling at a significant rate. While overall annual temperatures have also been cooling at a good clip since 1998, most of that cooling is in the winter months. This is a plot of the winter temperatures (December – February) for the Continental US since 1998:
http://i42.tinypic.com/2a96rh2.gif
The trend is an astounding -3.26 degF / Decade. The bold horizontal line is the 1901-2000 average. As you can see, winter temperatures have been falling considerably. Interestingly, April through September temperatures (six month period) have shown practically flat since 1998 with a trend of only -0.08 degF / Decade.
http://i44.tinypic.com/11wc521.gif
It really is a puzzle to me.

Worthwhile time to remember that Robert Goddard was considered a deviant from the settled science in his time.
“It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt … for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react … Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” New York TImes editorial 1920.
It only took the Times until 1969 to admit they were wrong.
“Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.” New York Times, July 17, 1969

Sh sh sh sh sh shadenfraud…..

Nick Stokes says:
October 29, 2011 at 2:25 pm
“Odd reporting here. The headline “Inches of “Global Warming” Get Dumped on NASA-GISS HQ”. And sure enough, photo of snow, But the only actual fact is a weather forecast.”
Now you know how we feel.

I am old enough to remember the ‘ice age is upon us’ scare. It really did happen you know.
I thought that after the latest warm cycle was over and the globe started to cool again that the climate boys would go back to scaring us with ice; but now they say “cold is really warm”. I don’t get it. Do people really by that sort of nonsense?

Where is James Hansen? He should be walking around denying the existence of the snow around his building.

Mark S says:
October 29, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Ira Glickstein wrote: So now, it is the turn for us Skeptics to show how silly such claims are.
There are genuine skeptic websites that paint a more nuanced picture of science (Collide-a-scape, for example). This blog isn’t one of them.
Yawn. Have you ever had an original thought?

This is all completely consistent with Global Warming, and it is worse than we thought.

From the AP:
NEW YORK – Authorities say New York City’s Central Park is seeing its snowiest October on record.
National Weather Service spokesman Chris Vaccaro says 1.3 inches of snow had fallen at the park as of 2 p.m. Saturday, making this the snowiest October there since records began being kept in 1869. That’s also a record for the date of Oct. 29.
Vaccaro says it’s the first time observers at the park have measured an inch or more of snow.
Snow was continuing to fall in the city Saturday, meaning the record will grow.
The snowfall is part of a storm that’s expected to dump anywhere from a dusting of snow to about 10 inches along the East Coast.

stevo says:
October 29, 2011 at 3:17 pm
“Yes, no-one doubts the world has warmed, do they? The BEST results were just nothing because you already know that the world is warmed, don’t you? And that’s why you never bother tiresomely hyping cold weather. Oh, wait.”
The cooling comes AFTER the warming, Stevo.
That it is so rapid is not astonishing at all; a system with positive feedbacks (let us assume they exist) must have a hysteresis (for feedback gains smaller 1; and we already know the gain can’t be bigger), and once the outside input (solar) overcomes the hysteresis, the flip into the opposite direction is amplified by the same positive feedbacks that held the system up for a while whilst the input was already weakly pulling in the other direction.
Positive feedbacks that amplify warming must also amplify cooling, in other words.

Mark S says:
October 29, 2011 at 2:20 pm

Ira Glickstein wrote: So now, it is the turn for us Skeptics to show how silly such claims are.

There are genuine skeptic websites that paint a more nuanced picture of science (Collide-a-scape, for example). This blog isn’t one of them.
—————–
Mark S,
?Nuance? . . . . ? Collide-a-Scape : ) ? . . . . ? WUWT : ( ?
That was decidedly non-nuanced. But was definitely snarky. Confused much?
If you are trying to drum up some traffic that KK’s joint sorely needs . . . . your nuanced message of will likely reduce KK’s traffic.
John

James Hansen said Manhattan would be under water not under snow.
He also said there would be a strong El Nino in 2011.

And Ira since you are trying to turn some snow into a GISS NASA bashing exercise, I sort of feel you should actually read and understand what they say about extreme climate events, as I have an inkling you are not accurately representing their position.

I’m pretty certain that running into Mike Tyson’s fist at the end of the Charlie Sheen roast did some serious damage to poor stevo.

Ira may be hyping a book, but at least I have the option of not purchasing his book.
What the other guys are asking for is not voluntary.

Stevo says: “A decade is too short a time to discern any trend in global temperatures at current rates of change. It’s such a very simple concept but apparently still too difficult for some.”
Hmmm…
Explain then why in 1988, Dr. Jim Hansen, with less than a decade of temperature data to support him, went before congress to claim that he had seen the effects of AGW, and pushed his three scenarios?
Of course lack of more than 10 years of data may explain why they had to rig the air conditioning in the hearing room to get the point across.

Transcript:
This transcript excerpt is from PBS series Frontline which aired a special in April 2007.
TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]

LazyTeenager says:
October 29, 2011 at 4:53 pm
And Ira since you are trying to turn some snow into a GISS NASA bashing exercise, I sort of feel you should actually read and understand what they say about extreme climate events, as I have an inkling you are not accurately representing their position.
========
Ira, at no point, ever made any representation of the “GISS NASA” position.
Position, being the operative word.

stevo says:
October 29, 2011 at 5:24 pm
“A decade is too short a time to discern any trend in global temperatures at current rates of change. It’s such a very simple concept but apparently still too difficult for some.”
So you’ll stop yammering in 20 years when we’re deep in the solar minimum? Fine. Some are slow learners.

“Who says and how did they come to that conclusion?”
Anyone with an ounce of sense, and simple statistical analyses in which you derive the trend and the uncertainty on the trend helped them to come to that conclusion.
“The fact is, there has been no warming in the last decade”
The fact is, you can’t tell what the trend is over the past ten years. It is a very, very simple concept, but clearly much, much too difficult for some.
“without any doubt, this earth hasn’t warmed in over ten years”
The fact is, you can’t tell what the trend is over the past ten years. It is a very, very simple concept, but clearly much, much too difficult for some.
“because it hasn’t gotten warmer in the last ten years”
The fact is, you can’t tell what the trend is over the past ten years. It is a very, very simple concept, but clearly much, much too difficult for some. But the last ten years has been the warmest ten year period in the directly measured climate record.

Didn’t you guys read the other thread about the heat wave in Moscow? Extreme events are supposed to increase. The warming will cause more snow earlier in the season. It doesn’t matter that it’s unprecedented, it’s still consistent with a warming world. Weather is climate, and it’s worse than we thought.

“A decade is too short a time to discern any trend in global temperatures at current rates of change. It’s such a very simple concept but apparently still too difficult for some.”
That is because the “current rate of change” is so very, very close to zero. Not catastrophically large in the warming direction. It’s such a very simple concept but apparently still too difficult for some.

Smokey says:
October 29, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Occupy GISS… and the EPA!
___________________________________
Great idea but let’s add the USDA and FDA. They are just as corrupt and will also cost tax payers a bundle in the coming years.
Oh heck let’s just occupy K street!

I note that Central Park apparently received no snow between 2PM and 8PM:
… Record October snowfall amount set for Central Park NY…
As of 2 PM today… Central Park recorded 1.3 inches of snowfall.
——
… Record daily maximum snowfall set at Central Park NY…
As of 8 PM today… a record snowfall of 1.3 inches was recorded at
Central Park NY.

Nice picture of OWS Protesters tents covered in snow.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/10/20111029195246572733.html

30 years warming, 30 years cooling which is blatantly obvious from the last 120 years data.
So now we cool, despite the efforts of those entrusted with the data to diddle the data to fit their theories.
Believing in ‘trends’ in climate is hopelessly childish and the believe will always be crushed by the next turn of the cycle.

stevo;
But the last ten years has been the warmest ten year period in the directly measured climate record.>>>
I love that argument. Let’s see, we’ve been on a warming trend since the 1600’s. So… the last century was warmer than the century before. The warmest in hundreds of years in fact. So, instead of talking about which was the warmest, let’s talk…by how much?
Arguably, there was a ten year time period in the 1930’s to 40’s that was warmer, depending on whose temp record you use. But let’s use Jim Hansen’s which after adjustments, more adjustments, some fiddling, then some adjustments, shows this last ten years is the warmest on record…by a few one hunfredths of one degree. Oooooh. I’m scared.
Let’s look at that through an analogy that everyone understands. Money.
Let’s say on day one I stuff $100 into my mattress. On day 2, I stuff $100 into my mattress. On day 3, I stuff $100 into my mattress, and so on for 100 days. I’ve now got $10,000 stuffed into my mattress. On day 101, I stuff one penny into my mattress. On day 102, I stuff one penny into my mattress. And so on for 100 days. At the end of 200 days, I’ve got $10,001 in my mattress.
It would be technically accurate to say that over the last 100 days, I’ve had more money in my mattress than EVER BEFORE. In fact, the last ten days, I’ve had more money than at any time in the last 200 days. Again, completely accurate. And, totaly meaningless. The extra ten cents would not be missed for a moment if I took the money out of the mattress to spend it. In fact, I wouldn’t even bother looking for it if I noticed it was missing.
So…the warmiong of the last few hundred years? Sure, let’s go with it is the warmest ten years on record. Completely meaningless. Now the warming since the LIA until now? Take that away from us and you’ll get the downside of climate change really, Really, REALLY fast, because we’ll have something called massive crop failure, famine, and deaths from cold that make any disaster of recent memory look like tiddly winks.
But keep counting those last few hundredths of a degree. they’re like my last ten cents of savings. Can’t be bothered trying to find it (if it is there at all) because it is meaningless.

When James Hansen made his prediction about the West Side Highway in Manhattan being underwater by 2028, it is a pity that the reporter did not stop to ask the (now-obvious) question: “Will the water be in liquid state (e.g. rising up from the river) or will it fall from the sky in solid state (as snow)?”

stevo says:
October 29, 2011 at 5:24 pm
“A decade is too short a time to discern any trend in global temperatures at current rates of change. ”
Two decades is proof postive of warming then? 1976-1998.
1940-1976 and 1999-2012 cooling. For one third of my life it has been warming and for two thirds cooling.

I think the most important connection is the proximity to Columbia University, with the Frankfort School connection.

Gail Combs says:
Oh heck let’s just occupy K street!
My most fervent hope is for someone new to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania street, or Ave, come January, 2013. If fear for the future of humanity if this does not come to pass. I see about an 80 year cycle going on here, politically speaking. Do the math.

Smokey says…
“The more stevo comments, the less intelligent he appears to be.”
It could, perhaps, be coined, The Lack Effect.
When are we going to get a guest post from you Smokey?

“stevo says:
October 29, 2011 at 6:14 pm
But the last ten years has been the warmest ten year period in the directly measured climate record.”
As a retired physics teacher, let me try to explain things from a different perspective. I will define displacement and velocity in the process. Displacement is the change in position. So if you started at sea level and climbed to the top of Mount Everest, your displacement would be 29,029 feet up. Now suppose you rapidly reached the top in 1998 and then started to slowly walk down at the rate of 10 feet per year. Velocity is the rate of change of position. So in this example, the velocity is 10 feet per year down. Now if you walked down for 12 years, your velocity would be down, even though you would still be very high up during those 12 years.
So it is perfectly possible to be high up (warmest ten year period), and at the same time be going down (or possibly cooling in our analogy).
By the way, according to the HADCRUT3 record, 1998 was the warmest year and 2011 so far, to the end of August, it is the 11th warmest. See: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
Since it does not look good to have 15 years of cooling for certain people, the suggestion is made that 15 years is no longer a good yardstick and 17 years is needed. And Trenberth talks of “20 years or longer” for some other purpose. I think I know why.

Werner Brozek;
I really like the climbing the mountain analogy, thanks! May I have your permission to use it? If not, I shall just steal it. 😉
I thought of another one that I’m still working on because my “money” explanation is apparently too long to hold anyone’s attention. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
I throw a ball up in the air. At the peak of the ball’s trajectory, it has a vertical velocity of zero. If I measure the vertical velocity of the ball at multiple points along the trajectory prior to the peak, and then extrapolate the resulting curve, the only conclusion I can come to is that the ball’s velocity tends to zero, and it will simply stop and remain stuck in the air.
Or maybe the way to go is to explain that at the peak of the ball’s trajectory, it is by definition, higher than it ever has been before….
The latter makes the point in a more realistic manner I suppose, I just like the image of the ball stuck in the air more. LOL.

I just heard a Weather Channel guy say all this snow was a sign of global warming!!
My hope is that this is the first of many heavy snowfalls for the Northeast.

Here is this very night when it snowed so early in the year in Manhattan, this 29th day of October in the year 2011, looking up through snow on the sidewalk across Broadway from Tom’s Diner:
http://i.minus.com/iNdtgAJtgo4C4.jpg
-=NikFromNYC=-

NikFromNYC says:
October 29, 2011 at 11:31 pm
Great picture, not quite enough for a hockey game I guess.

savethesharks says:
October 29, 2011 at 9:49 pm
Looks like you might have a contender for what we had here in Minnesota back in 1991
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Halloween_blizzard
Duluth ended up with 37 inches, Mpls/St Paul 28 inches , in SE MN where I am the snow fall was smaller, but we started with 2-3 inches of ice. Bismark SD hit -10 F breaking the daily record by 16 degrees. We got another big hit at the end of Nov., 12-18″ over most of the state. Never saw real dirt from Halloween until damn near Easter

“ARMY PUT ON SNOW ALERT”
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/280599/Army-put-on-snow-alert
“Health Secretary Andrew Lansley will unveil the country’s first co-ordinated Cold Weather Plan on Tuesday.”
Hot dry summers, mild wet winters.

davidmhoffer: “Arguably, there was a ten year time period in the 1930′s to 40′s that was warmer”
Not in any global temperature record you could care to dig up. I think perhaps you got the United States and the entire planet confused. Funny how that mistake, which I can’t imagine anyone making in any other context, seems to crop up so often here.
James Sexton: “my arbitrary time constraint is every bit as valid as your arbitrary time constraint”
Nope. Statistics tells us that 10 years is not useful but that 30 years is useful. Nothing arbitrary about it. Like I say, this whole business of needing a certain amount of data before you can determine a trend is very, very simple, but evidently much, much too difficult for you. When did you last study any maths?

They’re expecting the total from this storm to be 5 to 8 inches which doesn’t just break it shatters into smithereens the former October snowfall record set 150 years ago.

New York was right on the snow-rain line — UHI certainly pushed that line north some: http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_usa.gif
Image changes each day…..

Wow. Even my 10 year old knows that global temperature would be measured by a thermometer, not a rain or snow gauge.
This guy has a PhD? In what exactly?
And, for those with even a little bit of knowledge on the subject, higher temperatures = greater ability to hold water…which leads to more rain and snow.
Seriously, anyone know what this guy’s PhD is in? I’m guessing something like Culinary Science…

stevo says:
October 30, 2011 at 5:21 am
“Nope. Statistics tells us that 10 years is not useful but that 30 years is useful.”
Please define “useful”, and deliver a proof – this should be easy for someone like you with advanced knowledge about statistics and mathematics. Your proof should begin with “We define “useful” as…”
This American “No Child Left Behind” thing produces funny results, I must say.

stevo;
Not in any global temperature record you could care to dig up. I think perhaps you got the United States and the entire planet confused. Funny how that mistake, which I can’t imagine anyone making in any other context, seems to crop up so often here.>>>
Try NASA/GISS of HadCrut broken up by NH and SH. What you’ll find is that the NH has a very pronounced warming period in that time frame across the whole hemisphere, not just the United States, that is warmer than the rest of the record. The SH is in a cooling phase at that point, well below average, and the average of the two reduces the global number. If you fast forward to the last 20 years or so, you’ll see that there is an approximate 60 to 75 year warm/cool cycle in the NH and about a 90 to 105 year warm/cool cycle in the SH. The “warm” parts of the cycle for both coincide for the first time in a long time around 1990, giving rise to an “average” between the two that appears on the surface to support higher than normal global temperatures.
In fact, all it shows is NORMAL temperatures with the cycles between NH and SH coinciding to produce a misleading average between the two. This is no different than screaming that the ice is melting in the arctic as prood of global warming while ignoring the fact that ice is increasing even faster in the SH. The two hemispheres are very different, one being mostly land with an ocean cap and the other being mostly water with a land cap. It stands to reason that natural cycles will have different wave lengths, and a quick glance at the data shows they do. Drawing conclusions about what is happening when the cycles are in opposition to each other has no more value than drawing conclusions about what is happening when the cycles are complimenting each other. Everything needs to be in context.
Throw a ball into the air and you can say two things about it at the peak of its trajectory. First, you can say that it is higher than it ever has been before. Second, you could also say that it has a vertical velocity of zero. If we convert this to climate speak, it is the highest on record, but the increase in altitude has taken a hiatus. A few moments after the peak we could even say that the last few data points show a slight decrease, but there aren’t enough of them to say for certain that a falling trend has taken over, we need more data, all the models show its just a hiatus in the ball’s upward trend demonstrated very clearly by all the data points so far.
Nice, but the ball is going to fall, acclerating as it goes, and that’s just the way it is. The climate scientists gabbing on about the hottest decade on record remind me of Daffy Duck in that Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy walks off the edge of a cliff, looks down, and says in slight panic “gravity works”.

Of course, weather is not climate … unless, perhaps, it supports an inconvenient ‘Truth.’

Jimmy Haigh says:
October 29, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Sh sh sh sh sh shadenfraud…..
————-
Don’t you mean “Sh sh sh sh sh schadenfroid”?

@stevo says:
October 30, 2011 at 5:21 am
Funny how that mistake, which I can’t imagine anyone making in any other context, seems to crop up so often here.
Not so funny when you’ve been following things for a while. You see, it used to be warmer, even in Hansen’s official series. Then Hansen revised it downward, but it was still warmer. Finally, upon succesive revisions, it was eventually revised downwards to the point of being cooler than the most recent peak in the continuous warming since the LIA. Oh, and just to clarify that’s its really warmer now, he continuously revises the recent record upwards. And, all the while, grossly underestimating urban heat island effects.
What was your point again?

DirkH says:
October 30, 2011 at 10:04 am
———
It is appauling that concerned scientists like Ekwurzel spread their truths in TV and youtube but disable the comment function. They have no interest in discussing their expensive views, causing so much harm to tax payers. No chance to ask, why such simplistic views are applicable here but not elsewhere.
For example, if there is more moisture in the air and more precipitation, wouldn’t that also reduce and shorten draughts and be beneficial for mankind? The IPCC had already lied about this subject:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/18/how-the-ipcc-portrayed-a-net-positive-impact-of-climate-change-as-a-negative/
Another simplistic view not really communicated by concerned scientists:
As high latitudes warm faster, wouldn’t that reduce the temperature gradient und reduce the strength of winter storms, but hey that would be another benefit ? And global cyclone activity actually is at multi decade lows.
Finally, blaming global warming for a local weather event appears to be no so clever, as global temperatures have been running low in recent months compared with recent years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000

vigilantfish says:
October 30, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Very good – both are correct.

I really dislike this warmist bullscheisse about ‘peaking on Everest’ and a ball being ‘stuck in the air’. Fantasy land once again.
Everest is the highest mountain on Earth, 1998 was certainly not the hottest. And as for the ‘ball stuck in the air’ schlock, has gravity occurred to you??
Time to take yourselves off to a dark room, and hug your knees.

Dreadnought;
You’ve completely…and totaly…missed the point.

“Dreadnought says:
October 30, 2011 at 5:59 pm
1998 was certainly not the hottest”
It is according to
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
Do you see a number larger than 0.548 as it was in 1998?

Two weeks ago, over on the thread Shifting Sun-Earth-Moon Harmonies, Beats, & Biases
Posted on October 15, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Paul L. Vaughan, M.Sc. – October 2011
I posted this comment;
Richard Holle says:
October 17, 2011 at 9:33 pm
Watch what happens when we have a Synod conjunction with Jupiter on 10-29-2011 when the moon is maximum south declination. There should be a larger than usual meridional surge of warm moisture coming off of the equator into the mid-latitudes having some intense interaction with the Mobil Polar Highs that will be forming the other half of the lunar tidal bulges in both hemispheres.
These patterns are what got me interested in wanting to understand WTF was going on, back in 1983.
***************************************
Well here is the surge in moisture and the MPH making an early snow storm right on time in New England, on the following loop you can watch the interaction as it flows together.
Richard Holle
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/loops/wxloop.cgi?wv_east_enhanced+48+-update+3600
Now people are saying it is an extreme weather event that was not forecast for this time of year, it has little to do with the date that it happens it has all to do with the planetary synod conjunctions, if people would only look at the interactions, and study the patterns it would make long range forecasting much easier.

Dave Springer;
It just has to be below 32F for snow to accumulate. Far below freezing is just overkill for snow accumulation.>>>
Actually, snowfall can occurr a couple of degrees above freezing as the snowflakes may be below freezing but not the ambient temperature. Further, if temps are “far” below freezing, there is very little snow at all. We who live in winter climates call it being “too cold to snow”. While technically it actually does, the snow at minus 30 is pretty much dust rather than flakes, and there isn’t very much of it. Most snow falls between a couple of degrees above zero and a few degrees below zero.
Temperature alone however is not what determines glacier growth. Glacier growth is determined by the amount of snow accumulated in winter versus the amount that melts in summer. So, a warmer winter might easily result in more days suited to snowfall, and the increased snowfall, even when coupled with an also warmer summer, may grow the glacier. It is the amount of snow in winter minus the amount that melts in the summer that determines glacier growth, and surprisingly mild winters that hove arounf the freezing point will contribute a lot more to that growth than do very very cold winters.