15 years after Dr Viner embarrassed the British Climate Research Unit, Griffith University in Australia has just joined the slowly growing list of academic institutions which have predicted the “end of snow”.
According to ABC Australia;
Research conducted by Griffith University’s Environmental Futures Research Institute has warned that snow regions in Australia must adapt to warmer conditions caused by climate change, that is increasingly turning the alpine landscape from white to green.
Study co-author Professor Catherine Pickering said the current trends did not look promising and good years like the recent snow dump had become less frequent.
“The snow cover in the Australian alps is declining and it has declined a lot since 1954 when there was the longest snow course on record,” she said.
“We have found that it was originally a 30 per cent decline and now the latest data indicates we have got to a 40 per cent decline over that period.
“We used to have a couple of really big years when we had a lot of snow but that is no longer the case. Now, what used to be a not so great year, that is what we think of as a good year.”
However, the ABC article also quotes the president of the Canberra Alpine Club, who has a different opinion.
… Canberra Alpine Club president Lloyd Meehan said snow lovers were content with the current weather conditions and snow levels.
Mr Meehan said he believes while weather patterns changed over time, the decline was not consistent.
“The scientists will tell us that perhaps when you are looking at pure statistical data, there has been a gradual decline,” he said.
“But like many sports, from one year to the next it is a bit hard to actually guess what sort of snow depth we are going to get.
“One year you will get a poor one, the next year – like two years ago – you get quite good ones.”
For the record, the Australian snow season this year had a poor start, but the last week especially has seen massive snowfalls across Australia’s Eastern ranges, stretching up to the subtropical southern edge of the Australian state of Queensland.
If there is one thing above all else, which flags just how ridiculously wrong climate models are, and how desperate academics are for observations to agree with their broken models, its the academically embarrassing “end of snow” prediction.
I see a pattern! (in the graph).
Seriously, don’t they look at the graphs before writing these things?
The graph would appear not to be connected to the referenced research, as the article is about snow in Australia, while the graph depicts snow in California at Donner Summit. I understand the point of the graph, but it probably should not have been included in this article since it could be construed as misleading.
The claim was that the cause of the regional variation is warmer conditions caused by climate change. Climate change is supposed to be a global phenomenon.
Eric
I am a bit confused as to why an article about Australia should prominently feature a California ski resort graph? Would it not be best to either include Aussie ski graphs or broaden the scope of the text?
tonyb
There is a chart of snow depths at Spencers Creek, from Snowy Hydro data, at http://users.tpg.com.au/users/mpaine/snow.html
There is another for South Perisher at http://southperisher.org.au/weather/charts/all
As might be expected from global temperature data, the best snow period was in the 60s and 70s, and snow seasons since have been poorer. So it appears to be correct to say that snowfall in Australia has declined over the last 50+ years.
It is interesting to note from the Spencers Creek chart how marginal the Snowies’ snowfields are – see how quickly the deep snow declines back in the good years.
Mike Jonas, how can you say ‘snowfall in Australia has declined over the last 50+ years’ when the linear trend shown on your first link is flat!
Billy Liar – I would really like someone to download the actual data and do the analysis properly (I can’t at present). The linear trend shown looks very suspect to me, and it’s only for selected Aug and Sep dates. To my eye the earlier years had longer and deeper seasons – much more visible in the second link I think. As always, I am happy to be proved wrong!
@climatereason, that’s not for Donner pass the ski area, but somewhere around Donner Pass itself. I used to live near there. Still not for anywhere in Australia.
under 1000cm 1879-1951 34 years, 1952 -2013 34 years
over 1500cm ” ” 9 years, ” ” 8 years
over 2000cm ” ” 1 year ” ” 1 year
No – evidently they do not look at the data!
David,
Apparently you are looking at raw data that has not been homogenized to fit the CAGW narrative. You must not be a climatologists or you would not make such and error.
Congratulations. Your analysis of the Sierra snowfall record has driven a stake into the heart of one of the climate change arguments, that man has broken the climate so that modern climate is (different – fill in threat here) than older Edenic climate. In hydrologic terms, if stationarity can no longer be assumed, we must yield to the new climate paradigm.
“Stochastic Processes in Hydrology” offers an analog to the Voigt-Kampff test to assess stationarity. See Yevjevich:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Stochastic_processes_in_hydrology.html?id=uPJOAAAAMAAJ
Yevjevich provides an explanation of and tests for stationarity. In the simplest application, the record is divided into two or more parts and analyzed independently as you have done. “In general, if the subseries parameters are confined within the 95 percent tolerance limits about the corresponding value of the parameter for the entire series, the process is inferred to be self-stationary.”
No. They are hoodwinked believers that only look into the scope of the god-like model. Actual observation be dammed! And
Yes, I can see it! Apparently, nothing has changed.
It is after the publishing that counts – the MSM have moved on and the egg has been laid in the public’s brains.
I gave up updating this:
http://www.agwbs.com/agw-is-fake/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past.html
after the headlines in 2010 – ‘Snow-covers-Britain-from-head-to-toe’.
On the front page you will find a forecast (uk/global) that predicted this colder-than-average patch:
Cooler and wetter from 5-7 July
Possible few warmer days from July 19 (not certain)
From July ~29 a strong warm burst************
just sayin’
They must have written that before heading off to the northern hemisphere for warm holidays in Tuscany. July here in Australia is winter, and white, and bluddie cold.
yup zero C in my outdoor laundry overnight and still at 730am entire area was as white as snow
at 1130 I picked a slab of ice from the top of a trailer tarp as thick as window glass.
it was 9.1c here at 12pm.
bloody cold!!
There is still snow in Scotland
http://www.glencoemountain.co.uk/webcams.html
Hell, the piles of snow in Boston have finally just melted this week.
As I write, it is 2 degrees C in Melbourne – and has been below average for two weeks now. Just watch my burnt fuel contrails as I head for the tropics tomorrow for three weeks away from the global warming catastrophe I pray for every freezing day
Your observations must be wrong because it is quite hot here in Ottawa.
Also, why are we bothered about +2C temperature change. Here in Ottawa, temperatures go from-30C to +30C in 6 months. And then back again 🙁
Yes, snow in Queensland and a month of straight sub zero nights in the Nation’s Capital, nearly 30 years after the Global Warming fear mongering first started should have shut this bloke up before he opened his mouth. Some people have no shame.
It was Dr Viner, not Professor Viner.
Fixed, thanks.
Living in Canada it would be fantastic if I never had to deal with snow again. The upside would outshadow the downside ten-fold.
It is obscene for Canadian politicians to demand policies that
feed their croniesreduce he temperature of Canada. Are they crazy or criminal? We need a warmer Canada.Robert,
In your neck of the woods this is the stake in the heart of GW alarmism. Your elected officials are actually attempting to drive the climate (according to their own models) toward lower temperatures by over 1K, shorter growing seasons and lower CO2 reducing crop yield by up to 50% (@ur momisugly 270 ppm that was the apparent CO2 level in the garden of eden). If they are right with their models and were to actually succeed that would probably make Canada largely uninhabitable! THERE IS SOMETHING RATHER IMMORAL ABOUT THAT. I think that these facts possibly make attempts to reduce CO2 in the USA unconstitutional, which may extend to Canada as well.
You should yelp long and hard to your elected representative about their complicity in this evil.
This might have been a better graph to include. http://users.tpg.com.au/mpaine/snow_aug_sep_54-12.jpg from Spencer Creek, which appears to be in northern Queensland.
Heck, anything would have been a better graph than one from California!
Meh, can’t be Queensland, that was the best I got out of Google maps. http://users.tpg.com.au/mpaine/snow.html says
Ah, I asked Google about Spencer Creek, not Spencers Creek. There’s a difference!
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Spencers+Creek,+Kosciuszko+National+Park,+New+South+Wales,+Australia/@-36.4136991,148.3751917,12.25z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x6b2334dcfcccebd5:0x3de4a9cc93b2349a
Oh I don’t snow snow in Sarasota Fl might be worse.
It isn’t just academics. From the current strategic plan of our closest ski resort, Mt Baw Baw:
“Mt Baw Baw’s lower altitude makes it vulnerable to the effects of climate change and its potential impact on snow tourism. The ARMB is mitigating this risk by building year-round visitation to the Resort.”
Even more wrong headed folk then!
Current conditions at Mt Baw Baw: -3C, 53cm of snow down.
Nick Stokes — You are amazing!
Do you know what false attribution is? The author of your quote has a cause he is trying to further. To do that he uses false attribution. I am going to rewrite the quote removing the words “climate change” and replacing them with words that actually reflect the resort’s true situation. See if you can distinguish the intellectual difference.
“Mt. Baw Baw’s lower altitude makes it vulnerable to the effects of a poor snow year and its potential impact on snow tourism. The ARMB is mitigating this risk by building year-round visitation to the Resort.
Mt. Baw Baw due to its low altitude has probably suffered from numerous poor snow years in the past and the owners have come up with a way to expand their business making it less dependent on snow fall..
What do you know about bars? Many bars run a morning breakfast, a lunch, a happy hour and a rock band at night. The owners utilize the building all day long serving distinctly different crowds. That is a common business practice which Mt. Baw Baw has decided to implement.
Nowadays the use of the words “climate change” is highly indicative that the author is telling a lie. Really. See the words “climate change” and it is highly probable that a lie is being told.
Eugene WR Gallun
Seems like pretty much whenever I go to an area that is a ski area in winter, it is “mitigating the risk” of summer by incorporating the use of its lifts for summertime activities like hiking, sight-seeing, or mountain biking.
@ur momisugly Eugene, + many!
++++++ good one Eugene 😉
Apart from the climate change crap, a sound business plan, utilise the facilities year-round for increased profit.
The snow that is falling
Is not the same snow,
It’s more like warm ice,
Ask a scientist, he’ll know.
It’s proves that global warming
Is moving on at a pace…..
…….And we keep on believing,
We’re a very strange race!
http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/ignore-the-flying-pigs/
It’s always the dog that doesn’t bark in the night that’s most interesting.
You can store your water via snowpack during a dryer summer if it’s cold enough. That’s nice as it’s a cheap way to make sure the taps don’t run dry. If it’s not cold enough, people should be budgeting for more reservoir construction which seems to be the next cheapest way of ensuring the taps don’t run dry. A proper, human centered discussion on climate would include the obvious follow up of how much in extra water retention via dam and reservoir should be budgeted over what time period to accommodate this shift from snowpack storage to reservoir storage.
Increased dam and reservoir creation would split the green coalition so the question doesn’t get asked by friends of the cause. So why haven’t I seen any skeptics toss this particular cat among the canaries? Did I just miss it?
Dam and Reservoir creation usually doesn’t “split” green coalitions, it unites them – against them.
Just look at California where close to 80% of all water runs off into the Pacific – much in the name of a 2″ fish – and their technique of allowing the water to run off isn’t saving the fish – “as their models predicted” it would.
I think back in the sixties there was a proposal to create what they called NAWAPA North West Water and Power Alliance. A series of hydro electric dams down the spine of the Rocky Mountains stretching from the Yukon to New Mexico. Power and Water needs for western Canada and United States solved for a few centuries! Environmentalists buried that one so deep hardly anybody has heard of it unless they are old enough to remember.
Scott July 19, 2015 at 7:19 am
That is because the Delta Smelt is not dying through lack of water as the Federal Environmental Development Agency claims – it is being killed by bass introduced by California Department of Fish and Game. But it gave the EPA a reason they could use to put farmers into bankruptcy.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/drought-or-stupid-rescue-killing-delta-smelt/
Ian, your post reminded me of what happen to an home aquarium years ago when the enterprising young man put this minnow he found in a lake or a creek in to tropical fish tank, for some reason [all] his tropical fish started to disappear, That sweet little minnow was a bass, and of course the bass did what bass do eat anything [they] can catch and they are good at catching other fish. One a more serious [note] most of the invasive species here in the united states [were] introduced with some government money at some point an time with some “scientist” trying [to] address a “problem”.
It’s political suicide, even in California, to explicitly say that you want people to have inadequate water. By reframing the snowpack as nature’s reservoir that now must be replaced by manmade reservoirs due to global warming causing its disappearance, the greens must either explicitly go anti-human (which is a political loser) or fight it out over creating the replacement water infrastructure to replace the snowpack. They’ll split in an unusual way.
You didn’t miss it. Skeptics have repeatedly suggested simple and pragmatic solutions to the world’s problems over the decades in which nonsense eco-alarmist ideology has grown.
But, over time the pragmatic skeptics have been dismissed and disenfranchised, such that we have largely tired of repeating ourselves.
Just look at the environmental opposition to every new hydro-electric project. With hydroelectricity providing by far the cheapest renewable energy and currently more than half of the world’s renewable energy. Even when dodgy biomass is included in the calculation.
But, the loons have taught each other to dismiss it and to resist it, at every opportunity.
They have an inbuilt antipathy towards anything that actually works and is cost-effective.
If it doesn’t require massive subsidies, then they will object, whether the thing is renewable energy or not.
In fact, judging by the recent Australian reaction to the potential involvement with Lomborg, we should now assume that the loons object to the very principle of “cost/benefit analysis”.
Basically, what I am pointing out, is that the reasonable people grew tired of repeating themselves long ago, and have now largely adopted an air of disgusted resignation.
But, you are certainly not alone.
A tiny minority of others have maintained their ability to think rationally.
And we are being forcefully excluded from the so-called “debate”.
The “debate”, which we are now told, is over.
In effect it does seem that it is over. Since the leftist eco-loon “consensus” is now shouting down anyone who attempts to speak.
indefatigablefrog — absolutely correct — Eugene WR Gallun
It’s simple. The enviromenalists [sic] do not like electricity. I’m not sure why, perhaps because it is an unseen force or something equally evil.
Remember the Catholic Church isn’t opposed to birth control, merely birth control that works. Same with the Watermelons. They are not opposed to electricity, simply economical electricity.
Robert, cheap electricity provides comfortable living conditions for more people. That’s the last thing rabid environmentalists want.
The trick, I believe, is to get the loons to explicitly, and loudly, take positions that are anti-human. The start is documenting what the system actually is and what the slack level in the system actually is. It’s not terribly interesting work in itself which is why most people don’t do it but there are benefits. The loons thrive on the vague feeling that the system will keep chugging along no matter what. Identifying where the breaking points are is educational and disempowering for the loons.
Back in the sane ol’ days, both Oz and CA planned many decades in advance for future reservoirs and aqueducts. In both places, those plans were scuttled by the enviro-left.
But they are getting a 100 billion dollar train! Who needs water or electricity when you have a train!?
My question to the climate alarmist is this: “When will the children who live in the subtropical climates of the world stop seeing snow, because even up to a week ago, they are still seeing it?”
And yet there is snow in Queensland (which in Oz is like saying there is snow in Florida folks) the home state of Griffith University.
We have already survived the floods that signalled the end of the ‘endless’ drought predicted by another local eco-loon here in Oz and you guessed it, that all started in Queensland too.
Gosh that Gaia is a contrary old gal isn’t she. She really just doesn’t suffer fools.
Queensland, beautiful one day, all the brass monkeys are out looking for a welder the next….
I know, its a shocker – my pet spider dropped dead from the cold…
Funny, it is almost as if mother nature is deliberately setting out to make fools of these guys.
I believe it’s safe to quote Bachman-Turner Overdrive and say “b-b-b-baby you just ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
(neg. PDO + neg. AMO + solar grand minimum = ?)
Almost?
We are approaching absolute totality, the way I see it.
Reblogged this on Utopia – you are standing in it!.
They don t ned help looking like fools….
The only clear thing from the graph is that if 1889 – 1891 repeated itself, they would be screaming about climate change.
Meanwhile on the piste
http://www.perisher.com.au/weather-cams/cams#Xv8
It’s all ocean cycles, and they be changing again
All ocean cycles, yup, and also all randomness and also all just bad weather being…well…bad!
https://youtu.be/hQ72fcHDUC8
I am missing a disclaimer on foreward looking statements like this one:
http://www.siemens.com/press/en/events/disclaimer.htm
My cousins tell me it is cold in Queensland and they have had more snow than in the past 20 years this week. Unusual? Not really, as I have photos of my father skiing somewhere in the mountains of NSW.
I am guessing that the Donner record is replete with various methods used to measure snow and is more a record that demonstrates that artifact than it is a record of accurate snow levels.
Maybe some interesting bones, though none from the Donner Party have been found yet. http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/did-the-donner-party-really-resort-to-cannibalism
A few days ago it snowed in Sydney for the first time since 1836… The end of the Dalton minimum little ice age…. http://www.thestar.com/news/starweather/2015/07/ever-seen-this-before-kangaroo-feeds-in-the-snow-in-australia.html I say we name the current ice age the WUWT minimum!
http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-874028-galleryV9-zrzg.jpg
It was Bill Shrapnel who took this snapshot in Orange, New South Wales, Australia
See more at heights of 17 km in the lower stratosphere.
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/70hPa/orthographic=-221.68,-69.39,319
Strange that headline as Google has photos of Sydney with Snow in 2014.
Perhaps there is a distinction between Sydney in the City and Sydney in the Suburbs?
In any case, the star.com link does not actually say that it snowed in Sydney in 2015 (i.e. this week). It says that it hasn’t snowed there since 1834 and some people who moved away from Sydney now saw snow elsewhere in NSW. Somewhat misleading I would say…
Rich.
I’d vote for the Gorehansengavinator minimum with the pause called the Mann false warming.
I think the global fools’ minimum would be easier to remember.
Dawtgtomis:
Yours is definitely better.
I’d settle for the global fools’ minimum.
Wanted to reply to Rich but there is no reply button. Turns out the article I posted is misleading and incorrect, it did not snow in Sydney (yet) this year but it did snow there last year for the first time since the 1830s (as in an actual build up of snow on the ground). I see a few reports of “snow in Sydney” in 1986 but it was only in higher elevations and melted when it hit the ground. http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/spring-storm-brings-snow-to-sydney/37790/
The arrival of intense cold similar to the one that raged during the “Little Ice Age”, which froze the world during the 17th century and in the beginning of the 18th century, is expected in the years 2030—2040. These conclusions were presented by Professor V. Zharkova (Northumbria University) during the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno in Wales by the international group of scientists, which also includes Dr Helen Popova of the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics and of the Faculty of Physics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Professor Simon Shepherd of Bradford University and Dr Sergei Zharkov of Hull University.
http://astronomynow.com/2015/07/17/diminishing-solar-activity-may-bring-new-ice-age-by-2030/
Yet there was an article on spaceweather.com a few days ago (for a few hours) which stated that we should not believe the press that the expected upcoming minimum would have the same effect as previous ones and that models which predict past events cannot accurately predict the future (as NASA had bad results from their solar dynamo model). Dr P. implied that anthro-effects negate or mitigate the potential cooling.
I wish I had copied and saved the article because later that day it was gone. He must have gotten some flak from somewhere and ‘made it go away’ quickly.
I can only conclude that the poor guy has to pay homage to the meme if he wants to keep his job.
I notice that there is a concerning reduction of the number of graphs presented in printed media and educational resource material.
Seeing a graph is now “a very rare and exciting event”.
At the current rate of decline – by 2025, children just aren’t going to know what graphs are.
Graphs are considered too intensive for common core…
There are insufficient words in graphs for the continual NLP in more wordy Common Core subjects.
It seems for sure they will not know what having a prediction come true is.
Love it!
Hope I can plagiarize that one…
Rich.
Feel free. Plagiarize away!!