Michael Tobis has bupkis

UPDATES have been added:  see below. Not only does Tobis have bupkis, he’s been caught out in a Janus moment from 2010 where he says the exact opposite. – Anthony

I wrote a post yesterday pointing out how a WWF zealot immediately linked a heavy snowfall event in Moscow, Russia to ‘global warming’. Marc Morano of Climate Depot pointed out this hilarity at the secular Tobis Planet 3.0 blog in an email: Warmist Tobis says heavy snow is agw: calls anyone who mocks ‘clueless’ Logic Fail Logic Fail

Here’s what Tobis thinks:

It is interesting that most deniers seem to live in warm climates.

They cannot conceive of the possibility that unusually heavy winter snow is connected with less than usual winter cold in cold zones, something that pretty much all of us who grew up in frigid zones understand perfectly well. They are so confused that they find this perfectly ordinary fact of mundane reality grounds for mockery.

It’s quite a spectacle.

(Igloos in DC are another matter. A rare snow event in a non-snowy zone is not evidence of a warming trend. Of course, there’s more to climate disruption than just warming, but at least they are making some semblance of sense in that case, at least polemically, as the relationship is a bit complicated.)

But to mock a connection between heavy snow in February in Moscow and global warming is pretty much clueless.

Heh. Typical Tobis, as Willis would say he’s “all hat and no cattle“. I’ll get to that in a moment. At least this time he didn’t go off in an F-word fusillade which has made him famous for the record number of F-words in a single posting. I’m not able to comment there at his blog, as some comments I’ve posted in the past have never seen the light of day. But, I have to laugh at the juxtaposition of Dana Nuccitelli’s comment with the Tobis comment policy statement right below it. So, let’s look at some data.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.Dr. Judith Curry has discussed the science in her paper from Georgia Tech here: http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/05/impact-of-declining-arctic-sea-ice-on-winter-snowfall/ (h/t to Mosher)Joe D’Aleo also posted a critique to the Liu and Curry paper on WUWT here:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/increasing-winter-cold-in-recent-years-and-the-arctic/From a previous WUWT essay by Willis Eschenbach, who points out that neither essay compared sea ice and snow area, I repost this graph. Readers (and Tobis too) should 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.

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 temperatures for December-April in the CONUS versus snowfall.

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

Clearly snowfall increases with decreased temperature. The three graphs above were plotted by Steve Goddard.

But back to Tobis’ main point, in which is he’s claiming (bold mine):

They cannot conceive of the possibility that unusually heavy winter snow is connected with less than usual winter cold in cold zones, something that pretty much all of us who grew up in frigid zones understand perfectly well. They are so confused that they find this perfectly ordinary fact of mundane reality grounds for mockery.

Well, there’s data for that question too.

Note the middle graph in particular, showing below normal temperatures to the present. All temperatures in Celsius.

Source: http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/global_monitoring/temperature/tn27612_1yr.gif  h/t to WUWT reader “J”.

It really is rather hard to make a claim that “global warming did it” when data says otherwise.

So other than an angry rant basically saying “global warming caused it cuz we say it does”, what has Tobis got in the way of a factual argument? Where is his supporting data? And he didn’t answer the question: “If global warming caused this snowfall event, what caused the heavy snow 100 years ago when CO2 levels were below Hansen’s “safe” 350ppm?”

His two commenters didn’t answer the question either. They also offered no supporting data.

They and Tobis (and the WWF zealot with the original comment) have bupkis.

For the record I grew up in the midwest, and faced the great blizzard of 1978 with its exceptionally cold temperatures and huge snowfalls, plus the Chicago Blizzard of 1979 (to name a couple I experienced firsthand). Tobis and friends seem to think that living in Northern California now somehow disqualifies me from understanding snow and temperature. That’s probably the lamest argument ever put forth by that guy. Imagine if I made the same argument because Tobis lives in Austin, TX. where “snowfall is rare“.

Should you care to visit Tobis’ blog, here’s the link: http://planet3.org/2013/02/05/logic-fail-logic-fail/

Good luck trying to get a factual word in.

Sidebar: The WWF zealot (Kokorin) who made the claim about AGW and snow in the original newspaper article has an interesting view of the world. See this comment from WUWT Larry Huldén

Larry Huldén says:

You’re missing the point. Obfuscation aside, the point is that excessive February snow in Moscow means that February in Moscow is more likely to be anomalously warn than anomalously cold. Which you ought to know.

Here is my reply:

Tobis writes:  “February in Moscow is more likely to be anomalously warn[sic] than anomalously cold.”

But it isn’t, the data I presented from the Moscow Observatory shows a below normal temperature in January into February. And, this is a single event we are talking about in the newspaper article, not a trend, not a long term climate issue.For more on snow and temperature see this: http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%29/guides/mtr/fcst/prcp/rs.rxml

The claim about this snow event being driving by AGW is the same logical fallacy you and your buddies embraced with the Moscow heat wave in 2010, which was a weather event, not a climate event. And, that’s not just my opinion, NOAA shares it too.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/09/noaa-findsclimate-change-blameless-in-2010-russian-heat-wave/

Further to your claim, let’s look at long term snow trends for that part of the world. Rutgers Snow Lab offers some helpful plots. First all months of data back to the beginning of their record:

Source: http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=0&ui_region=eurasia&ui_month=12

Now, the month of February.

Source: http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=1&ui_region=eurasia&ui_month=2

If global warming was creating more snow in that area, wouldn’t there be an upwards trend?

Ya still got bupkis Mike. – Anthony

UPDATE2: I recalled on the drive into the office today that Tobis made this claim in 2010 related to lack of snow at the winter Olympics:

“But there’s another lesson here, too. Don’t overreach. Is there anything in any particular weather event (except prehaps [sic] ones far more bizarre than this one) that offers strong evidence for or against any theory of climate change?

…

But big snowstorms in the mid-Atlantic or the South, particularly in El Nino years, are not evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change either. They are not the sort of thing we particularly expect more of because of human interference. At best it seems to me that the case is uncertain.”

http://init.planet3.org/2010/02/hill-of-snow.html

Besides having bupkis, Mike Tobis can’t make up his mind about snow and AGW, like the weather itself, he’s fickle. – Anthony

UPDATE3: My response to Mr. Tobis in comments: