Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Although global warming might have been implicated in harsh weather in the Rockies, Forbes author Dr. Marshall Shepard definitely wants to make it very clear he is not trying to link this snow event to climate change, even though there is a growing body of evidence that global warming will make extreme cold and snow more likely.
The Blizzard In The Rockies Doesn’t Disprove Climate Change But People Will Say It Anyhow
Marshall Shepherd Senior Contributor
Sep 29, 2019, 04:52pmI predicted several days ago that some people would be tweeting that this early season snowstorm in parts of the Rocky Mountain region somehow refutes anthropogenic climate change. Rob Bailey, a computer engineer in Ohio, brought the Tweet at this link to my attention. I am sure there are many more just like it.
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So why is the region experiencing such record cold and snow conditions in terms of magnitude of the event? To answer this question, we have to look to the jet stream. According to the NWS Glossary, the jet stream is a region of “relatively strong winds concentrated in a narrow stream in the atmosphere, normally referring to horizontal, high-altitude winds….The position and orientation of jet streams vary from day to day.” The wavy pattern of the jet stream is a very strong determinant of general weather patterns, particularly in terms of temperature and wetness. With this storm, the jet stream plunged southward bringing extremely cold air into the region. An upper-level low approaching from the Pacific region supplied the moisture.
To be clear, this is a weather event. I am not attributing it to climate change at all. However, I do want to conclude with something that is very counterintuitive to many people. There is a growing body of evidence (and a few counter-narratives) in the peer review literature that suggests that because the Arctic region is warming, there is less of a difference in temperature between the polar and tropic regions. That difference, called a gradient, is what determines the strength of the jet stream. If the difference is smaller due to so-called Arctic Amplification (warming in the Arctic), the jet stream would be wavier. The “so what” is that a jet stream with greater wave amplitude means more extreme troughs or “dips” with cold air and more extreme ridges or “humps” with warm air. In other words, the extremes on both sides of the temperature range are amplified.
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Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2019/09/29/the-blizzard-in-the-rockies-doesnt-disprove-climate-change-but-people-will-say-it-anyhow/
The following image seems to have upset Dr. Shepherd, because some cruel contrarians are using this image to mock the urgency of our global warming emergency.
Now don’t any of you go upsetting Dr. Shepherd even further by suggesting what he wrote doesn’t make sense.
Update (EW): h/t Right-Handed Shark points out Dr. Shepherd was not nearly so coy a few months ago when he linked the record heatwave in Europe to global warming.
Article is pure BS. If global warming is causing more frequent or severe cold outbreaks then this should manifest itself in the observational temperature history. Specifically, the warmest days should increase over time as one would expect with a warming planet, but if their proposed theory is true then the coldest days would not be expected to remain steady or drop.
So if the author’s theory is correct, the variance of temperatures should be expected to widen over time. However, the opposite is happening. The range in observed temperatures is actually slightly decreasing:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/02/04/disrupting-the-theory-on-pv-and-global-warming/
As Larry Kummer opined just the other day: “The volume of activists’ propaganda is too large; it makes rebuttal almost impossible. Joining the doomster parade is the fast track to fame for those in the physical and social sciences. Journals in an ever-widening range of fields just wave through studies about the effects of climate change (a travesty of peer-review). This influence on America’s communication systems is power. It is tactical genius resulting from decades of effort. But as the Germans learned in WWI and WWII (they had to repeat the lesson), tactical excellence cannot overcome strategic errors. Activists rely on doomster messages that are beyond the climate science consensus. This gets attention, might prove to be a strategic error. After generations of bombardment by doomster messages from scores of causes, the US public has become inured to them. “It’s an announcement that the end is nigh. It must be Tuesday.”
“Journals in an ever-widening range of fields just wave through studies about the effects of climate change (a travesty of peer-review)”
Interesting, that nearly every other science admits to an issue with reproductability, yet climate science is immune.
Perhaps that is the most telling thing about this particular discipline…
Oh, that, AND the infamous email about keeping qualified people out of the peer review process itself.
Something that the cheerleaders in the “but…but…but that’s the Climategate emails were debunked” mob never want to discuss (along with the deleting stuff to get out of FOI requests).
It does get hectic at the command center for global warming messaging. Every twist of the jet stream and local weather event must now be managed with conformist statements, misdirection plays, and use of phrases like “growing body of evidence.” Such efforts do rely heavily on the assumption that the masses are too ignorant to question it.
Frost in Montana. Snowstorm in the Dakotas.
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The original worry about CO2 was that additional CO2 in the air would absorb infrared radiation re-radiated from the earth, causing the atmosphere to become slightly warmer, which could induce more evaporation of water and possibly heavier rains, and/or melting of the ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica.
But “global warming” CANNOT cause snowstorms. Snow can only form in a cloud if there is enough COLD air that can remove the heat of fusion (heat released when water turns to snow) without the air warming above the freezing point. If the entire atmosphere warmed up due to excess CO2, there would be fewer cold air-masses and fewer snowstorms.
Extreme weather (of both kinds) occurs when the jet stream flows northeast or southeast instead of due east. Storms which follow the jet stream (in the northern hemisphere) bring cold air southward to the north and west of the jet stream, and bring warm air northward to the south and east of the jet stream. If the jet stream is far south, areas to the north have unusually cold weather, and if the jet stream is far north, areas to the south have unusually warm weather. At the same time it was snowing in Montana, most of the southeastern United States had record heat. There was also an intense storm over the Plains last April, where the temperature contrast was such that there was snow in western Kansas while it was 85 degrees in eastern Kansas.
These “troughs” or “ridges” in the jet stream do cause extreme weather, but do not affect “global average temperature” much. The polar regions have a certain mass of air, and if polar air is drawn southward somewhere, it must be replaced by warmer air moving northward at a different longitude. Near an intense storm, the counterclockwise circulation leads to some warm air being pushed westward into the colder air mass along the north edge of the storm, and cold air being pushed eastward along the south edge of the storm, which tends to mix the air masses and moderate the temperatures. If there is enough mixing, the temperature gradient across the storm decreases, which weakens the storm.
Thanks for that summary.
Of remaining interest is the condition of stronger jet stream activity in NH summers during solar minimum conditions. If there are enough of those uncharacteristic summer storm patterns, could they collectively alter global averages? Then multiply that over 4-5 weak solar cycles such as SC 12-16 and SC 24, 25…
https://leif.org/research/Prediction-of-SC25.pdf
slide 18
Excellent article thanks, I think we ha e been seeing the beginning of the GSM for the last two years
Heres a snap shot video of the very early snow in USA and Europe heavely biased on the GSM theme, reduced crops and a time line for GSM
https://youtu.be/By-5akYR7Gc
You can make a good case for AGW resulting in more snow in already cold regions in the middle of winter. If Chicago gets 2metres of snow this January, yep, that could plausibly be due to a warming atmosphere, more evaporation, more moisture, more snow, the temperatures are normally well below freezing so even with warming you’ll still get snow.
Trying to use the same explanation for massive dumps of snow, in September, in temperate regions, is just witless. It’s the jetstream, AGW does something to the jetstream, this is post hoc reasoning, its a crock.
Oh, well you know, for 2 months of the summer here we had extremely normal weatherr and they were very quiet. In late spring and in late summer we had a warm dry spell and they began screaming that the sky was falling. Now it will get cold and they will scream the sky is falling. Is the weather not allowed to deviate more than 1 degree Fahrenheit from average norms before the panic sets in now?
As a side note one of my most liberal friends told me privately today she has just been ignoring the Greta thing because she thinks “having a 16 year old tell the UN what to do is stupid”. There is yet hope.
While they are getting snow storms out west here Ohio we are have a heat wave. Depending where you are 100 year record highs are being broken. (Subject to weather station locations.)
This is south of Jackson, WY – south of Montana …
https://www.wyoroad.info/highway/webcameras/US26287WindRiverLake/US26287WindRiverLake.html
– JPP
That stop sign by mid or the end of winter usually gets buried in snow
– JPP
It’s no longer difficult to show that CO2, although increasing, has nothing to do with our current warming. Alarmists, rather than taking advantage of earlier global warming data, have instead used a cherry-picked short-term correlation between CO2 and temperature from 1975 to the 2000s. (The IPCC admitted there was a temperature “hiatus” in the 2000s. There was a global cooling between 1945 and 1975.)
The only other argument favoring CO2 is, when added to a closed container, the temperature therein increases somewhat. However, the open atmosphere is hardly a closed container. Satellites detect heat escaping to space and closed containers do not experience planetary-level feedbacks.
The proponents of anthropogenic-caused global warming invariably DENY that the Medieval Warming Period (MWP, 1,000 years ago) was global and likely warmer than it is now. The alarmists acknowledge only that Europe experienced the MWP. (They had no choice – climate in that region is too well documented!) Alarmists apparently must take this unjustifiable position because their computer models cannot replicate the earlier global warmings. Their computer models require an increasing CO2 level, plus depend even more on yet another ASSUMPTION – that water vapor feedback is the actual culprit, causing 2 to 3 times the temperature increase brought on by the increase in CO2.
The global temperature increase during the MWP and the earlier global warmings could not have been influenced by CO2 because there was no increase in CO2, not during the MWP, nor during any of the earlier global warmings before the MWP. The problem for alarmists is that it becomes obvious that our current warming (such as it is) might also be due to NATURAL climate variation. That, of course, conflicts with Mann’s hockey stick graph. Mann recently lost a suit he brought against Dr. Tim Ball years ago. Ball apparently implied that at least some of Mann’s work was fraudulent. Now Mann must pay all of Dr Ball’s legal expenses. Mann succeeded in extending the duration of that lawsuit by delaying a dismissal, agreeing to provide his “work”, at or before the new termination date, but chose to ignore that agreement later.
In case you have any doubt about Mann’s dubious hockey stick, it’s also easy to show (and easy to understand) that the MWP was indeed global and at least as warm as now. While that proves nothing directly about the cause of our current warming (such as it is) it speaks loudly about the credibility of the folks who DENY that the MWP was global and at least as warm as now. The link below provide the MWP global study, among other things.
https://principia-scientific.org/empirical-evidence-refutes-greenhouse-gas-theory/
Nonetheless the question remains. Why did the alarmists choose CO2 as the culprit when there is no evidence that CO2, a trace gas, has ever had any impact on our planet’s temperature? There was obviously some uncertainty. Phil Jones, one of the prominent alarmist early players, stated that if the MWP was global and as warm as now, then that was a “different ballgame”. Alarmists decided instead to deny that the MWP was global and at least as warm as now.
It’s obvious now, if not then, that a more rational approach would have involved a closer investigation of the earlier global warmings, particularly the MWP, before introducing speculation about CO2.
Some time ago Henrik Svensmark, a Danish physicist, and some associates, came up with a theory which does make use of, and explain, the historical data. Svensmark’s theory involves sun activity modulating the level of a rather steady steam of cosmic rays intent on penetrating the lower atmosphere. (CERN certified some time ago that cosmic rays may influence cloud cover.) Until very recently we have been experiencing a high level of sun activity. During such periods the cloud coverage of the earth is lower. More radiation reaches the earth so it becomes warmer. However, a very low level of sun activity is now underway. If the sun remains inactive for a significant duration, Svensmark would expect a cooling.
At this stage of the game, whether or not Svensmark’s theory holds up, it appears that more attention needs to be directed at historical data, and increasing CO2 should be of more concern to botanists and health researchers than climatologists. Since CO2 increase was the only possibility for human activity being responsible for warming, it appears that humanity is off that hook.
Oct 1, 2019 Big Business’ Climate Charade | NEO Review: 59/19
There is no doubt human activity is destroying the environment. The only thing worse, however, is when the worst environmental offenders on earth – massive corporations, banks, and governments – hijack public interest in undoing that damage.
https://youtu.be/UbTuIHH6ArA