Olympic athletes just won’t know what snow is (with apologies to Dr. David Viner)
With the winter Olympics taking center stage of world media right now it of course becomes a potential on-camera political opportunity for anybody with an idea and a sandwich board. So, predictably, somebody tried to make the winter Olympics all about “climate change”….and failed. Nutty Bill McKibben gave his endorsement:
There’s only one teensy little problem…
Here’s the plea from an organization called protectourwinters.org
US SKI TEAM MEMBER ANDREW NEWELL & 105 WINTER OLYMPIANS CALL FOR CLIMATE ACTION
Today, US Ski Team member, 2014 Olympian Andrew Newell, 105 Olympians and Protect Our Winters released a statement calling on world leaders to take action on climate change and to prepare a commitment to a global agreement prior to the Paris climate talks in 2015.The letter has been signed by 105 Olympians from countries that include: The United States, Switzerland, Norway, Estonia, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Italy and Sweden. In addition to Newell, some of the 105 athletes include: US snowboarders Danny Davis and Arielle Gold, Switzerland’s Bettina Gruber, Norway’s Astrid Jacobsen and Italian ski jumper Elena Runggaldier.“Recognize climate change by reducing emissions, embracing clean energy and preparing a commitment to a global agreement at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris 2015.”
– See more at: http://protectourwinters.org/newell-2890#sthash.BxRf5tN0.dpuf
Among other things, it seems they are whining about the lack of snow at Sochi, a place where palm trees grow and climatically not that great of a place for a winter Olympics, but has been “geoengineered” as this news story tells us:
Freezing Sochi: how Russia turned a subtropical beach into a Winter Olympics wonderland
Sochi is not the most obvious place to host the Winter Olympics.
The Russian resort, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, is humid and subtropical. Temperatures average out at about 52 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, and 75 degrees in the summer. Palm trees line the streets, and it’s the only part of Russia warm enough to grow tea leaves. In other words, it’s a lovely spot if you’re planning a beach holiday — Stalin had his favorite summer house there — but it wouldn’t be most people’s first choice for a ski trip.
…
So it shouldn’t come as much surprise that transforming Rosa Khutor into an Olympic venue has been a rapid, expensive process. It’s estimated that the cost of staging the Olympics in Sochi has been greater than the previous three Winter Games combined — ballooning to a whopping $51 billion. A sizable chunk of that money has gone to dealing with the “whims of the weather,” as a spokesperson for Sochi 2014 put it in an email to The Verge.
…
“There is almost no snow here — at the moment it’s raining,” says Olga Mironova, a local resident. That’s exactly the problem that derailed the last Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010 — buckets of snow had to be airlifted to top up the slushy covering on the hay bales that were being used to create artificial mounds in the tracks. Those emergency measures proved successful, but organizers admitted afterwards that they’d seriously underestimated the impact of climate change.
Apparently ‘climate change’ jumped in and made them choose a ridiculous venue at Sochi. Oy vey!
After McKibben made his tweet of support, a count of the list presented at http://protectourwinters.org was made, and summed up in this riposte:
105/2500 *100 = 4.2%
I can’t imagine why any athlete would want to be concerned with a political agenda that might deflect their concentration from the greatest moment of their lives. I’m surprised that even 4.2% of the winter Olympic athletes bothered.
Meanwhile, back in la-la land, we have this plea from Olympian organizer Andrew Newell
This year, while preparing for my third Olympic games in Sochi I had to ask myself: what’s changed? What has changed since that day in 1985 when I first experienced that thrill and came to love this sport? Thankfully, much is the same except there is no escaping that the once-consistent winters that I saw as a young kid are no more, especially near my home in Vermont.
Of course most of us know that athletes generally aren’t very smart when it comes to things outside their narrow field of expertise and training, but you’d think this “climatic community organizer” who says we have to “protect our winters” would at lease be able to do these two things:
1. Check the expected climatic conditions of Sochi
From Capital Weather Gang: The Games are being held during a stretch of the coastal city’s coldest winter stretch, with a daily average high of 49 degrees and low of 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Remarkably, Sochi’s daily average temperature values never drop below freezing at any time of the year. According to NASA, it’s the warmest host city for any winter Olympic games.
The daily average low (blue) and high (red) temperature with percentile bands (inner band from 25th to 75th percentile, outer band from 10th to 90th percentile. (WeatherSpark)
2. Check the weather report back home and snow depth in his home town of Bennington, Vermont:
Source: http://www.google.org/publicalerts/alert?aid=bb3a19e9321d2bc0&hl=en&gl=US&source=web
Source: http://www.weatherstreet.com/city_snow_depth/05201-Bennington-VT-snow-depth.htm
Eh, maybe not.
It seems the winter snow extent trend is on the rise in Northern hemisphere, from Rutgers snow lab:
Source: http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1
So tell me again, why do our winters need protection?
UPDATE: Dr. Luboš Motl weighs in: Sochi, swimming, climate, activism
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Add the California drought to the politicization list. This morning’s Department of Water Resources California Water News carries an item “Peter Gleick on the California drought”. Link here:
http://mavensnotebook.com/2014/02/12/peter-gleick-on-the-california-drought/
[begin short excerpt and note Gleick’s reversal of weather and climate]
Peter: That’s a great question and it’s a difficult question. We have droughts and floods normally, we have a variable climate. Obviously California’s had droughts periodically and we have wet years and dry years, like everywhere.
We also know, however, humans are now changing the climate. We know that climate change is real. The scientific community is very strong consensus about that, and one way to phrase it is that we’re now as sure that humans are changing the climate as we are that smoking tobacco causes cancer – it’s that degree of certainty.
We also know that as the climate changes, our weather will change. The weather is just the short-term manifestations of climate; climate is the long-term average of our weather. We know temperatures are going up, we know sea level is going up, and we know precipitation patterns are changing in parts of the world, so the argument is not ‘is this drought caused by climate?’ – nobody argues that.
[end excerpt]
Long-term Sierra snowfall has been covered by WUWT here:
Dr. John Christy: “no-significant-trend” in S. Sierra snowfall since 1916
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/24/john-christy-%E2%80%9Cno-significant-trend%E2%80%9D-in-s-sierra-snowfall-since-1916/
and
Christy on Sierra Snowfall over the last 130 years – no trend, no effect from CO2
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/18/christy-on-sierra-snowfall-over-the-last-130-years-no-trend-no-effect-from-co2/
In the second post, I provided additional historic rainfall information going back to 1769-1770 at my comment “Neil Jordan says: February 18, 2012 at 1:00 pm”
My comment included links to the original report and a tabulation of annual rainfall from 1770 to 2000.
[begin quote]
The Lynch Index was based on the August 1931 report, “Rainfall and Stream Run-Off in Southern California Since 1769″ by H. B. Lynch, for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The report is available on-line at http://cepsym.info/history/RainfallStreamRunoffSoCA_since1769.pdf
and
http://books.google.com/books/about/Rainfall_and_stream_run_off_in_Southern.html?id=sJMJAQAAIAAJ
[end quote]
Bill McKibben is a few characters short of a full twit.
Spend more gold to capture Olympic Carbon!
Mr. Andrew Newell complaining of “inconsistent winters in Vermont” reminds me of Prof. Chris Turner complaining of a loss of ice in the Antarctica.
Of course it helps when you select two lousy locations for the winter Olympics in succession.
No palm trees in Vancouver, B.C. (Canada) but it was a dubious site to hold outdoor events, as some of the skiing events were held essentially in North Vancouver. The weather in Whistler was a more reasonable explanation, but even that weather wasn’t outside the norm. But holding outdoor events in Vancouver, where it seemed local organizers “hoped” for winter to be cold, was pretty silly really. So of course that feeds into the climate change hype.
Go somewhere that actually is a winter city. No palm trees, no rain as the predominant winter form of precipitation and things will likely be just fine. But tweeting about “just fine” or normal just isn’t that much fun.
@Steve from rockwood “And of course there were the snowmobilers who were chased away by my dog as they crossed the ski trails.”
That’s one smart pooch. And yes, always competing interests which must be balanced. Moronic snowmobiler above only validates the usual unappealing stereotypes.
Steve from rockwood
Yes please don’t you or your dog walk or crap on the groomed ski trails. They now make nice 4 stroke snowmobile and jet ski engines that are much quieter and pollute less. We used to refer to the jet skis as floating chainsaws.
Too much winter in lots of other places…. Via Drudge: http://news.yahoo.com/skier-killed-colorado-avalanche-tenth-u-death-season-231739214–ski.html;_ylt=AvngQv8CCTSzqV2q_zbhv2DQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTBsbzR0bHJyBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMyBHNlYwNzcg–
I live near Detroit. Right now, I’d be delighted to never see snow again in my life. Too bad this global warming thing fizzled.
Rod Everson,
I really wish the Wayback Machine would have archived those NASA GISS pages from 2009. It would prove how dishonest they are about the data. I went to http://archive.org/web/web.php and put in the Toledo station webpage so now the 2014 data can be brought up in 2019 to compare. See if they try to add another .9 increase to the already .9 increase they have added since 2009. Who knows what the data looked like in 2000. Another odd ball is that now in 2014 they do not have data for 1986. Yet back in 2009 they had the data for 1986. What happened?
Ian W,
Those station data numbers are not even ‘anomalies’ they are the monthly average.
David S,
The BEST data for Toledo Express is the same data I had downloaded back in 2009, except BEST data goes back 10 years further to 1871 than the NASA GISS data.
NASA GISS monthly data for Toledo Express Airport
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_425725360000_14_0/station.txt
BEST monthly data for Toledo Express Airport – what NASA GISS data looked like in 2009
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Stations/TAVG/Text/163515-TAVG-Data.txt
But what I don’t get for the BEST data is why do they need to adjust all that raw data? Down for the past and up for the current? At least BEST shows the raw and adjusted data so we can see how much they adjusted them. NASA GISS just adjusts them and plays them off as raw.
@ur momisugly george e. smith
February 12, 2014 at 9:54 am
“Well so how many Olympic Gold medals does this Andy Newell have so far ?”
=======================
None!
http://www.sochi2014.com/en/athlete-andrew-newell
Sheesh, this would be like trying to hold the Winter Olympics in Texas. What were they thinking?
“Warmup in Sochi Could Cause Problems for Outdoor Events
By Courtney Spamer, Meteorologist
February 12, 2014; 6:04 AM
Temperatures will continue to reach above average for the first full week of competition with some minor effects to the outdoor events.
…
The warmer air, even for the indoor rinks, will make it more challenging to keep the ice in good shape. Either way, the rise in temperatures could cause some delay for events.
A storm system will approach the region over the weekend leading to rain in Sochi. Meanwhile, rain will fall in the mountains before changing to snow and blanketing the region with several inches.
Cooler and more seasonable weather is expected to follow this storm for the final week of the Sochi Games.
Meteorologist Eric Leister contributed to this story”
http://www.accuweather.com/en/features/trend/sochi_olympics_warm_snow/23109393
Now as we all know all of this can be totally explained by the addition of .02% of CO2 to our atmosphere.
@Dirk Pitt
“Well so how many Olympic Gold medals does this Andy Newell have so far ?”
=======================
None!”
Well if you fail miserably you can always blame it on Global Warming. He hasnt been able to practice in his home town without any snow.
Sochi as a location has more to do with showcasing a pleasant part of Russia and providing air access and accommodation to visitors and participants, i.e. the location is political to boost Putin’s status. Rosa Khutor has plenty of snow.
That well known political forum, Nature, just had to chime in, didn’t they….
http://www.nature.com/news/winter-olympics-downhill-forecast-1.14639
Update: I think my poor sheep and goats want me to knit them sweaters or better yet down coats. We have had over 4 inches of snow fall since noon. (So much for Jeff Masters ability to forecast. less than one inch my &^%@ur momisugly#.)
Jared,
Temps displayed at the GISS website are not “raw”, neither current nor past, the data is “homogenized”, and bears little relationship to reality.
Much of the “data” from the past changes on a monthly basis by various amounts. At the end of 2010 there was a much bigger adjustment to many, but not all, stations that I monitor.
I started saving past data from a few stations a few times a year starting 2007. Mid 2012 my computer died, so I’ve lost some files, but still have Nuuk, Vostok, Amund-Scott, Davis, Halley, Hilo, Nome, Norfolk Island, Yakutat and a few others. To see what the GISS is doing to data, there is a more comprehensive analysis of what has been happening there. A few other private people are doing some monitoring of GISS web data to some extent. Such as
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/data-tampering-at-ushcngiss/
I agree that the corruption of past temperature records is the primary scandal underlying the so-called “Global Warming” issue. Some people are selectively looking for the real, recorded historical station temps from various government agencies, with various levels of success.
In short, very few long term surface weather stations have been maintained with any level of scientific integrity over multi-decadal times. A few european stations may be ok. The raw data from the Amundsen-Scott south pole weather station is archived at the Univ. of Wisconsin. That data goes back to 1957. Plots of south pole temps from that data is a flat line, no change for 55 years.
“That’s exactly the problem that derailed the last Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010… but organizers admitted afterwards that they’d seriously underestimated the impact of climate change.”
What writer Duncan Geere would rather you didn’t know is that the main Olympic skiing venue was actually at Whistler Mountain, a 1.5 hour drive north, where the snow was fine. “Up at Whistler an unprecedented 9.88 metres (32.4 feet) of snow is on the ground, to the delight of Olympics organizers.”
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2010/2010-02-09-02.html
Geere’s hay bale mountain, Cypress, minutes from Downtown Vancouver; and a moderating ocean, hosted a small subset. Historically there have been bad seasons from time-to-time. But recent ski-season snowfall stats simply don’t back up the climate alarmist’s wishful thinking . If this is climate change, give me more please.
Cypress Mountain Average Annual Snowfall:
•2012/13 Winter Season was 1109 cm – over 36 feet! (mid mtn)
•2011/12 Winter Season was 1175 cm – over 39 feet! (mid mtn)
•2010/11 Winter Season was 1408 cm – over 45 feet! (mid mtn)
•2008/09 Winter Season was 968 cm – over 32 feet! (mid mtn)
•2007/08 Winter Season was 995 cm – over 33 feet! (mid mtn)
•2006/07 Winter Season was 844 cm – over 27 feet! (mid mtn)
http://cypressmountain.com/mountain-stats
Additionally, minutes away “next door” at Grouse Mountain, where I hold an annual season’s pass, the 2010 snow became exceptionally good such that they were able to extend the ski season by one week past planned closing.
http://www.grousemountain.com/press_releases/ski-and-ride-the-peak-of-vancouver-until-may
That’s right, skiing in May.
RBG
Why are warmers so insistent that some point in time climate is the “correct” one to maintain? Where does one get an ego that large to believe that you actually CAN know what the correct climate?
(There is a great overlap, of course, between warmers and the Malthusians who can tell us, within a couple of hundred million, what our population SHOULD be).
Years ago there was a lawsuit where an atheist sued a preacher who had prayed for rain, but the same storm caused a lightning strike which caused a fire. The preacher won because he could prove he only prayed for rain, not lightning.
Warmers better get the same kind of judge, because WHAT IF all their cooling efforts cause TOO MUCH winter?
BTW, in Canada our version of NASA GISS is also playing silly buggers with data. I know that because I accidentally left an Excel data import link “live” for a years-old data pull. I guess they don’t think people will catch them.
Russia has won its bid to host the Olympics in Sochi. Hooray hooray. Now lets open the envelope and see which one. Ohhh, the Winter one.
There should be an organizattion to protect people from the winter. It’s brutal out there.
If only they didn’t burn all that fossil fuel to get to Sochi, there would be more snow.
You know it makes sense.
It is highly unlikely that the last statement was uttered by those involved in the 2010 winter Olympics organizing. Just the year before it was perfect conditions. Climate change would not manifest itself in just one year, especially if supposed global warming has increased by only 0.8 C from 1880.
I read the local papers here near Vancouver daily and I never read such a statement.
2009 article:
“Vancouver — Canadian winter Olympians are urging Prime Minister Stephen Harper to protect winter sports by supporting a fair, ambitious and binding agreement at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
Twenty members of Canada’s Olympic team took a break from their busy training schedules this season to tell the prime minister that global warming is the greatest threat to Canada’s winter sports.”
Other nutty predictions from the same article:
“the skating season on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa could be shortened to just one week.”
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/media/news/2009/12/canadas-winter-olympians-to-prime-minister-harper-show-leadership-at-un-climate/
By the way, why has it changed from weepy to nutty? Now I have to change all my Word templates ;-(
I do not know what part of Vermont he is talking about. What does a normal winter look like?
It was -24F in Island Pond, Vermont this morning. http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=MISPV1
FWIW it is warmer now than the winters of 1978-79 but the coldest temperatures at Island Pond were -43F 7 February 1993, -40F 14 February 2003 and -36F multiple dates including 2009. I am okay with temperatures warmer than -30F.
http://nowdata.rcc-acis.org/BTV/pubACIS_results
Jay Peak, the major resort in northeast Vermont has had 185″ of snow so far this year and we are entering the snowiest months of the year. The Mountain could pick up an additional two feet with the approaching storm Thursday and Friday. This is a classic Vermont winter pattern this year with little snow in January followed by frequent nor’easters in February and March.
http://www.jaypeakresort.com/skiing-riding/the-mountain/snowfall-charts/
Stratton where Newell skied when he was younger averages 180″ of snow a year and has received 110″ so far.
http://www.stratton.com/the-mountain/mountain-statistics.aspx
Anyway, after a up and down start to the season the skiing is great in Vermont everywhere!