Heaviest Snowfall in a Century Hits Moscow – WWF has logic fail

The heaviest snowfall in a century brought Moscow and the surrounding region to a near standstill and left hundreds of people without power, officials said Tuesday.

And with snowfall set to continue at least until the end of the week, the authorities are bracing for more chaos on the roads.

“There hasn’t been such a winter in 100 years,” Pyotr Biryukov, deputy mayor for residential issues, said Tuesday in comments carried by Interfax. “The snow this year has already reached one and a half times the climatic norm,” he said.

The capital has seen 216 centimeters of snow fall since the beginning of winter, Biryukov said. 

Average snowfall in Moscow is 152 centimeters a year. Biryukov said the city saw 26 centimeters in the 24 hours preceding his Tuesday afternoon news conference and has seen 36 centimeters since the beginning of February.

The heavy snowfall that struck the city Monday quickly led to chaos on the roads. The Yandex Probki traffic monitoring service reached a full 10 points, and on Monday evening it issued the seldom-seen warning that “it’s quicker to walk.”

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/heaviest-snowfall-in-a-century-hits-moscow/475102.html#ixzz2K4m8i13z

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In a similar story here…

The WWF in Russia blames the exceptional winter weather on global warming: 

Whether or not Blinkin is right about the tires, City Hall would be well-advised to give the massive snowfall some serious thought. Scientists say such extreme weather is only likely to increase.

“The weather we’ve seen in the past couple of days completely fits with the tendency that was identified a couple of years ago, that we are going to to see much stronger, intensive bursts of precipitation in the future,” said Alexei Kokorin, director of the climate and energy program at WWF Russia. “In the summer, we will probably see stronger bursts of rain.”

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Gaia is angry, send more money to Pachauri@wwf.ru

Seriously though, the logic fail here by the WWF spokesman is typical for clueless zealots. If global warming caused this snowfall event, what caused the heavy snow 100 years ago when CO2 levels were below Hansen’s “safe” 350ppm?

Inquiring minds want to know.

UPDATE: The popular warmist theory is that reduced summer sea ice causes the enhanced snow effect, and that sea ice reduction is caused by global warming, but it isn’t cut and dried proof. Then there is the months-long lag problem between reduced sea ice and weather.

From a previous WUWT essay by Willis Eschenbach, I repost this graph. Find the correlation between Arctic sea ice and Snow area.

Figure 2. Arctic sea ice area (blue) and Northern Hemisphere snow area (red).  Upper panel shows actual data. Lower panel shows the anomalies of the same data, with the same units (note different scales). The R^2 of the snow and ice anomalies is 0.01, meaninglessly small. The R^2 of the first differences of the anomalies is 0.004, equally insignificant. Neither of these are significantly improved by lags of up to ± 6 months. SNOW DATA ICE DATA

Willis wrote then:

I’m not going to say a whole lot about this graph. It is clear that in general the arctic ice area has been decreasing for twenty years or so. It is equally clear that the northern hemisphere snowfall has not been increasing for the last twenty years. Finally, it is clear that there is no statistical relationship between decreased ice and increased snow.

UPDATE2: Speaking of statistical relationships, here’s a couple.

The graph below plots annual snowfall vs December to April temperature, for all Colorado USHCN stations which have been continuously active since at least 1920.

The Colorado USHCN Stations plotted are:

BOULDER, CANON CITY, CHEESMAN, CHEYENNE WELLS, DEL NORTE 2E, DILLON 1 E, EADS, FT COLLINS, FT MORGAN, FRUITA, GUNNISON 3SW, HERMIT 7 ESE, LAMAR, LAS ANIMAS, MANASSA, MONTROSE #2, ROCKY FORD 2 SE. STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, TRINIDAD, and WRAY

And for those that would say that is too small a sample size, let’s take it up a notch. Below is all USHCN station temperature for December-April in the CONUS versus snowfall.

Here is all USHCN stations annual temperature in the CONUS versus snowfall.

Clearly increased snowfall and decreased temperature correlate. The three graphs above were plotted by Steve Goddard.