The folly of blaming the Eastern U.S. heat wave on global warming

The only “global” thing in that picture is cooling. Wonder if the MSM will report that? No, I don’t really.

This is a normal summer for the Mid-Atlantic region. I just noted that National AP (Weah DC) was 102 degrees. But also noted that north of DC in Frederick Co MD that the temps are 95–not a record breaker for here.
Usually the high is located off shore and called a Bermuda High which brings very hot, humid and lots of POx. But the high is on-shore. Haven’t heard of any POx warnings in the local weather/nes media.

I keep hearing about how winter in the southern hemisphere has been colder than normal, and the anamolies in that figure give credence to that idea. Same thing for summer in the British isles. Course, I fully expect that all these incidents will be somehow linked…you know, global warming is causing the ‘insane’ heat in the US while also causing summer to be cool and wet in Britain and winter to be chillier in Australia.

Thankfully it is moving away. We are still so short of water that we are looking at crop failure, possibly total crop failure.

Same thing happened in Russia a couple of years ago and it was also blamed on global warming.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has taken advantage of the first real summer (37 C in Waterloo) we have had in years to schedule a rabidly pro-AGW show that includes some lout claiming that ‘ocean acidity is up 33% because of global warming’.
And you thought no one was keeping track!

Robbie said: “If it gets a little bit higher than June, 2012 will be the third or fourth warmest year on record.”
If this happens, and it could, why should we care? We have been coming out of the Little Ice Age for 150+ years. Is it surprising if the general trend is upwards? What is problematic for you and your buddies is that for 15 years we have been basically flat. If CO2 was such a strong catalyst then the past 15 years should have led to inescapable warming…..they have not.
For fun, let’s remember this quote by Gavin Schmidt from 2007. The first enumerated points were questions put to Dr. Schmidt and his response follows. Basically, if this year (“year 5” of his points) doesn’t exceed the warmest year on record in all 4/5 indices, the condition has been met for Gavin to question Anthropogenic Global Warming….how much you wanna bet he finds a way to NOT question it?
“(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding
(2) In general, any year’s global temperature that is “on trend” should be exceeded within 5 years (when size of trend exceeds “weather noise&#8221
(3) Any ten-year period or more with no increasing trend in global average temperature is reason for worry about state of understandings
I am curious as to whether there are other simple variables that can be looked at unambiguously in terms of their behaviour over coming years that might allow for such explicit quantitative tests of understanding?
[Response: 1) yes, 2) probably, I’d need to do some checking, 3) No. There is no iron rule of climate that says that any ten year period must have a positive trend. The expectation of any particular time period depends on the forcings that are going on. If there is a big volcanic event, then the expectation is that there will be a cooling, if GHGs are increasing, then we expect a warming etc. The point of any comparison is to compare the modelled expectation with reality – right now, the modelled expectation is for trends in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 deg/decade and so that’s the target. In any other period it depends on what the forcings are. – gavin]”

Yet, much of the NH mid-latitude land areas are rising at a rate of over one deg F (over 0.6 deg C) per decade. See Figure 3 of the 2012 GRL paper by Judah Cohen. Draft here:
http://web.mit.edu/jlcohen/www/papers/Cohenetal_GRL12.pdf
By 2100, most (over 70%) of the summer days in the Midwest will exceed 90 deg F, unless we reduce AGW.
Extreme hot weather similar to the last week’s excessive heat wave will occur every other summer week in the future!
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/climate-change-illinois.pdf

Yep… summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere… makes sense!

On the site of Joanne Nova for the posting listed as
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/weather-from-before-coal-fired-power-stations-shock-not-perfect/
There is a nice chart:
http://joannenova.com.au//globalwarming/graphs/akasofu/akasofu_graph_little_ice-age.gif
A small green arrow and red dot show our current state of affairs. To the right of that red dot is the future in dashed lines.
I’ve used the link to Jo’s site because the article there is so very interesting. However, the chart is also on WUWT here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/20/dr-syun-akasofu-on-ipccs-forecast-accuracy/
In the current post and comments:
Robbie says:
July 7, 2012 at 10:59 am
Shall we wait and see . . . ~ . . . Shall we?
I think we should. Meanwhile, I trust Robbie will cut CO2 emissions to near zero – you do have to breathe. I, on the other hand, intend to use my car and air conditioner insofar as I agree with Roy Spencer, namely “It’s summer.” I did grow up before air conditioning and remember summer nights when it was too hot to sleep. That had the advantage that one did not find it unpleasant to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night, unlike in winter when the thunder mug was the better choice.

Paul K2–sorry, but the UCS is not a group of scientists, just a politically leftist advocacy group.

It’s just the weather and not the climate. By the way is Britain’s drought (caused by climate change) over yet after 3 months of wet, wet, wet?

Saturday July 7,2012
IT WILL RAIN ‘TIL SEPTEMBER
BRITAIN is facing its “worst ever” summer with cold wet weather ruining family holidays and blighting the Olympics, forecasters warned last night.
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/331299/It-will-rain-til-September

REPLY: The Union of Concerned Scientists? An NGO turned fearmongering moneymaker that requires only a credit card to be a member with no qualifiactions whatsoever? THATS’s your evidence? GUFFAW, ROTFL! Sure, whatever you say. Kenji says otherwise. – Anthony
Anthony, have you bothered to read the Cohen (2012) paper I linked to that was published in the GRL entitled “Asymmetric seasonal temperature trends”? There is much there you might like; but most of the analysis contradicts your conjectures in this post.
Here is the Abstract for your perusal:
Current consensus on global climate change predicts warming trends driven by anthropogenic forcing, with maximum temperature changes projected in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) high latitudes during winter. Yet, global temperature trends show little warming over the most recent decade or so. For longer time periods appropriate to the assessment of trends, however, global temperatures have experienced significant warming for all seasons except winter, when cooling trends exist instead across large stretches of eastern North America and northern Eurasia. Hence, the most recent lapse in global warming is a seasonal phenomenon, prevalent only in boreal winter.
Additionally, we show that the largest regional contributor to global temperature trends over the past two decades is land surface temperature in the NH extratropics. Therefore, proposed mechanisms explaining the fluctuations in global annual temperature trends should address this apparent seasonal asymmetry.
As for the Union of Concerned Scientist maps, there are many projections of what extrapolated AGW warming trends for NH land areas like the US mainland out there. The displays on that site convey the information quickly, accurately, and easy to understand.

“The is weather, not climate. It is caused by a persistent blocking high pressure pattern. In a day or two, that red splotch over the eastern USA will be gone.”
Yes – our CAGW climate scientists forget that “weather is not cimate” unless it’s winter and somewhere there is a new low temperature record.
But remember that these scientist/advocates are merely opportunists, fund-raising off of others’ misery (e.g. the western wild fires).

Robbie says:
July 7, 2012 at 10:59 am
Shall we wait and see what the UAH Global Temperature Update will do for July? Shall we?
As you may have noticed Mr. Kuipers the atmosphere is extremely dry in the areas where it is the temperatures are high so the atmospheric enthalpy is also extremely low. Therefore the actual amount of heat energy required to raise the atmospheric temperatures to their current levels is very low. So it actually proves very little. But then you really knew that anyway.

Robbie,.
How many years is climate according to the IPCC or the WMO??? Don’t bother it’s 30 years.
It’s just the weather and not the climate.

I was recently conversing by phone with a highly educated American friend who lives in Oxford, UK. We of course touched on the weather. He vociferated about the exceptionally cold, wet, unpleasant weather there this summer. When I did the same regarding the exceptionally hot and dry weather here in Colorado, his immediate response was, “And they say Global Warming isn’t happening!”
Is there something in the water over there?

It seems to me that an atmosphere containing greenhouse gases should moderate surface temperature extremes, both peak highs and peak lows, while increasing the daily average. This seems apparent to me because desert areas with their lower humidity levels generally have daily temperature extremes that are both higher and lower than more humid areas at the same latitude. It’s certainly most apparent on the moon.
Is there something wrong with my logic? If not, why do climate alarmists blame most weather extremes on anthropogenic CO2. Or maybe they just choose to be dishonest and remain silent when journalists make incorrect assumptions. This doesn’t make sense to me either unless the vast majority of all journalists chose their profession because they have no aptitude whatsoever for math and science and are unable to distinguish fact from fiction in such matters. I have had one conservative newspaper editor privately agree with me that the latter case is true.

Its peculiar that so many readers here seem to deny that much of the middle part of the US mainland has had some extremely hot weather recently. Most people who live there seem to be asking “What’s UP with this extremely hot weather?” and “When will it end?”
Well, what’s up might be that we have changed the meteorological system. I am happy to see that WUWT has finally recognized that the Arctic ice pack is melting off severely every summer, including this summer (WUWT expects ice extent to fall below 4.5 million sq km this year). This is a nice baby step in the correct direction.
Now lets try a bigger step. NH weather systems are driven by the jet stream. The jet stream is driven by the pressure differential between the arctic and the mid-latitudes. Now what happens when the Arctic isn’t as cool, and the pressure of the mid-troposphere rises?
The pressure differential changes, and the jet stream slows, which means that it is more susceptible to blocking patterns. In short, Arctic amplification warms the arctic, which changes the jet stream and changes weather patterns in the NH.
Here is a nice video by Dr. Jennifer Francis, a meteorologist from Rutgers, explaining how this happens:

So yes, the climate scientists predict climate changes. And now the meteorologists are predicting weather pattern shifts base on observed climatic changes, such as the loss of the Arctic ice pack and reduced snow cover.
My friends and family are sorry to hear, that these kinds of heat waves are here to stay, and with more on the way in the coming years.

In Central Oregon I have not removed the tarp from the AC yet. Most summers it runs only a day or two. If CO2 is the AGW problem and it must be reduced and coal fired electrical plants are the culprit, I see a major reduction in electrical power coming courtesy of the EPA. I grew up in the midwest and remember the windows open sweating in the sheets summer nights. Now when I go back to visit it is AC everywhere. So the question is: are the AGW alarmists willing to cut electrical power to essentials, which certainly should not include AC since we survived without it 50 years ago and most of the world does today? Under those circumstances Paul K2 could decide just how important AC is versus his concern about AGW.

Nick: You should realize that the people posting here are generally amateurs, and I have found most of the posts on this site that cover topics related to science to be incorrect. For example, just last week there was a post by Dr. Outcalt that was complete nonsense. If you take the time to read down through all the comments, you will eventually see that (even though many substantial comments were snipped by the moderator). This has been true for most of the posts that pretend to cover real science. If you take the time, and slog through the nonsense in the comments, in many cases the mistakes in the posts will become apparent.
I highly recommend reading Tamino’s site, since he has the time to identify and correct at least some of the mistakes on the posts here (like the Outcalt post). I won’t put the link to Tamino here, because I am afraid of the moderators.
[Moderator’s Note: It is absolutely fascinating that a search on the name “Paul Klem” (or “Paul K. Lem”) yields nothing of substance, but the very same anonymous coward is able to declare a respected physicist’s work “nonsense” and manages to disparage, almost in the same breath, the many professionals that comment here. “Tamino” (known to his friends as “Grant Foster”) is linked on the right. We know him of old. He’s not as bright as he thinks he is. Your grasp of the science is quite a bit shakier than you think.
Oh, yeah…. disparaging the moderators and moderation policy will get you snipped. You have been given a fair degree of latitude here and my advice is don’t push it. -REP]

Here is a high resolution Temperature anomaly map from the Modis Terra satellite for the week of June 25 to July 2.
The US hotspot is clear enough but there are quite cold areas in northwest North America, northern Europe, central Africa, central China, northeast Siberia, and Australia.
http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/6124/june24tojuly2.png
Larger version.
http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/2936/june25tojuly2large.png
Certainly does not look like a GHG signal; the weather is variable is a better explanation.

Paul K2;
But the climate scientists underestimated the impact of AGW on the polar regions. The Arctic ice pack, and snow coverage, have fallen much faster than the climate scientists expected.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well I have been following the climate debate from several years and that statement is just exactly opposite of the facts. They grossly over estimates ice pack melt in NH, predicting an ice free arctict that is no where in sight. They predicted coastal cities under water by now, which are having trouble actually measuring any local sea level change at all. They predicted melting in the SH too (how convenient of you to leave that out) but the ice in the SH has been increasing (which you also conveniently over look). As for the rest of your tripe, it amounts to cherry picking some data and deriving a linear trend from a cyclic system.
They predicted accelerating global temp increases, instead, the highest concentrations of CO2 ever recorded in our lifetimes correspond to declining temperatures. The predicted increased desertification, we’ve seen a decline instead. They predicted increased severeweather, but on a global basis, total cyclone energy has declined ever since we started measuring it 30 years ago.
What your various comments amount to is sifting through reams and reams and reams of data that says the exact opposite of what the climate scientists and their models predicted to find the odd short term trend that agrees with the general meme and then pretend that it represents some sort of long term trend. For those of us who actually pay attention to the whole picture, the only one you are fooling is yourself.

You know what Im tired of? Im tired of news and weather casters telling us how hot it feels. How the heck do they know how hot I feel. I bet you Im way cooler when Im standing in my sprinklers:) Wish they would just go back to degrees and humidity separately instead of making up some arbitrary number based on feels like and presenting that to us as today’s temps.

davidmhoffer wrote: Well I have been following the climate debate from several years and that statement is just exactly opposite of the facts. They grossly over estimates ice pack melt in NH, predicting an ice free arctict that is no where in sight. They predicted coastal cities under water by now, which are having trouble actually measuring any local sea level change at all.
Try getting some facts from the source, instead of relying on WUWT to process the information before feeding it to you.
I copied and pasted the predictions from the 4th IPCC report:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html
Please note these predicitions contradict your statement:
Snow cover is projected to contract. Widespread increases in thaw depth are projected over most permafrost regions. {10.3, 10.6}
Sea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios. In some projections, arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century. {10.3}
It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent. {10.3}
If radiative forcing were to be stabilised in 2100 at A1B levels[14], thermal expansion alone would lead to 0.3 to 0.8 m of sea level rise by 2300 (relative to 1980–1999). Thermal expansion would continue for many centuries, due to the time required to transport heat into the deep ocean. {10.7}
Contraction of the Greenland Ice Sheet is projected to continue to contribute to sea level rise after 2100. Current models suggest that ice mass losses increase with temperature more rapidly than gains due to precipitation and that the surface mass balance becomes negative at a global average warming (relative to pre-industrial values) in excess of 1.9°C to 4.6°C. If a negative surface mass balance were sustained for millennia, that would lead to virtually complete elimination of the Greenland Ice Sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 m. The corresponding future temperatures in Greenland are comparable to those inferred for the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when palaeoclimatic information suggests reductions of polar land ice extent and 4 to 6 m of sea level rise. {6.4, 10.7}

Paul K2 says (July 7, 2012 at 2:05 pm)
I highly recommend reading Tamino’s site,
———
Reading, sadly, is all once can do. As soon as any opinion which differs in the slightest degree from the Great Man’s views are sent in, they are either suppressed or the commentator is gratuitously insulted with the crowd cheering him on.
Since you have been talking about Arctic ice trends, here’s a perfect example. Note (1) that one should not fear the moderators here about linking to a site with a different outlook, and (2) Tamino’s blast of rudeness to a dissenter.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/sea-ice-3-d/

Paul K2: I got interested in this after the 2009 publication of the NCAR study discussing record high vs. record low temperatures. They identified a trend to more high records, and it was picked up by Andrew Revkin of the NYT.
NOAA collects and reports 4 types of daily temperature records: maximum, minimum, maximum low, and minimum high. Here is a simple tabulation of the total of all 4 types of records, from 1994 to now (2012 is annualized by doubling the first six months):
Year: Temperature records (in thousands):
1994 103.4
1995 128.0
1996 143.0
1997 117.1
1998 136.8
1999 117.8
2000 134.6
2001 100.0
2002 125.6
2003 111.0
2004 96.2
2005 106.7
2006 119.0
2007 90.7
2008 51.1
2009 62.0
2010 69.9
2011 81.7
2012 92.2
Insofar as the number of temperature records is a proxy for weather extremes, it’s pretty clear that there has been a *decrease* over the last six years compared to the previous dozen or so.
mean 1994-2006: 110.2
mean 2007-2012: 74.6
That’s a pretty big change, more than 30%.
Now, let’s see, what declined substantially over the period from 2007 or so to now, reaching a minimum around 2008-2009? Hmmm…. Oh, I know!
http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfjmms.html
Nah, couldn’t be. Climate scientists assure us that variations in solar activity are too small to explain much of anything….

Paul K2 says:
July 7, 2012 at 1:56 pm
But the climate scientists underestimated the impact of AGW on the polar regions.
====================================================
Let me tell you this: every single climate scientist who estimates the impact of AGW on whatever is blatantly wrong. I mean, even if AGW was real. AGW is a purely statistical sort of average calculation product derived from a sample of temperature measurements.
An average can not have impact on parts of the sample, it is exactly the other way round.

Paul K2;
Try getting some facts from the source, instead of relying on WUWT to process the information before feeding it to you.
I copied and pasted the predictions from the 4th IPCC report:
>>>>>>>>>>>
Sir,
I see that you are no run of the mill troll. You are an expert troll. You planted an agregiously false statement in the hopes of getting called on it so that you could respond with reams of quotes that seem to support your position. For the record:
1. I got most of my background in climate initially from reading AR4 myself, long before I discovered WUWT. It was reading the highly cherry picked, grossly misrepresented, marketing spin dressed up as science, cherry picked total cr*p that convinced me that the whole mess was a facade in the first place.
2. The endless quotes, out of context and frequently poorly, inaccurately, or even fictitiously cited that comprise AR4 could be used to show that they predicted that the earth would freeze over tomorrow if you cherry picked enough. The wording of Ar4 is such that it could be taken to mean pretty much ANYTHING after the fact.
3. Your original assertions did not specify AR4, they were much broader than that, suggesting what the leadership of the CAGW meme have being saying, which goes far beyond what AR4 said, and encompasses a considerable amount of science that has been….. ooops I mean magic…. that has been published in the years since AR4. AR5 is on the horizon in part because AR4 has proven to be a complete failure.
If you want to debate AR4, then say so up front. But don’t come here, try and tell me where I should get my facts from when you don’t even know in the first place where I get them from and where I don’t, and don’t make general statements that you then defend by trying to exclude everything before and since AR4 from the discussion.
Sorry for under estimating your troll abilities earlier. Clearly you get a capital T. Troll.
REPLY: Yes Paul K2 who previously commented here as Paul Klemencic is a well known troll. He mostly hangs out at Lucia’s. I generally ignore him as he’s hopeless. – Anthony

Looking back at this thread, I ran across Smokey’s latest post, and I really have to say I’m impressed. I haven’t seen such deliberate distortion of graphical data in quite some time!
Here’s Smokey’s last graph. He says that this demonstrates “The longest temperature record in the world confirms the same trend in other cities, showing that the long term rising trend is within past parameters. If CO2 caused measurable global warming, it would show up in the trend. But it doesn’t. Thus, the CO2=CAGW conjecture is falsified by real world observations.”
Sit down, class, and learn how to distort data.
First and foremost, notice how compressed the Y-axis is. Looking at the data graphed, there are plots scaled by 0.00001 (essentially straight lines) and then offset high and low to compress the data. This is deceptive – those lines are unneeded, and minimize our ability to discern changes in the real data. This is particularly true since at this point in the discussion most people who are talking about climate have seen other graphs without this compression, and will interpret the compressed graph compared to the uncompressed ones.
Here’s the graph without those extraneous scalars or re-centering offsets. That certainly makes things a bit clearer. The next item to note is that this graph has much of the data detrended! Amazing – the graph is intended to show something about the trends, but those trends have been artificially decreased. Here is that same data without the detrending.
Next, the graph shows GISTEMP and HadCRUT3. HadCRUT3 is obsolete, the current data is HadCRUT4, which has notably more stations included. Here’s the graph with HadCRUT4 added.
Finally, the assertion that “the long term rising trend is within past parameters”: Here is HadCRUT3 (the most sympathetic case here) with long term, 30, 60, and 90 year trends. You will note that for each shorter time period (30 years being long enough to establish a linear trend versus noise at more than 4-sigma confidence) the trend is higher – warming is accelerating.
Conclusion? Smokey’s statements are incorrect.
—
Summary: If you see a graph with unneeded compression or expansion, and in particular if you see one where (as in the case of trends here) the important data has been altered to change values, you can conclude one thing with certainty. The presenter of that graph is attempting to mislead. Shame on you, Smokey.

diogenesnj – With respect to temperature records, or in fact any record of a varying parameter over time, it is completely expected that the number of record extreme events will decrease over time – you’ve simply seen more of the system behavior. Early in observations, every new data point might be a record – after you’ve been observing for a while, you will see fewer extremes.
The telling number is the ratio of record highs to record lows. Changes in that ratio reflect changes in the base statistics, changes to the average temperature. In the 1960’s that ratio in the continental US was about 0.78:1 highs to lows (slightly more lows than highs). But in the 2000’s, the ratio in that region was 2:04:1, twice as many highs as lows. And that reflects the increasing average temperature.

Robbie says:
July 7, 2012 at 10:59 am
Shall we wait and see what the UAH Global Temperature Update will do for July?
Regardless what happens in July with UAH, a new record for 2012 is totally out of reach and at the end of this year, 1998 will still be the warmest on UAH (as well as RSS and Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2). Here is the analysis for UAH.
With the UAH anomaly for June at 0.369, the average for the first six months of the year is (-0.089 -0.111 + 0.111 + 0.299 + 0.289 + 0.369)/6 = 0.145. If the average stayed this way for the rest of the year, its ranking would be 10th. This compares with the anomaly in 2011 at 0.153 to rank it 9th for that year. On the other hand, if the rest of the year averaged at least the June value, which is more likely if the El Nino gets stronger, then 2012 would come in at 0.257 and it would rank 3rd. (1998 was the warmest at 0.428. The highest ever monthly anomalies were in February and April of 1998 when it reached 0.66.) In order for a new record to be set in 2012, the average for the last 6 months of the year would need to be 0.71. Since this is above the highest monthly anomaly ever recorded, it is virtually impossible for 2012 to set a new record or to even come in second.

Paul K2 says: July 7, 2012 at 12:47 pm
John F. Hultquist: Most homes in Pennsylvania didn’t have AC thirty years ago. None of my family had AC in their homes. We really didn’t need it much. That is likely why you had trouble sleeping. Now, most of my extended family there has AC.
45 years ago, when my parents built their house in N Central Tx, the central AC they got was a less than normal thing at the time. Most people in TEXAS didn’t have it at that time. Now, show me a house built in the last 20 years, in Texas that *doesn’t* have central AC. Furthermore, most POOR people in the US have AC. We’re a more affluent society (at least according to our debt levels, at both the gov’t level and individual level, but that’s another blog), so we get conveniences that we didn’t in the past. Almost every new car has not only AC, but power windows, automatic transmission, nice stereo, etc. What does that development tell you about AGW? Nothing? Exactamundo.

Paul K2 says:
July 7, 2012 at 1:21 pm
“Its peculiar that so many readers here seem to deny that much of the middle part of the US mainland has had some extremely hot weather recently”
I am a relative newcomer to this site, but have seen it explained many times over that most skeptics do not deny that the climate changes and that it has been warming for a few hundred years. They don’t even deny that CO2 has an effect. The only real argument seems to be over the significance of the anthropogenic CO2 contribution. The alarmists claim, that we will suffer a catastrophe if don’t stop burning fossil fuel, is not supported by any scientific arguments I have seen anywhere, including my copy of the 4th IPCC report. There are always, valid scientific arguments that counter the IPCC claims. For example, I have never seen an explanation of the ice core data from approximately 120,000 years ago showing the temperature dropping from a high point to nearly ice age conditions before the CO2 even began to drop.
Rather than address many of these counter claims, alarmists instead attack, the skeptics credentials or simply make stuff up about them. Paul, where exactly did anyone deny on today’s postings that we are currently having some unusually hot weather. I just drove around in the Virginia suburbs of the Washington D.C. area keeping my eye on my car’s outside air temperature display which indicated from 96 to 103 deg F., depending mainly on whether I was in a wooded area or a treeless area. This car is ten years old and during that time I have seen temperatures of 103 on at least 3 other occasions so to me the temperature is much higher than a normal summertime high but not all that unusual for a extreme summer heat wave.
Just because most skeptics are not climate scientists is not a valid reason to ignore the science behind their claims. The laws of physics are the same no matter where you learn them and it is physics that control weather and climate. The problem to overcome is, all the laws of physics are in effect all the time, not just those that are chosen to be used in weather and climate models. It is obvious that present models are severely lacking something. But then, in fairness, it may be the most complex thing that has ever been attempted to model and many factors must simply be guessed at.
I do appreciate your posting of Jennifer Francis’s interesting dissertation on a possible cause of hot weather in the area. But that is weather change not climate change, unless, of course, the arctic sea ice never returns in the next few hundred years. The joke about weather here in the Washington DC area, which is difficult to forecast, has always been – if you don’t like the weather now, just wait a day or two. I always used to enjoy Joe Bastardi’s morning forecasts on WMAL. I miss the humor Joe.

After the awful floods in Queensland last year there were claims that they were caused by global warming/climate change. These were made by the head of the IPCC no less. Prior to the floods Prof T Flannery was on record as saying Queensland may never have drought breaking rains again. They were both wrong.
The Queensland weather bureau put the event down to the PDO and La ninja the head of IPCC later retracted his statment. The release of water from the Wivenhoe dam also contributed.
It seems any event now is being attributed to Global Warming, too hot, too cold, too dry too wet So any event you get in the US, drought, fire, floods severe winter will all be caused by Global Warming to the exclusion of anything else. Prof Christy called it the “ultimate non falisifiable hypothesis” which he further stated is not science.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Christy.Testimony.pdf

Regarding my last post, I must apologize – I didn’t catch that Smokey had plotted HadCRUT3 linear trends twice, and hadn’t plotted GISTEMP linear trends at all. But that’s easy to change in the dropdowns for data selection at WoodForTrees.org – I would encourage folks to explore the data themselves.
For comparison to the obsolete HadCRUT3, here is HadCRUT4 with full length, 30, 60, and 90 year trends, and here is GISTEMP with full length, 30, 60, and 90 year trends. Note the steepening trends, note the clear acceleration in warming.
And again, if you see a distorted or overly compressed graph, such as temperature change in zero-based degrees Kelvin, you know that someone is trying to deceive you.

Lester Via says:
July 7, 2012 at 3:53 pm
I am a relative newcomer to this site, but have seen it explained many times over that most skeptics do not deny that the climate changes and that it has been warming for a few hundred years. They don’t even deny that CO2 has an effect.
====================================================
Yeah, that is what some warmists do: creating an impression that nobody challenge their warmism. The reality is quite different, however, but many are probably unwilling to speak up. I allow me to refer to a comment of mine on the issue of consensus: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/consensus-argument-proves-climate-science-is-political/#comment-972119 .

To “Paul K2” I have one question for you: If the science behind global warming is sound, then why do the scientists who promote it, such as Michael Mann and James Hansen, repeatedly violate the scientific method and federal law by doing everything in their power to avoid showing the raw data and methodology of their studies? Please tell me how something can be considered scientific if it brazenly violates the scientific method of transparency, openness, and willingness to admit the study may be wrong.

I recall seeing 44 Celsius (111 Fahrenheit) In the shade growing up (way too hot for ball hockey)
Indeed heat waves and media hype are always a good bet.
Humidity is a big factor, though, and ours was %25 at the time.

Lacking a better place to put this … We don’t even know why Hot water freezes faster than cold water. Wikipedia on Mpembe effect (possible) causes.

Paul K2 says: July 7, 2012 at 1:56 pm
What you are really seeing is a combination of NATURAL factors that are the result of things like a weak solar cycle, multidecadal oscillations shifting from one phase to another, etc. The only man-made effects that can be found in any of the observations are the UHI effects on the overall temperature record (coupled with removing rural sensors) and the results of tinkering with the data by those who are supposed to be maintaining the integrity of said data. Instead of learning what has happened and what is happening, these supposed scientists have buried their collective head in the sand and will not consider anything other than a CO2 driven catastrophy that just will not cooperate with their predictions. There is SO much we could have learned over the past 30 years or so with the amount of money spent trying to prove the phantom menace really exists and labelling every extreme weather event (droughts, floods, excessive heat, monster snowstorms) as proof.
These types of WEATHER and natural WEATHER pattern shifts are known and are very well documented throughout history in various parts of the world. It’s not climate change. That IS climate. That’s what happens when the various oscillations fluctuate between positive and negative phases. They don’t all happen at the same time, so each one may only change an aspect or two of a particular regions overall weather patterns. Get enough of them to shift at the same time and it can really wreak havoc on WEATHER patterns, but they do not necessarily cause climate change. Again, a climate can be and almost always covers a wide range of weather and persistent weather patterns. That’s the way it has been since we came out of the last glacial period (except the Younger Dryas event) and will be for at least for the remainder of this current interglacial. There is no place on earth where the climate is supposed to be identical every year. That’s the biggest mistake of many who believe in AGW and why so many seemingly intelligent people get suckered in.
Are humans making an impact on the earth? Yes. We always have and always will – some good some bad. Is pollution a bad thing? Yes, emphatically! Is the world gaining heat at unprecedented levels that can only be attributed to CO2 emmissions? No! Are there natural events that seem to correlate much better with the current state of weather and climate? Without a doubt, yes.
Do yourself a favor, take a look at the temperature reconstructions of the last million years and see where we are today compared to where we have been. Now, where were all those SUVs and coal fired electric plants 100s of thousands of years ago??? Oh…
But then again, I’m just an amateur with a love for actual science, so what do I know…

Paul K2 on July 7th at 1:56 PM:
“But the climate scientists underestimated the impact of AGW on the polar regions. The Arctic ice pack, and snow coverage, have fallen much faster than the climate scientists expected.”
This is absolutely true because they have no idea of what they are doing. Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming but they persist in using climate models that use the enhanced greenhouse effect to predict warming. Small wonder they underestimate the warming by a factor of four. The true cause of Arctic warming is warm water from the Gulf Stream carried north by Atlantic Ocean currents. It started suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century, paused for thirty years in mid-century, then resumed, and is still going strong. To understand it you have to download this paper: http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/arno-arrak.pdf . Unfortunately this means that you cannot point to any aspect of Arctic warming as part of global warming. And since this is the case it leaves you without any authentic example of greenhouse warming whatsoever within the last 100 years.

Blaming one location is just idiotic. Every place has contributed to it. Sure the eastern side may have a bit more, but I don’t think it’s fair to assign blame to any one place. Also, look at Greenland and parts of Asia. Sure they aren’t AS hot, but it is still somewhat the same temperature. Idiots

Paul K2;
How about last summer in Texas? Didn’t you have a 1 in a 1000 year event caused by several abnormally long blocking highs? My relatives in San Antonio told me that Texas never had so many 100 degree days in a summer before. >>>>
Well obviously anecdotal evidence presented from a single city in Texas is representative of what is happening on a global scale. This is the mistake that you have made in pretty much all your comments. You focus on examples of extreme weather and present them as proof of predictions made in regard to climate while ignoring the larger picture which is chalk full of contrary examples which are just as valid on a cases by case basis as the examples you present (which is to say not at all). Hold the big picture in perspective or you’ve got nothing of substance upon which to predicate your argument.
Take KR’s clever attempt to show us Hadcrut and GISS temperature trends with linear trend lines jammed through what is clearly cyclical data, making linear trends useless accept on time scales orders of magnitude larger than we have data for. Notice also that the globe has in fact been warming up at very roughly the same rate since the LIA several centuries ago, and that CO2 increases that became significant after 1920 don’t seem to have altered that rate of warming at all.
Even the IPCC admits that CO2 is logarithmic, a fact that they tend to then gloss over when writing their reports, but read AR4 closely enough and you’ll see that every single prediction and outcome is predicated upon CO2 being logarithmic. That being the case, even by the IPCC’s own standards, anything over 400 ppm (which is pretty much where we are now) is subject to the law of diminishing returns, and hence is pretty much negligible.
In 1920, accodring to the IPCC, it would have taken 280 additional ppm of CO2 to arrive at a direct temperature increase of +1 degree. The debate about feedbacks aside, this is a rather clever piece of subterfuge all on itz own. This is not 1920 and we’re not at a baseline of 280 ppm anymore. It will take 400 ppm to drive a direct temperature increase of just one degree from where we are today. At peak consumption rates, that will take us the next 200 years to arrive at and probably longer because of the increased uptake by the biosphere (which mostly turns that uptake into food btw).
We have FAR more to fear from climate change due to natural variability than we do from CO2 increases, FAR more. That’s what the science espoused by the IPCC actually says once you get past all the distracting marketing spin and alarmist language. That’s what our written history books tell us. That’s what the geological record tells us. Spout cherry picked quotes and graphs from AR4 all you want, the science, the written history, and the geological record all say otherwise.
But if you want to insist that something catastrophic is happening, then consider this.
Human beings could survive rather easily another ice age provided that we exploit to the fullest possible extent the energy resources we have available.
Human beings could survive rather easily global temperatures exceeding the highest the earth has ever experienced and at CO2 concentrations that make our current levels look like a rounding error to zero provided that we exploit to the fullest possible extent the energy resources we have available.
Drill baby, drill.

I blame the EPA. Growing up, the summertime would always be super hazy. You could almost count on the forecast being hazy, hot, and humid. The visibility would routinely drop to five or six miles. I’ve noticed since about 2009, it no longer gets hazy. The sky remains blue and visibility remains at 10 miles at the airport. Ever since that time there has been a trend towards hotter weather even though it doesn’t look like there’s been any fundamental change in weather patterns. In the 90s and early 2000s, it usually never got above the low 90s. Even the “hot” summers only peaked at 91-93, though there might be 10 or 15 days with temperatures between 90 and 92. Several years never even hit 90. Temperatures have now reached the upper 90s for two straight years, with locations nearby reaching 100. Temperatures this high had not occurred since the drought of 1988. So I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or if it has something to do with a new EPA policy, but at the same time summers starting becoming hot again, the skies have cleared up. Weird.

A global phenomenon? Yeah, well. Down here on the southern Victorian coast in Australia we’ve just had our second white frost in two days. Unusual enough for all the locals to chat about it on morning walks.

Apparently PaulK2 doesn’t know the difference between projection and measurement?
It looks like climatology will end up contributing more material to the science of anthropology than it will to the study of climate.

I notice these global warming alarmists were no where to be found when Florida citrus crops were covered in ice.

It does pose an interesting conundrum.
Either use your electricity and air conditioning, thus causing CO2 emissions, or bake in the heat on the assumption that less CO2 emissions means that you will only bake a little bit more in the future.
Or you can have no electricity as the warmers want and has happened to many because of the storms and you can bake without any choice.
Take your pick. Forego electricity and air conditioning for the cause or blame global warming because you have no electricity to keep cool. It’s very hard to explain this conundrum. How many warmers have air conditioning? How many that have no electricity desperately want it now.

So many comments so far off the mark; too many to respond to. Arno Arrak says that the Arctic ice pack is melting not due to polar amplification, but a long term shift in ocean currents. In my comments I said polar amplification, but that the faster melt than expected seems due to teleconnection (transport of heat by wind and ocean currents) and faster melt mechanisms due to the weakened pack (fractured ice floes exposed to wind and waves have higher heat transfer rates than a solid pack). We may disagree on the triggering cause, but possibly may agree on the factors causing the runaway melt.
Amino Acids in Meteorites: Please view the Jennifer Francis video more carefully. The increased amplitude of Rossby waves in the jet stream pulls cold Arctic air down into the Northern side of the jet stream bend, and pulls tropical air up into the Southern side of the bends. Florida citrus crops covered in ice are yet another sign.
Many of the rest of you have been taught to attack climate scientists. But these theories I am discussing and have linked to today are espoused by meteorologists (weather scientists). You guys need to learn some new scrips and taunts. It seems that the group of scientists involved in your proposed conspiracy just got a whole lot bigger. Check out some famous meteorologists like the Wunderblog where Dr. Masters talks about the work of Dr. Francis. Its a bit odd that this stuff is so new and novel to you, especially since WUWT is run by someone supposedly knowledgeable in weather patterns.

Mr. B.
In other words, I try to keep an open mind and accept the facts as they are, not the way I would like them to be.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
And yet you present not a single fact in support of your position, you only cite WHO you believe. Odd that you claim the support of factual evidence, yet cite none.

Mr. B. says:
July 7, 2012 at 6:48 pm
Yeah I know , it’s all a hoax created by the liberal media and the leftist scientific community. That’s the other attempt some people use to justify non belief in global warming. Yet these same people still believe Iraq had WMD’s and Saddam Husien was involved in 9/11. The biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public and the world at large.
====================================================
So, according to you the last Iraq war was a hoax perpetrated by the American president, the majority of the Congress and 35 other countries who sent their troops to Iraq. But at the same time the IPCC and the leaderships of some Academies of Science can not create a hoax nor can the left wing dominated media. Very logical.
Speaking of the American National Academy of Science, did all the 2,200 members and 400 foreign associates vote to approve the AGW concept or was it just the leadership (http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/leadership/nas-council.html) ? I mean, the most members have nothing to do with the “climate science”. Even the most members of the “Leadership and Governance” have nothing to do with climate professionally. Doesn’t it smell like hoax now?

KR says:
July 7, 2012 at 11:26 am
…. the statistics of weather shift, that’s climate change. And what we’re seeing are the weather statistics moving (see http://tinyurl.com/cgnaj79 for a discussion and data) to hotter and higher energy events…..
So no, this particular heat wave cannot be directly attributed to climate change. But we’re certainly going to see a lot more more of them, with fewer cold events, as climate averages change and the weather dice get loaded more and more heavily to the hot side…..
___________________________
OR
Stephen Wilde could be correct, esp. given the weak solar cycle 24

….the jet stream is weaker when there’s less ozone (it has to do with latitude-dependent temperature gradients across the upper atmosphere; those gradients are strong in winter and weak in summer). Ozone creation depends on UV from the Sun, which is weaker during a solar minimum. See where this is going? Weaker magnetic activity on the Sun means less ozone which means a weaker jet stream which means it meanders more……

That sure sounds like what I have observed the Jet Stream doing for the last few years and as a farmer I watch it carefully.
OR
E.M. Smith could be correct. Just before entering into a bond event, the ending of warmth turns into a lot of unsettled weather, high winds and flooding.

….There is a known 1470 year cycle of Bond Events and DO events. One is a periodic spike up, the other the periodic spike down that seems to be the counter point. DO events are during glacials, Bond Events during interglacials…

…According to Lamb, the 13th century experienced the highest number (by some margin) of “severe sea floods” along North Sea & English Channel coasts. Although the climate across NW Europe was still generally benign (indeed, the peak of warmth of the Medieval Age may have occurred in this century), from the middle of the 13th century, an increase in ‘unsettled’ weather events has been detected by some researchers; the first signs of the descent into the ‘Little Ice Age’. It is indeed possible that the increased storminess was concentrated in the second half of the 13th century, so it was unfortunate that Eleanor attempted the passage of the Dover Strait at this time. (Lamb)

Ending of warmth turning into a lot of unsettled and flooding. Wait a minute, that sounds rather like this last decade or so…
My reading on this is pretty simple. I think we had The Last Big One at the entry to The Dark Ages and it pretty much screwed things up for a few hundred years. That would make The Little Ice Age a 1/2 Bond Event (thus answering the question of “was it a Bond Event?” with a pretty good “No”.)
…It misses our slow decline from the Holocene Optimum into ever lower optimums. So much so that the Modern Optimum hardly shows on the Ice Core at all (and Greenland is colder than it was when the Vikings landed there (on that peak about 1000 BP). We had a lower Little Ice Age compared to the prior 1/2 Bond event of about the time of Christ, even though it was only a 1/2 Bond Event, due to the lateness of the hour in this interglacial. That would imply that THIS Bond Event, that I’ve taken to calling Bond Event Zero (c) will likely be worse than the last one we had. The Dark Ages. It ought to be worse than the Little Ice Age too. It ought to have made the first stirrings of the turn about 2005, and be well underway about 2035. That this is in agreement with the projected depths of the present Solar Grand Minimum does not give me cheer…

OR Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the same ~ 1500 year cycle (Bond event) that E.M. Smith discusses in depth in the above article.

….Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily apparent in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One sees clear indications of long-term changes discussed above, with CO2 and proxy temperature changes associated with the last ice age and its transition into our present interglacial period of warmth. But in addition there is a strong chaotic variation of properties with a quasi-period of around 1500 years. We say chaotic because these millennial shifts look like anything but regular oscillations. Rather they look like rapid, decadal long transitions between a cold and warm climates with long interludes in one of the two states. The best known example of these events is the Younger Dryas cooling of about 12,000 years ago, named for the arctic wildflower remains identified in northern European sediments. This event began and ended within a decade….
…It is that global climate is moving in a direction that makes abrupt climate change more probable, that these dynamics lie beyond the capability of many of the models used in IPCC reports, and the consequences of ignoring this may be large. For those of us living around the edge of the N. Atlantic
Ocean, and that includes Chicago where we are meeting today, we may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.

If humankind is darn lucky, CO2 is the “Magic Control Knob” and we are not headed into a cold spell however I think that is highly unlikely if you look at this graph of CO2 vs temperature for the last five interglacials.
I may have just worked outside in 104F for several days (grumbling all the while) but I prefer that to ice and famine in a heart beat!

Mr. B. says:
July 7, 2012 at 6:48 pm
No doubt this post will fire up all the Rushbots out there and the personal attacks on me will be fast and furious. Good, then my point is made.
I doubt if anyone here will attack you personally. If they even bother to make the effort , they will instead, simply point out your misstatements and faulty logic.

Personally, I find it ridiculous that people think the thunderstorms were something remarkable. Maybe for the way they marched across the region, but derechos, from my understanding of them, are capable of this any year. We had a wind storm left over from Hurricane Ike here in OH a few years ago. It was worse. It ripped a neighbors tree in half. We had to help him tear it down in the middle of the storm. Got the rope tossed over our anchor limb and the tree chose that moment to snap. I ran my ass off and wound up standing in leaves when it hit the ground. For those that doubt the power of tenths of seconds in the Olympics, I swear I was that far from road paste.
Anecdotal crap aside, I think the map says it all.

KR,
You missed one more linear trend line for 10 years…here it is 😉
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/offset:14/plot/gistemp/compress:12/offset:13.885/detrend:-0.02/plot/hadcrut3vgl/trend/offset:-0.42/detrend:-0.23/offset:14/plot/hadcrut3vgl/trend/offset:14.1/detrend:-0.23/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:17/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/trend/offset:14

Hey KR. I notice you like 30 year periods in your graphs. I like’um to.
Here’s a good one
It’s even better before the latest set of HADCRUT adjustments

Firey @ 4.05 pm
After the awful floods in Queensland last year there were claims that they were caused by global warming/climate change.
It seems that there has been another fabrication of [infrastructure] data.
Queensland railway managers ‘falsified’ rail bridge safety inspections on the Central West line.
The matter has been referred to the CMC (Crime and Misconduct Commission).
source: Courier Mail news [Queensland], Australia. 7/7/2012

KR says:
July 7, 2012 at 7:24 pm
It’s warming faster than the first part of the century, faster over time, and that is by definition acceleration.
I was given the impression that anything other than CO2, such as the sun, was basically negligible. So whether the warming now as compared to 70 years ago is for different reasons may be a matter of debate, but compare the following:
Essentially identical 30 year slopes many years apart.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1912.33/to:1942.33/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1982.25/to:2013/trend
#Selected data from 1912.33
#Selected data up to 1942.33
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0156268 per year
#Selected data from 1982.25
#Selected data up to 2013
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0153446 per year

Just curious- what does the map header mean when it says “Global Anomaly 0.001 C”
Is that a sum of the over and under presented on the map and displayed in different colors?

KR said (July 7, 2012 at 11:26 am
“…So no, this particular heat wave cannot be directly attributed to climate change. But we’re certainly going to see a lot more more of them, with fewer cold events, as climate averages change and the weather dice get loaded more and more heavily to the hot side…”
As I’ve said before, those who forget extreme weather events in the past are doomed to state all current weather extremes are unprecidented.
If heat waves are going to get longer over time, then why is it, more than 89 years later, there is still one extreme heat wave that remains unbroken – the one in Marble Bar, Australia.
The town set a world record of most consecutive days of maximum temperatures of 37.8 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) or more, during a period of 160 such days from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924.
If their “climate” is getting worse, if their averages are rising at tenths of a degree per decade, why hasn’t this record been exceeded or beaten? Weather or climate?

From the looks of the map to save themselves East coast iberals and Leftists lshould move to India, please.

I have to agree with Paul K2 that something weird is happening with the weather. It appears to be melting people’s brains for the first time in history.

Missed the link in my last comment to the site showing weather forecasts for the N. Hemi.
Select N. Hemi option and 500 hPa and see forecasts for 48h 72h etc.
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/fsecmeur.html

Paul K2;
Historical record: Thriving Viking colonies with productive agriculture in Greenland hundreds of years ago. Explain.
Archeological Record: Receding glaciers in Canada’s north have recently exposed hunting camps that are hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old. Explain.
Geological Record; CO2 has been, millions of years ago, many, many, many times higher concentration in the atmosphere than it is now, but temps were lower. Explain.

“It is caused by a persistent blocking high pressure pattern”
Here we go again.
Wasn’t that the same weather pattern that brought that Heatwave to Russia back in 2010. The Warmist Alarmists were going gaga over and blaming that on AGW/CC hysteria aswell?
We’re getting all the hype here in NZ on the US Heatwave. Going on about 35C Temps in Washington DC. I thought the record for Washington DC was 41C set back in the 1930s/40s?

NoteL should be accept and adapt, of course I’ll get hammered on that

TV Report from drought stricken Texas (tree die-off from last year’s drought):
Business is booming in Texas, and not just the oil and gas business. Tree trimmers are raking in the bucks after last year’s drought killed an estimated 500 million trees.
“I’ve been so swamped, we’ve had to call in reinforcements” from other states, arborist Glen Jennings told NBCDFW.com.
The Texas Forest Service, which estimates 5.6 million trees died in urban areas, urged homeowners to be pro-active about removing dead trees — before they land on neighboring property.
“Be aware that your tree could fall onto someone else’s property,” service official Jim Rooni said in a statement Thursday. “he rules vary from place to place, but generally the owner of the tree is responsible. Bottom line: You could be liable.”
Jennings was stunned by the amount of dead trees across the state.
“I, personally, have never been in the middle of something like this before,” he said. “Small droughts, yeah, but statewide?”
Maybe we need to add arborists to the list of co-conspirators identified by anti-AGW special interest groups, along with climate scientists, meteorologists, agronomists, etcetera…
At what point does the conspiracy theory against scientists become ludicrous?
P.S. And Joe Bastardi just leveled a tirade against mainstream news media… they must be in this massive conspiracy as well?

Joseph Adam-Smith says:
July 7, 2012 at 11:32 am
I really do wish we could have Global Warming in the UK. The weather is cold and, to put it mildly, wet!
Rainfall in England in June was 277% of “normal” for the month, defined as the 1971-2000 average.

For Reference: Here is documentary style video presenting a theory that seems to explain both long-term and short-term climate change as a result of extra-terrestrial influences, both solar and galactic. It is important to note that clouds serve as indicators of ongoing condensing convective activity–a primary form of heat transfer from the surface of the planet.
Svensmark: The Cloud Mystery
“Uploaded by rwesser1 on Jul 24, 2011”
108 likes, 9 dislikes; 8,812 Views; 62:46 min
Henrik Svensmark’s documentary on climate change and cosmic rays.

Marian
“It is caused by a persistent blocking high pressure pattern”
Here we go again….
Yep, pay attention to descriptions of weather events that include that word ‘blocking’. It is the description that tags what looks like a possible Global Warming phenomenon. And one that till recently hadn’t been appreciated that well. Possibly a disconnect between the Meteorologists and the Climatologists.
A big factor in weather patterns are the Polar Jet Streams. Relatively high speed and high altitude eastward travelling air flows, they act as barriers, dividing climate zones because weather systems can’t easily cross them. So in the northern hemisphere, this tends to divide the colder polar weather patterns from the warmer mid latitude weather. But the jet streams don’t just travel across at one latitude. They meander north & south. When it meanders south, colder air from the arctic can penetrate southwards – colder weather. When it meanders north, warmer air from lower latitudes can penetrate north – warmer weather.
And if the meandering of the jet-stream happens to freeze in place for a period, which it does from time to time, then whatever type of weather is happening nearby tends to intensify – warm gets warmer or cold gets colder. This is what happened in western Russia in 2010. Warmer air from the Mediterranean was able to keep moving northwards because the Jet Stream had ‘locked up’ for a time. Our weather, no matter where in the world you live, is best when it cycles frequently between cooling and warming influences. Too much of any factor is bad.
So what is happening to the Jet-Stream? Preliminary research (this is still an emerging field of study) is suggesting that the North Polar Jet Stream is slowing. It is meandering further north & south. And it is becoming more prone to ‘locking up’ for periods. All of which isn’t good news; that will definitely lead to more extreme weather events in the regions influenced by it. More snowstorms and rain if you are north of it, more heatwaves, drought and fires if you are south of it.
The recent intense thunderstorm activity in a band across from Chicago to Washington DC, a phenomenon called a Derecho, may have occured because of this. A large warm air mass moves north from the regions like Colorado where the fires are happening. This comes up against the Jet Stream which forms a barrier to it’s further northward movement. All that energy then starts to spill out sideways, following the normal pattern of air movement eastwards. And thunderstorms start plowing eastwards towards Washington DC.
So, what is Climate Change doing to this pattern? The strength of the Jet Stream is driven by how large the temperature difference is between the equatorial latitudes and the poles. This temperature gradient drives an energy flow towards the poles. And one of the major places this energy ends up is in the JetStream.
So as Global Warming progreses, the northen polar region is warming faster than the tropics. So the temperature difference between these two regions is dropping. With the result that the strength of the Jet Stream is dropping. More meandering. More frequent ‘lock-ups’. And so more frequent occurances of extreme weather events.
AGW predicts more extreme weather. And this looks like a significant mechanism that drives that. The temperature difference between the Arctic and the Tropics declines. The Jet Stream slows and meanders more. And the weather systems bounded by the Jet Stream become more intense.
So how can the US be suffering heatwaves while the UK is seeing a very wet summer? They are on opposite sides of a slower, lazier Jet Stream
Why aren’t we seeing this down here in the southern hemisphere? The Southern Polar Jet Stream typically runs further south of us here in Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa. The Southern Hemisphere has far more ocean than land that tends to moderate weather extremes. The Antarctic isn’t yet seeing the major temperature changes that the Arctic is. So the basic driver of this isn’t there. And if it was happening, it would be happening down in the Southern Ocean where we don’t pay much attention

The US should be sued in World Court by the ROTW (Rest Of The World). Eastern and Central US has stolen all the rest of the world’s summer heat. It is even willing to put up with massive storms trying to keep cold air from getting in, in order to selfishly deprive everyone else! Those responsible should be put on ice, and left there until they’re terminally frostbitten.
It’s only fair.

@Glenn Tamblyn
Are you saying that this is a new phenomena, never happened before? Persistence of the Greenland below jet stream pattern is surely a key feature of interglacials as the Greenland above is of glacials. Historical evidence would suggest this is merely a natural response to natural process.

Trouble with this posting is that NOBODY will see it only the few hundred here. if a major newspaper had this article front page it would mean something. Anyway ther is NO global warming check AMSU data. Actually July looks like itrs gonna be quite coolish globally haha

KR says:
“So no, this particular heat wave cannot be directly attributed to climate change. But we’re certainly going to see a lot more more of them, with fewer cold events, as climate averages change and the weather dice get loaded more and more heavily to the hot side…..”
———————————————————————————————————–
Thats what they said after Katrina. That there would be a lot more of them and they would become the new normal.

Glenn Tamblyn’s comment marked July 8th at 3:00 AM is an excellent summary of the current theory covering changes in extreme weather patterns driven by polar amplification. Anyone interested in learning about the recent changes in extreme weather should read it.
I might only add that observational evidence shows that the Arctic sea level pressure (SLP) has been rising over the historical average. This higher pressure decreases the driving force for the jet stream. Please see Figure S4 in the Cohen paper that shows the observed Arctic winter SLP trends (and shows the models didn’t predict the rising trend!).
http://web.mit.edu/jlcohen/www/papers/Cohenetal_GRL12.pdf
Also KR’s comments appear lucid and accurate.
I suggest readers might re-read this thread, concentrating on these commenters, and then an accurate understanding of two important points will emerge:
1. Extreme weather events will become more common due to overall rising temperatures, in the case of the mid-latitudes in the NH, the temperatures are rising over 1 deg F every ten years in many places inhabited by people (such as the Midwest states bordering the Great Lakes. This temperature rise “loads the dice” and increases the chances of extreme heat events, and increases the chances of severe precipitation events due to higher atmospheric moisture.
2. Meteorologists are now collecting data that show the decline of the Arctic ice pack has increased the seasonal SLPs in the Arctic, and has changed the amplitude and movement of the Rossby waves in the jet stream, creating more stable and persistent weather patterns. Blocking patterns in the jet stream results in extreme weather events.

@ Jesse Fell
Ah, the specifics of the case. Natural cycles have no reality in the anthropocene as all is different. Reminds me of an UK Chancellor of the Exchequer who decreed the end of boom and bust.
Science is best guess, informed by empirical evidence. That the linear models do not fit the real world, with no sign of the predicted signatures of unnatural climate change, suggests that the models have been falsified and that more attention should be given to cycles and empirical evidence.

American journalists should feel ashamed at this East Coast, Washington centric news bias, it comes over as both elitist and rascist (as they seem to be saying other people who suffer similar weather are not as news worthy) as should those psuedo-scientists who feed them the alarmist nonsense.

Joseph Bastardi – If you don’t like or prefer the F&R 2011 methods, I might suggest looking at the much simpler analysis of John Nielsen-Gammon,
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2012/04/about-the-lack-of-warming/
where he simply plots temperature broken into the categories of El Nino, La Nina, and neutral periods. He also in part accounts for volcanic aerosols by excluding years immediately after major eruptions. What he finds is that all three categories show warming at ~0.16 C/decade. And no evidence of a decrease in that rate.