From the Weather is not climate unless we say it is department: Over at Climate Progress, paid propagandist Joe Romm wails about “journalistic malpractice” from Michael Mann’s words in a tweet:
The wailing (Jan 31st and again Feb 4th) was because the LA Times didn’t use the words “global warming” or “climate change” in a story about the mild winter in the USA. But Romm and Mann both ignore the much bigger story of a bitterly cold winter in Europe with snow reaching into northern Africa which has caused nearly three hundred deaths. Conversely, there doesn’t seem to be any deaths associated with the mild winter in the USA that Romm and Mann are wailing about. You can decide who’s committing “journalistic malpractice”.
Rutgers Snow Lab has the current NH snow extent:
Romm’s buddy, Dr. Jeff Masters puts the temperature departure in Europe and Alaska in perspective with the continental USA:
And here’s a CNN story from today about the severe winter weather in Europe:
Situation ‘tragic’ as winter weather blankets Europe (Snow Reported as far south as Algeria in Northern Africa)
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 12:23 PM EST, Sun February 5, 2012
London (CNN) — Heavy snow left several Italian villages paralyzed and without power as winter weather and cold temperatures spread across Europe, the mayor of one village said. Many of the 32 villages in the Aniene Valley, near Rome, lost electricity on Friday when an electric pylon fell because of the snow, said Piero Moscardini, mayor of Vallinfreda. The valley, home to about 50,000 people, has received some 100 cm (39 inches) of snow, Moscardini said. “It’s the worst snow since 1956,” he said. “The situation is tragic. We need the Army to save us.”
Ambulances cannot traverse the roads, he said, and some villagers cannot reach their stables to feed livestock. Meanwhile, deaths continued to increase from the cold. In Romania, four people died on Saturday and another six on Sunday, authorities said. A total of 34 people have died since the cold snap began in late January. Nineteen national roads and one highway remained closed on Sunday. More than 30 cities and villages are isolated, authorities said, and power outages were reported in 200 cities and villages. More than 3,000 employees belonging to the Interior Ministry were involved in rescue operations, as hundreds sought refuge in temporary shelters and hundreds more were hospitalized because of hypothermia.
In Poland, TVN Poland said a total of 53 people have died, eight of them in the past 24 hours. The victims are mainly homeless people, according to the report. Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest international airports, canceled about half of its flights Sunday, its owner said Sunday — about 260 more flights than it expected to cancel as of the night before. Between two and four inches of snow fell on London overnight, as the British capital became the latest European city to be hit by winter weather wending its way west. Drivers in both London and Rome will need to worry about ice as temperatures rise slightly, then fall again to below freezing, CNN meteorologist Tom Sater said Sunday.
Full story here
People stand in snow in front of the Colosseum on Saturday, February 4, in Rome.
A boy and his mother skate on the partly frozen Elbe River as the skyline of the eastern German city of Dresden is silhouetted in the background on Thursday, February 2. A cold snap kept Europe in its icy grip, pushing the death toll past 150 as countries from Italy to Ukraine struggled to cope with temperatures that reached record lows in some places.
A man pets a dog next to frozen sea waters in Constanta, Romania, on Wednesday, February 1. Temperatures plunged to -34 degrees Celsius (-29 degrees Fahrenheit) in central Romania, where eight people died due to cold-related causes, according to local media.
Freshly plowed snow frames a road in Bucharest, Romania, on Friday, January 27.
iReporter Cosmin Stan sent in this photo from Bucharest, Romania, on Thursday, January 26. “The problem was not the quantity of the snow, but the strong winds,” he told CNN.
“”Speaking of which, there doesn’t seem much being said about the Titantarctic Mission….””
Slow down, we can’t handle all the Gaiety we already have.
Don’t worry, be happy, we will get to the rest soon enough.
I keep telling you guys. Anything that comes out of TWITter is a TWIT, not a tweet.
Been a nice couple of days in Western Washington. Welcome change from three weeks ago when we had a rare 9″ of snow that hung around for three days when temps were an unseasonably low mid 20s.
May I suggest the admins take another peak at comment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/05/tragic-winter-weather-in-europe-doesnt-fit-the-mannian-narrative/#comment-885285
i don’t often see phrases like “take them out” and “genetic slag”. i think i know what they mean though.
[Reply: OK, I peeked as you suggested. And I did it during the Super Bowl, which is going above and beyond. Because interrupting the SB is far more important than thermogeddon destroying the planet. Didn’t see anything earth-shaking or actionable in those comments, although I don’t know what ‘genetic slag’ means. And maybe someone is proposing that someone ‘take them out’ to lunch.☺ In any case, we moderate lightly here, and the cited examples seem at most to be venial sins. ~dbs, mod.]
[Further Reply: The efforts of moderator dbs and myself crossed. I never over-rule his judgement, but I think I know what was meant, too. That post is snipped. -REP]
sadly they do love the name playing game……. facts don’t matter….. deaths don’t matter….. all that matters is $$$$ in funding to keep jobs going even if they produce false results……. I do detest this sport!
CLIMATE DISRUPTION…… hummmmm I thought that happened every time we had a La Nina or El Nino. But I also thought they were perfectly natural changes which occur on a semi regular basis and had done so for (perhaps) millions of years. Oh wait a minute, now I get it – you cannot tax a natural event, so you have to come up with a way of making it a devastating climate event caused by human activity, then you can tax it! It all makes perfect sense now.
http://justmeint.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/what-is-in-a-name/
Yep, this is climate change… Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall… repeat At Neuseaum.
The LA Times article was written by “Eryn Brown is a science and health writer for the LA Times.”
…..she has a whole pile of other articles that would make Mann and Romm proud
Guess the wheels are off the wagon if one of their main promoters doesn’t stick to the script…….
Saw a headline floating by on Twitter with an estimate that the cold has killed half the Ukrainian winter harvest.
https://twitter.com/#!/newsua/status/166256150638104576
Cold is not a joking matter.
“One person is dying every five minutes due to cold weather this week, as Britain reels from a winter death rate twice as high as some of the world’s coldest countries, according to the Department of Health’s Chief Medical Officer. Many of the dying are elderly. Pensioners groups described the figures as “shocking.””
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/9055933/Snow-to-fall-in-London-as-bitterly-cold-weather-grips-Britain.html
Up here in Canada, our lovely non-nonsensical bureaucrats we have up working for Environment Canada released a report that claimed Canada had a ” fairly warm winter.”
While I’m sure it was nice from their hotel room in Florida, where they most certainly wrote the report, the rest of the country was under snow, and suffering from lower-then-normal temperatures. In fact, here on the West coast, I believe cold-related fatalities are up, although we don’t have the numbers yet. (I’ve already heard of a few reports of fatalities among the homeless.)
Funny how the bureaucrats forgot to mention that.
Robert @ur momisugly 4:30 PM on 2-5 –
Fifty some years ago I remember reading “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates” (Disney also did a movie based on the story). It is one of the many stories, historical fiction and fact, I’ve read through the years detailing life during the little ice age. During that time, life for the middle class (what there were of them) and the poor was extremely hard. One of my biggest criticisms of these so-called “climate scientists” is they appear to have absolutely no idea of what has occurred on this earth during recorded history. And to me, this ignorance makes it impossible for them to correctly interpret anything that occurred in prehistoric times. It also shows how little awareness people like Mann and others have of the hardship cold imposes on the poorer sectors of our population.
Snow in Italy?
Heck, it’s snowing in North Africa, south of the Mediterranean!
Here is a picture from Tunisia, taken this Saturday (yesterday).
http://www.tunisienumerique.com/meteo-tunisie-20-centimetres-de-neige-a-ain-draham/101733
Is this the Gore effect? Did Al go to Tunis recently to lie on the beach?
(A maiden screams: “Help! He’s dying! Push him back in the water!”)
[Moderator’s Note: the efforts of Moderator dbs and myself kinda got crossed. That comment is gone. -REP]
From this document produced by DEFRA (Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs), a UK government department,
that assesses the impacts of climate change in the UK.
A warmer climate will result in between 5,700 and 36,000 fewer winter deaths JUST IN THE UK.
Anyone that’s been paying attention knows that the mild winter in the US AND the cold winter in Europe are both the result of climate change. The only thing that isn’t due to climate change, apparently, is normal weather. But normal weather doesn’t make the news.
I couldn’t help but laugh seeing all the snow in the UK because we all know that it doesn’t snow in the UK anymore (except for the last 3 winters of course!).
Snow in Rome???
Good; for a moment or two I thought that seriously questionable material was going to be allowed to stand un-rebutted.
And you just know how I hate that unbased, mind-fluff, con – spira – cy – based stuff …
.
What is it with these people. We have to see several (like a decade or two) weird winters before we can say anything about what is going on with climate. Blocking highs happen- subpolar jets get diverted north or south of their normal trajectories and warm or cold ensues. That’s weather – if you don’t like it wait, it will change. Same thing in summer, a blocking high moves the subtropical jet north or south and WEATHER gets weird. It would be laughable if it weren’t such a well known COMMON event.
Now as for those global trends with the negative temperature numbers, they may mean everything, something, nothing, or have no relevance to anything whatsoever. I think we need to keep refining our measuring techniques and watch. There are no tipping points (the honest geologic data indicates it has been warmer, colder, higher CO2, lower CO2, almost completely covered in ice, and completely ice free), so if the data later becomes clearer (without manipulation) that something NEEDS to be done we can do it. Until then, the CAGW folks can all take long walks off short docks into deep water (preferably partially frozen) for all I care. They ceased to be scientists the moment they began being politicians demanding global authoritarian governance.
1a. Here in our corner of the northestern inland area of Ohio we haven’t
had a record high or a record low temperature for roughly the past
eight or more months.
1b. Here in our corner of the northestern inland area of Ohio we have
had record amounts of average monthly rainfall for roughly the past
eight or so months.
2a. The BBC has done a really good job of covering the big chill in eastern
Europe, especially the Ukraine this last week. Without editorializing about
global “anything” and sans comments from the usual hockey stick supporters,
they have repeatedly mentioned a number of European records of the past 27
years for cold and snow being buried by the current Arctic cold weather outbreak.
3. In view of the recent world wide weather news and any implications
all these short term reports might have for true scientific climate observations,
Mike Mann and Joe Romm seem sadly and perhaps intentionally myopic.
Mike and Joe seem to be short sighted as well as nearsighted at the same time.
seem terribly myopic.
While one has to be careful not to take localised extremes and claim them as proof for or against Global Warming, the sum of all the events seem to show the Global Warming theory is becoming shaky. Last year, Auckland (New Zealand) experienced snow for first time since 1939. This summer New Zealand had snow falls in the South Island. They are, while not unheard of, not a usual occurrence. The summer in the North Island has been colder and wetter. As we are currently experiencing a La Nina pattern, more rain was expected. However La Nina conditions should also bring warmer than normal temperatures and while I have not seen the figures I think that has not been the case. Sydney, on the other side of the Tasman, experienced the coldest first week of summer since 1960.
J. Felton says:
February 5, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Up here in Canada, our lovely non-nonsensical bureaucrats we have up working for Environment Canada released a report that claimed Canada had a ” fairly warm winter.”
While I’m sure it was nice from their hotel room in Florida, where they most certainly wrote the report, the rest of the country was under snow, and suffering from lower-then-normal temperatures. In fact, here on the West coast, I believe cold-related fatalities are up, although we don’t have the numbers yet. (I’ve already heard of a few reports of fatalities among the homeless.)
Funny how the bureaucrats forgot to mention that.
j. Felton,
I also live in Canada (Southern Ontario). My pond froze on Dec-18th (about 10 days later than normal). There is no snow on the ground (very unusual). It has been a very mild winter.
Plus you live in the Florida of Canada so go back to your roses. It never snows in Vancouver – well unless you call 2″ a snow fall.
Seriously, you can’t walk outside your house and summarize the world’s weather by what you feel. Plus I miss Joe Fortes so I may be grumpy.
If you want info on temperature trends in the NH winter look at the AO index. It has been positive most of the winter, hence the relatively warm winter in the NH up to about two weeks ago. Two weeks ago it turned negative. This allows the upper level winds to dip south in the NH bringing cold to somewhere in the NH. Unfortunately for Europe, it seems to be bringing arctic air to them at the moment.
European cold snap, 2012: 300 deaths
European heat wave, 2003: 35,000 deaths.
Do they write the script as they go along?
In Jan 2010 it the big freeze in Europe was within natural variability as reported in the Independent in Jan 2010:
“The Met Office’s Barry Gromett said December and January’s cold weather was “within the bounds of natural variability” within a global trend of rising temperatures – in which 2009 is set to be the fifth warmest year on record.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/no-conflict-between-big-freeze-and-climate-change-1858530.html
Now it’s the melting ice in the Arctic:
“A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.”
“The current weather pattern fits earlier predictions of computer models for how the atmosphere responds to the loss of sea ice due to global warming,” said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The ice-free areas of the ocean act like a heater as the water is warmer than the Arctic air above it. This favours the formation of a high-pressure system near the Barents Sea, which steers cold air into Europe.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/science-behind-the-big-freeze-is-climate-change-bringing-the-arctic-to-europe-6358928.html
Looks like Professor Stefan Rahmsdorf has all the bases covered now as we can expect more European big freezes. Wonder if his models can tell us when we will get another US big freeze, when the La Nina will end, when the next one will occur, when we can expect the next drought in Australia and what the English Summer will be like?
The Cold PDO gave us back to back La NIna, coupled with the low solar output which funnels the cold Arctic air down to lower regions in the Northern Hemisphere, the result is all before us. Changes to ozone in the upper stratosphere and lower mesosphere influence the planetary wave that breaks up the polar vortex which in turn shapes the AO and jet streams.
The AO has been positive this winter which gives some areas warm conditions, the QBO has been holding back the planetary wave since early last year but has now turned, which should make a negative AO more likely (neg AO at present), which should give us more massive winter conditions over Western Europe and parts of the USA.
There is a good chance for a triple back to back La Nina next season. Watch the Nth Pacific warm pool in the next 6 months.
http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/?q=node/224
Scientist: ‘Gulf Loop Current is broke’ -“Mini Ice Age” on the way Europe – Jul 21, 2010
http://youtu.be/syD80ez0d-M
“The gulf loop current is broke. “They have finally done something they can’t fix”. Take appropriate action (do not panic). This “climate change” will take place in 1-2 years, so there is not much time. God help us all and pray for love and peace to all life.
Hard science, current data shows *loop current broken*and worsening. Report by National Institute
Nuclear Physics etc… Links:
http://www.colinandrews.net/GulfStreamBroken.html
http://www.associazionegeofisica.it/OilSpill.pdf
http://www.cleancaribbean.org/docs/COREXIT_9500_UsCuEg.PDF
http://argo.colorado.edu/~realtime/welcome/ “
J Fischer says:
February 5, 2012 at 7:14 pm
European cold snap, 2012: 300 deaths
European heat wave, 2003: 35,000 deaths.
———————————————————-
It is an interesting read, the Europeans who died in the 2003 heat wave. It says more about how people treat the elderly than anything to do with the weather.