Climate Explainers Tackle All That Snow

Here in the UK, the snow is falling. I’m now 69 years of age, and despite all the hype and doomsday reassurancies, the climate has not changed. We still get the variety of weather we always have – hot summers, cool summers, rainy summers, milder winters, cold winters, plus the occasional unusual events.
1975 for example saw a hot summer, with a snowfall in June. On a lesser scale, this happened in 2009 as well. No doubt global warming would be the explanation these days for the summer snow!
I’m not a climatologist of any stripe, hence I’ve had to read and sift material on the global warming issue. Comments made for example by meteorologist Williams James Burroughs in his book ‘Climate Change’ (Cambridge University Press, 2001) are relevant here. On p186 he comments that the range of extreme UK temperatures for January during the period 1772-1821 compared with 1946-95 is virtually unchanged, but a large shift in the median temperature (half the population lie above it, and half below) is seen. He goes on to comment that the changes affecting winter temperatures in the British Isles over the last 200 years or so are a matter of a shift in weather patterns rather than a significant warming of the northern hemisphere.
Moving on from this, the Köppen climate classification stresses that a range of temperatures are relevant in describing climate – how often do we see this in any discussion of the issue? Never – all ‘bloggers’ seem obsessed with fractional claimed global averages’
A favourite observation of mine is a reader’s letter from the UK’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper ( page 23 on Tuesday October 1st 2013) from Captain Derek Blacker RN (retd.), Director of Naval Oceanography and Meteorology 1982-84. He said this:
“I was a meteorologist during the Seventies when glaciers in Europe and other continents had been growing for the previous ten years, and pack ice had been increasing during winters to cover almost all of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. Scientists were then warning that the Earth could be entering another ice age. The current deliberations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have conveniently overlooked this. Before insisting that humans have been the main cause of global warming an explanation of this apparent anomaly should be promulgated.”
In connection with this letter, a look at information supplied by the Icelandic Meteorological Office is interesting. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, “heavy sea ice was quite common along the coasts of Iceland, but in the 1920s a drastic change occurred. Sea ice along the coasts of Iceland became an uncommon event, and almost a forgotten phenomenon around the middle of the century. An abrupt change occurred in the mid-1960s. Heavy sea ice formed almost each year following that period, but since 1980 widespread and long-lasting sea ice off Iceland is seen at rather irregular intervals.”
Some of the important fishing areas around Iceland are located on the shallow banks off the coast of Greenland at about 63ºN. These banks can be ice-covered during most of the year, causing difficulties for the fishing vessels. Ice edges form ‘tongues’ which extend like giant hooks when viewed from a satellite, extending for many kilometres (over 100km for example) and curving back towards the main ice sheet. These ice tongues, which can change rapidly from one day to another, are particularly important for fishing vessels operating near the ice edge. In some cases the ice tongues can turn back towards the main ice pack and vessels near the ice edge can be trapped. Consequently trawlers need accurate ice edge maps updated every day.
These are real world observations rather than suppositions based on modelled temperature based on the assumption that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming matter.
To end, William James Burroughs comments in his book referred to above that the Central England Temperature (CET) ‘confirms the exceptionally low temperatures of the 1690s and in particular the cold springs of this decade. Equally striking is the sudden warming from the 1690s to the 1730s. In less than forty years the conditions went from the depths of the little ice age to something comparable to the warmest decades of the twentieth century’.
Let’s wait and see what happens next!

Well, I for one can’t get over how wasteful and irresponsible Ma Nature has been, leaving the fridge door open like that. Doesn’t she realize that, although we are currently in an interglacial period we are still in an ice age? And that even though we’ve had some warming since the LIA, that we may in fact be going into a period of cooling, possibly lasting for decades? Doesn’t she know that it is cooling, not warming that is dangerous to man, and to all life? Shame on her!