UPDATE2: Gosh. Shouldn’t Dr. Cullen know more than McKibben and Brad Johnson?! (h/t to Marc Morano) – Anthony
Here’s the SST anomaly map she cites as proof in her post about the issue at Climate Central. Note that actual temperatures in the ocean are quite cold.
Dear Chicken Little: The Sky Is Falling (It’s Snowing) But Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies Off New England Are NOT Unusual
Guest post by Bob Tisdale
UPDATE: If you should run into any alarmists over the next couple of days, remind them of the Northeast Blizzard of 1978.
########################
Global warming alarmists are predictable. If they see elevated sea surface temperature anomalies on a map anywhere close to a weather event, they immediately claim manmade global warming contributed, or will contribute, to the weather. They erred that way with Hurricane Sandy—sea surface temperatures along Sandy’s storm track haven’t warmed in 70+ years—and they’ve done it again with the blizzard threatening New England today. Refer to the WattsUpWithThat post Propagandist Brad Johnson of ‘Forecast the Facts’ tries to make the pending East Coast blizzard about the ocean ‘warming’ – Fails.
Anyone who has followed my posts over the past 4 years about the natural warming of satellite-era sea surface temperatures understands there is nothing in the data to indicate that manmade greenhouse gases played any part in the warming. That is, the data indicates Mother Nature, not manmade greenhouse gases, was responsible for the warming over the past 31 years. The same holds true for ocean heat content data.
Figure 1 is a map of the sea surface temperature anomalies (Reynolds OI.v2) for a portion of the North Atlantic. It captures the data for the week centered on Wednesday January 30, 2013. The map was created at the NOAA NOMADS website, using the Reynolds Optimum Interpolation sea surface temperature data. I’ve used the contour levels of 0.5 deg C, with white set at zero, which are settings often used by NOAA. Obviously, last week sea surface temperature anomalies were elevated near the New England coast, but the data, as we will see, reveals that there’s nothing unusual about those levels. We’ll use the coordinates of 35N-45N, 77W-67W for the data in the following graphs.
Figure 1
SHORT-TERM WEEKLY DATA
Figure 2 presents the weekly sea surface temperature anomalies off the New England coast, starting with the week centered on Wednesday January 3, 1990 and ending with the week of January 30, 2013. The base years for anomalies are the standard climatology of 1971-2000 from the NOAA NOMADS website. The horizontal red line represents the most recent weekly value of +0.55 deg C. Sure does look like it’s been warmer many times over the past 2+ decades.
Figure 2
LONG-TERM MONTHLY DATA
We have to switch datasets to NOAA’s ERSST.v3b for the long-term data. The data for the month of February 2013 will not be available until early in March, so we’ll use the January 2013 value for the most recent temperature anomaly for the New England coastal waters—the red horizontal line. The current anomalies were exceeded by a good amount in the 1940s. And they’ve regularly been exceeded as far back as the 1850s and 60s.
Figure 3
And to drive the point home, Figure 4 is a graph of the January sea surface temperatures (not anomalies) for the New England coastal waters from 1854 to 2013. Sea surface temperatures were much warmer during the 1930s and 40s.
Figure 4
CLOSING
It’s difficult to claim the recent increases in manmade greenhouse gases are responsible for the warm sea surface temperatures off the New England coast, when the those values were regularly exceeded 70 to 80 years ago.
Alarmists will take any opportunity to claim manmade greenhouse gases are responsible for weather events, such as Hurricane Sandy, and now the upcoming New England Blizzard. It’s often easy to illustrate the errors in their claims. Another example is the Russian heat wave of 2010 which Trenberth and Fasullo tried (and failed) to attribute to the warming of sea surface temperatures. Refer to the post here.
Alarmists, of course, will continue to make unfounded claims, and I will be happy to show how ridiculous those claims are.
This is a preliminary report. Sea surface temperature data for the week centered on Wednesday February 6, 2013 will not be available until Monday February 11. I’ll be happy to update this post then.
SOURCES
The weekly Reynolds OI.v2 dataset is available through the NOAA NOMADS website. And the ERSST.v3b dataset can be accessed through the KNMI Climate Explorer.
DATA REVEAL THE OCEANS WARMED NATURALLY
Earlier I noted that satellite-era sea surface temperature data indicate the oceans warmed naturally, not via manmade greenhouse gases. NOAA’s ocean heat content data also do not support the hypothesis of manmade global warming. Refer to my recent essay titled “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge”, which is linked to my blog post here. Refer also to the two-part video series prepared for the WattsUpWithThat (WUWT-TV) special linked to the post The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans. And of course there’s my book Who Turned on the Heat?
Who Turned on the Heat? is intended for persons (with or without technical backgrounds) interested in learning about El Niño and La Niña events and in understanding the natural causes of the warming of our global oceans for the past 31 years. Because land surface air temperatures simply exaggerate the natural warming of the global oceans over annual and multidecadal time periods, the vast majority of the warming taking place on land is natural as well. The book is the product of years of research of the satellite-era sea surface temperature data and ocean heat content data that are available to the public via the internet. It presents how the data accounts for its warming—and there are no indications the warming was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. None at all.
Who Turned on the Heat? was introduced in the blog post Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about El Niño and La Niña… …Well Just about Everything. The Updated Free Preview includes the Table of Contents; the Introduction; the beginning of Section 1, with the cartoon-like illustrations; the discussion About the Cover; and the Closing.
Please buy a copy. Credit/Debit Card through PayPal. You do NOT need to open a PayPal account. Simply scroll down to the “Don’t Have a PayPal Account” purchase option. It’s only US$8.00
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Thanks, Anthony!!
What I like is her value sign facing the wrong way…didn’t she want to say > as in greater than?
I was caught in the blizzard of 1978 in R.I. Our high school bus got stuck several times on the way home and we kept pushing it up hills and around stuck cars. It was a losing battle and eventually the driver, (Mr. Howard Bradley…we gave that poor man such grief) made a gutsy call and told us to get walking. It was a two hour walk in whiteout conditions without a hat or gloves on. Anyway, I got a shot of brandy from my best friend’s mom when I showed up on his doorstep looking like an icicle.
I got stuck (at a keg party, as luck would have it) in another blizzard in 1981 or 1982 while stationed in Norfolk Va. While I no longer live in Virginia, I don’t believe the Norfolk area has experienced similar snowfalls since that fateful weekend when five intrepid Sailors single-handedly floated a keg.
Mr. Bradley; if you’re up there watching, I’m sorry for being such a rotten snot.
Ralph B:
+1
You can tell someone is non-technical when they don’t know the difference between ‘>’ = ‘greater than’ and ‘<' = 'less than'.
Only twits tweet. Even bigger twits re-tweet.
Oh, how I remember 1978. Landed in Boston on the Sunday, the storm began Monday afternoon, got the last club-car seat on the train to Newark, which took 8 hrs or so, nightmare at the (pre-reserved) Hilton, nightmare getting to DC. By Thursday was back in the air to St. Louis, but had to cancel Friday’s appt in Dallas, as DFW was iced in. Happily, made it home to Vancouver instead. I think the threat of the day was the coming ice age.
Please excuse an off topic query to Bob. There was a big jump in global temperatures according to RSS and UAH between December and January. The Nino 3/4 and SOI anomalies are both negative. There is an SSW over the North pole. Could these be related in some sort of way?
The author of the post at climate central you quote is Andrew Freedman, not Heidi Cullen. In it he says ‘As was the case when Hurricane Sandy struck in late October, sea-surface temperatures are running a couple degrees above average off the East Coast, which according to climate scientists may reflect both natural climate variability and the effects of manmade global warming.
The presence of unusually warm waters could aid in the rapid development of the storm system, and infuse it with additional moisture, thereby increasing snowfall totals.’
While he is obviously wrong to state that the waters are unusually warm, I find it difficult to disagree that, according to the graphic, ‘sea-surface temperatures are running a couple degrees above average off the East Coast’.
I hope there’s thunder snow. I love thunder snow.
winds going in the wrong direction…..
http://www.weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_wv_hem_loop-12.gif
For what it is worth this seems to be the latest line of attack since the temperature increase has stalled for the last 16 years. For what it is worth Hubby just got an e-mail from the “League of Conservation Voters” (LCV.org) asking citizens to send the LCV’s prepared letter to ABC, CBS, and NBC to ask them to provide more coverage on “Climate change” and to leave skeptics out completely. They are upset about the amount of space given to the skeptic side of the debate. (What space)
The e-mail:
So there you have it the newest crusade to save the planet from global warming. (Don’t these people ever quit?)
I was living on Cape Cod in February of 1978. It was amazing to behold. We got much less snow than Boston, which got well over 2 feet. At on point on the Cape we were in the eye of the hurricane and it was beautiful with a perfect circle of blue sky directly above us with dark clouds all around. I remember seeing a news photo of a bus in Boston in which you could only see the bus destination sign near the roof line. At one point the traffic stopped dead on the 128 and they spent a whole day getting people out of their cars and back to their homes. People had to abandon their cars on the freeway and many of them didn’t want to do that. The freeway shut down for three days.
I remember reading stories of people finding their dead children in melting snow banks three weeks later. It was sad.
There were several big snow storms that winter. In April a local news reporter whose name escapes me did a funny story in which he went out and beat on the last remaining patches of melting snow with a snow shovel saying, “This is for Dec. 28th, this is for January 19th, this is for February 8th, etc. (I might have the dates wrong.)
I can see now why weather.com wanted to start naming winter storms. This is all about drama now, and each new “extreme” weather event is only more grist for the mill churning out hysteria. How much better to be able to refer back to “Nemo” alongside “Sandy” and “Katrina” while spewing the hyperbole.
I wonder if some of the anomalies might result from meandering of warm and cold eddies of the Gulf Stream.
Isn’t “Forecast the Facts” the people who want to force their belief system on all weather forecasters regarding climate change? Their must be a reason they are trying to promote the snow storm in the Northeast as being a result of man made warming. I’m curious as to what those reasons might be. Is it that the president’s SOTU speech will contain passages about heating the planet and people shoveling snow and freezing may believe that the snow storm was caused by the cold? It will be interesting to see if any weather forecasters mention man made warming as a cause of the snow and cold.
First decent chance to use the snowblower this winter. I got so excited I did the homes of the ladies next door and beyond. Nothing unusual about this storm for Waterloo.
The sea surface temperatures seem to be quite ordinary – as ordinary as it has become for alarmists to shout and stomp and wave their arms. The number involved must be large because the wind is picking up…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_United_States_blizzard_of_1978
I remember watching dump truck dump snow off the bridges because there wasn’t any room elsewhere to put it in Boston, NY and other cities..
Man am I getting old..
I was in the Army stationed outside Boston in 1980 and people were still talking about the blizzard of ’78. Folks were using cross-country skis to get to work. Maybe these people should read up on the Great Blizzard of 1888, too.
We haven’t gotten too much snow (yet) here in western New Hampshire so far (a couple of inches). More on the way (supposedly heavy into the evening), but I’m thinking we may not reach the max snowfall depths they were predicting locally (16 inches). If the winds pick up, that will make for an interesting Saturday, however.
And folks, there is NOTHING unusual about this storm…I’ve seen much worse here in New England…
It’s February and it’s snowing in the Northern Hemisphere. This would not be possible without the appearance of Global Warning Sharks
/sarc
One thing I keep thinking about in watching the anomaly maps:
Instead of the temperature anomaly being reported in degrees, what do they look like plotted in ‘sigma’? Directly on the map. light blue/red for ‘less than one’. moderate for ‘1 to 2’. And brilliant for 3. Because 3 sigma might actually deserve it. And something incandescent for 4.
This should allow a more direct sense of “Ok, -how- anomalous is this?”
And lets not forget a week or so ealier a different blizzard had hit the Midwest. I don’t think ocean temps were involved with that one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Blizzard_of_1978
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/iln/research/Blizzard1978/blizzard78.php
Ralph B says:
What I like is her value sign facing the wrong way…didn’t she want to say > as in greater than?
===
Hey, don’t get too technical, she’s only a PhD.
Heidi Cullen, an AMS Member, is Vice President for External Communications and Chief Climatologist for Climate Central, a non-profit science journalism organization headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Cullen is the author of The Weather of the Future published in 2010 by Harper Collins.
You are all liars! I remember 1978, it was exactly 66 degrees everyday, all day, and there was a gentle shower every evening just as I was eating dinner. It was beautiful and just and nothing was scary or EXTREME! just wonderfully placid and unchanging.
I just want to remind that the idea that education should go after the “mind, heart and the soul” and try to encourage emotional visualizing of the need for change has been around about 20 years now. So the coverage of this blizzard after Hurricane Sandy is frustrating to the rational and scientifically informed but that’s a small minority of the viewing audience. Everyone else watches the visuals and hyping and infers that Something with a capital S must be done.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/truly-effective-teaching-involves-the-awakening-of-all-three-heart-mind-and-the-soul/ has very graphic quotes of how and why the student is targeted so that their perceptual filter as well as their habits of mind get changed. And primed to action at the spectre of any environmental threat.
And again many of these students are now adults with their own families. Two generations being visually and emotionally bombarded with this message from a young age. And since the media is viewed as the other half (apart from education) of the broader Communications strategy, there is no way the typical meteorologist or newsman does not know what emotional press points they should be hitting. They simply may not know the why. To maximize the influence of created emotions and false beliefs.
We are playing for keeps here with people who say repeatedly that reality does not matter to them. Perceptions drive behavior and it is making behavior and reactions predictable that is the point. Of all these continual misrepresentations.
CLIMATE4YOU web page has these bits of news about far more severe winters in the US MASSACHUSETTS area back in 1740/1741 and again 1747/1748. Don’t tell the global warming alarmists or they will claim global warming had its start back then where there were hardly any people to generate co2
(Perley 2001).
Not only was the winter 1740-1741 characterised by very low temperatures, but also by huge amounts of snow. People in the region saw this winter as the most severe since the European settlement began. There was 23 snow storms in all, most of them being strong. On 3 February about a foot of snow fell, and about one week later there were two more storms, filling the roads in Newbury, Massachusetts, up to the top of fences. Snow depths of about 3 metres were reported from some places.
. The winter of 1747-48 was one of the memorable winters that used to be talked about by our grandfathers when the snow whirled above deep drifts around their half-buried houses. There were about thirty snow storms, and they came storm after storm until the snow lay four feet deep on the level, making travelling exceedingly difficult. On the twenty-second of February, snow in the woods measured four and one-half feet; and on the twenty-ninth there was no getting about except on snow shoes”.