Bitter cold records broken in Alaska – all time coldest record nearly broken, but Murphy's Law intervenes

Isopropyl alcohol is listed as having a freezing point of -90C. I tried to find a water-isopropyl phase diagram but couldn’t. If someone on WUWT can find a phase diagram, a person on the ground in AK can mix graded solutions of isopropyl & distilled water to make thermometer that will accurately measure -80C.
Just put a series of solutions (probably ~0-15% water in isopropyl) in sealed tubes outside. Then, photograph which solutions freeze. Don’t forget to shake tubes before imaging to prevent supercooling. It will be like Mythbusters. The only battery that need work will be in the camera.

Usually equipment like this has a battery monitor and will shut itself down if the battery voltage drops too low. The whole idea is that if you get a reading you can trust it. Operating out of spec is a different story but Davis should be able to confirm if they have a low battery monitor and shutdown function.

more global warming news eh??? you know global warming causes ultra low temps!

Thom says: I just can’t wait for the Hansen January map showing Alaska or Europe basking in red.

Thom, for skeptic and nonskeptic alike, there is no need to wait: monthly summaries are available here.
And yes, during 2011 our planet was bathed in red.
Like the navigator says in Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove:

“I’m sorry sir. Those ARE the numbers.

And surely, rational skepticism isn’t afraid to look at the numbers, eh?
REPLY: Oh please. Some days I wonder if you aren’t just mendacious without substance. What you posted is *not* GISS, as we know, GISS takes the NOAA data and sends the NOAA data through the sausage grinder to pop out a new specially adjusted data set of their own with no care to looking at the need for adjustment. So much for your “rational” contribution when you can’t even compare data sets correctly.
We’ll wait for the January GISS report, until then please just hold your commentary because your contributions like this are just noise. If you reply to criticize me directly, then you’ll be putting your name to it per your recent acknowledgement of the importance of that. Otherwise it is the bit bucket.
– Anthony

Oh NOOOOOOOO!!!!! We can’t take any more of this catastrophic warming in the Arctic!

As for the temp variance from site to site – it really comes down to how much ice fog one gets. Some areas never get ice fog and sit in a low area so the cold air could pool, others got ice fog or a slight breeze.
Russ’ question about daily temp ranges vs no solar insolation can be answered. Its because the sun is insolating south of barrow and the heat propagates via radiation northwards in the atmosphere. Radiation does radiate outwards from the surface but also sideways through the atmosphere.

Well, here in Washington D.C. it’s supposed to be in the balmy mid-sixties today. I’m waiting to see the Washington Post tell us that’s more proof of global warming! But then you have the extreme cold weather in Alaska (in the winter, go figure) and I’m supposed to believe it’s global cooling!? I’m so confused!! Oh! I forgot…”Climate Change” is the new mantra. I understand now. Then I guess it’s ok to raise my taxes and the govenment will somehow moderate the earths temperature. This is what Obama’s selling…any takers?
Y’know, people keep saying this, but I don’t see Obama investing a whole lot of rhetoric and no hard action at all in CAGW. Sometimes he gives a speech to appease his hard-environmentalist block where he talks about how much he loves wildlife and is worried about climate change and so on, but in practice he more or less completely ignores it. The republicans have historically done the same thing — talk about how much they think prayer in schools would be just the thing for our heathen country and how happy it would make jesus, but when push comes to shove done nothing about it in office, or do something only if they know that what they are trying won’t actually work, e.g. pass legislation that they know the supreme court will just “veto”. That way they keep the votes of the extremists for “trying” without actually doing anything.
If I had to choose, I’d say republicans do a lot more pandering to the tea party extremists than democrats do to tree party extremists, but both are guilty of “lip service” of the most obscene kind compared to the moderate middle of the road that represents halfway decent governance for the country. Personally, I abhor the entire practice at both ends of the political spectrum and would rather see politicians that openly slam both the tree and the tea party as being completely out of touch with reality and inappropriate to use as the basis for a reasoned public policy for the US, but that’s just me.
Personally, I think Obama is a smart man. Smart people are generally cynical and not easily taken in by scams. I very much doubt that Obama is, himself, convinced that CAGW is a true hypothesis, and he can see the political problems with the IPCC and carbon trading as well as the next non-idiot human. The cap-and-trade bill had no chance of getting through the Senate when it was passed in the house, and has no chance of passing in the Senate today. Hell, it wouldn’t pass in the House (again) today — Cap-and-Trade is a demonstrated global flop anyway, and Obama would lose a lot of his moderate support if he allowed himself to be distracted. Just as the republican candidate of your choice will get tea party support (what’s the alternative, Obama?) Obama is going to get tree party support (what’s the alternative, Ginrich? — oh wait, Ginrich has actually said, back in 2007:
I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frank:ly, it’s something I would strongly support.
So Ginrich can actually double down on both sides of the issue, although I don’t think he will. A lot of people who might have been convinced three years ago are a lot less convinced today. Remember, Climategate really has had an impact — it revealed that certain scientists were systematically lying to politicians to accomplish political ends, and politicians hate that. Boy that cried wolf syndrome has hit, and now they take the pronouncements of Hansen and Mann with a grain of salt. You’ll still see some lip service being paid by Obama and Ginrich during a campaign (if it comes down that way, as I’m thinking it probably will) but in truth both of them are smart enough to wait and see and not invest a whole lot of energy doing anything about cap-and-trade or CAGW either way.
WUWT can claim a fair bit of the credit for that, IMO. While it can get a bit shrill in opposition and isn’t always totally defensible in its “alternative physics” scenarios (nothing really wrong with that, BTW, as long as there is a lot of strong feedback that strips away the junk science in favor of the real deal, and usually there is) it and Climate Audit have been the voice of reason (sometimes crying in the wilderness, but with its hit-record, it’s a pretty populous wilderness), and I am quite certain that it/they have impacted policy makers in many ways direct and indirect.
Personally I think it would be a lot wiser not to bash Obama but to educate him. He’s easily smart enough to be educable, and wasn’t born yesterday — he can see a vested interest for what it is, and his rhetoric on the issue is nowhere near that of e.g. Gore’s. Even his support for e.g. Solyndra is defensible — trying to keep the building of solar cells in the US instead of in China is hardly a bad thing to try, and ultimately it is solar cell technology and manufacturing capacity that will make the entire issue moot, long before any possible “catastrophe” looms and without carbon trading at all. My main regret is that he didn’t do more for solar technology, and do it more intelligently, INSTEAD of wasting political capital on obvious crap like cap and trade.
But remember, back in 2008 the Warmists were close to their peak in strength and influence, and Obama may well have sincerely believed his scientific advisors, and not realized that their “advice” was predicated on a long and complicated deliberate misrepresentation of the science that concealed all of the problems with it while amplifying and cherrypicking all of the data. Newt Ginrich is hardly a “liberal”, and he was taken in by it. Lots of republicans were. Who could seriously believe that scientists would conspire to “hide the decline”, to prevent people from being able to see the raw data and what they did to it to support their assertion of warming? The non-warming baseline post 1998 was still short enough that it hadn’t become an increasingly glaring “problem” to the warmists. The fundamental problem is that damn few politicians are themselves competent in science. They have little choice but to be advised on it by those that are, and are thus inevitably vulnerable to the sort of general conspiracy that Climategate I revealed.
Right now there is advantage in neither money nor votes at stake with regard to CAGW in the upcoming election. The important issues are “the economy (stupid)”, “energy production only insofar as they have bearing on the economy (stupid)”, “The problem of a nuclear-armed Iran (primarily insofar as it affects energy production and hence the economy — stupid — although it gets honorable mention as an actual threat)”, and “North Korea as an actual threat”. Expect to see lots of lip service paid to tea/tree party members, but even so the level of active pandering is likely to be the lowest in years — both Romney and Ginrich are pragmatists, and the True Believers (Paul and Santorum) have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination, and on the other side Obama is primarily a pragmatist himself. He’s already been burned by Solyndra — it will be an albatross around his neck no matter what, and Cap and Trade may be as well — and I expect his rhetoric to be something like “we need to do something about CO_2, but Cap and Trade isn’t it” — followed quite probably with the platform suggestion that pushing solar is still a good idea, that while we do need to continue developing local fossil fuel resources to keep prices down and help the economy (stupid), a great way to do it is by massive investment in solar research and pilot project infrastructure, ideally done in such a way as to create jobs and new wealth.
Whether or not you buy this argument or think that we should just crank up drilling and production of oil makes little difference to the fact that Carbon Trading is dead and IMO won’t come back to zombie life — it is permanently dead. The IPCC is dead, they just don’t know it yet. The scientific rhetoric coming out in the latest climate reports is starting to be a bit muted as more and more climate scientists are noting that global temperatures really aren’t following Hansen’s and the GCM predictions (in spite of a fair bit of scrambling to “extract” a “warming signal” out of the downturn and to continue to cook the actual temperature record up to boldly create warming where none actually exists. Most scientists aren’t fools and aren’t actually malicious or venal, and when somebody suddenly makes Iceland absurdly warmer than its actual contemporary thermometry indicates, well… the UHI corrections to the actual temperature record are supposed to be negative, and people sooner or later notice that sort of thing.
In the end, it is stuff like the UAH satellite reconstructions of the true global average temperatures in the troposphere that are convincing. Proxy reconstructions have big problems even when they aren’t deliberately hiding declines or trying to “erase” the MWP or LIA, both deliberate goals revealed in climategate communications. The satellite record, OTOH, is difficult to fudge — it’s all openly available data, and the transformations of the data are straightforward and openly published as well. There is damn-all warming visible over the satellite era — perhaps 0.2C over more than 30 years. The straight-up maximum ignorance extrapolation is thus 0.6-0.8C over the next 100 years, far short of a catastrophe in anybody’s book. And there are “disturbing” indications that the 0.2C is “high”, largely spurred by two El Nino episodes and that temperature may actually be falling post 1998 since the latest El Nino barely matched the peak value of the previous one and otherwise exhibited strong regression towards the 30 year mean.
If January temperature do indeed exhibit their promised “plunge” (see WUWT in an article from earlier this month) and end up negative compared to the 30 year baseline, that would — naturally — continue to heat away at the 0.2C warming trend in the data.
Things really are changing in the climate system. Stratospheric H_2O is dropping — down by some 10% or more from its long term average over the last 30+ years. That directly modulates the GHE as stratospheric water vapour is, of course, a major GHG. As far as I know, nobody knows why it is dropping. Long term oscillations are changing phase, some of them in relatively rare coincidence. The sun has finally come out of the 9000-year Grand Maximum that dominated the latter part of the 20th century, and is now rapidly approaching levels of (low) activity not seen for 100 years or more. Volcanic activity — relatively quiet during the last 40 years, in spite of a few spectacular exceptions — may be globally increasing. Countries that were nearly pre-industrial have dramatically industrialized over the decades since the Cold War ended, completely altering the profile of many atmospheric aerosols. The oceans are slowly being better understood, although they are still a huge unknown in the climate equation.
The one truly sad thing about the CAGW “scientists” is that the political blinders that they have assumed are preventing them from seeing just how exciting all of this is. The “unadjusted” proxy record of global temperatures makes it completely clear that the temperatures we have today are neither “unprecedented” or all that extreme (even over the last 2000 years let alone the Holocene), and we do not understand most of the actual drivers of the natural variation of the global climate. We do not, in particular, know what the temperature outside “should” be, what it would be if global CO_2 were still 280 ppm but everything else was the same. We don’t even know what global CO_2 “should” be, since at least part of the increase in atmospheric CO_2 is non-anthropogenic in origin, CO_2 driven out of the oceans in positive feedback response to post LIA warming that would have happened without human industrial contribution at all! There is 60-100x as much CO_2 in solution in the oceans as there is in the entire atmosphere, and even small changes in the depth of the thermocline can make big changes in the ocean-atmosphere equilibrium as the ocean SLOWLY SLOWLY warms in response to century-scale modulation of e.g. the solar constant, clouds and albedo, and so on.
Yet there they are, stuck without opposable thumbs (Gary Larson cartoon, sorry:-) with all of this rich data and network of interconnected causality in an openly chaotic system, trying to reduce it all to a single controlling knob. It’s as hilarious (in a tragic sort of way) as the notion that the Fed can control the world economy by adjusting the single knob of the prime lending rate, or that we could regulate the speed of a car as we drive around curves and up and down hills only with a single accelerator pedal. One hammer, so everything is a nail. This is the primary error made in all sorts of modelling applications, where one tries to reduce everything in a high-dimensional problem to a single variable logistic curve so you can use logistic regression and make statements your average idiot corporate vice president can understand, if you make more widgets you will make more money, or consumer can understand, if you eat more oatmeal, you’re less likely to have a heart attack.
But honey badger just don’t care. The world is not one dimensional (or linear, or logistic), and there may well come a point where making more widgets makes you less money, where eating more oatmeal makes you fatter and increases your risk of a heart attack, and there may be entire vast seas of corporate practice or population variability where altering widget production or varying the amount of oatmeal consumed has no effect whatsoever. So it is with the climate. If every human on Earth were to disappear overnight, it would probably have some impact on the climate — simple changes in land use brought about by humans, cutting forests and planting crops instead have probably had a measurable impact, and CO_2 and water concentrations and distributions may have had an impact as well — but who can sensibly think that the climate would stop varying, significantly, on a secular scale of decades to centuries? Only an idiot.
Without a complete understanding — a predictive understanding — of the climate over the last several thousand years, we cannot even extract the “warming signal” from the “noise” of natural variability. To do that, we’d have to know what the climate outside “should” be, and we don’t. Until we get over the CO_2 is all that matters one-knob approach, we aren’t going to figure it out, either.
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