Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The recent Mothers Day Freeze which smashed cold records across the Midwest, East and South has not deterred Northern Illinois University from making an end of snow prediction.
Climate change could dramatically reduce U.S. snowstorms
by Northern Illinois University
MAY 26, 2020A new study led by Northern Illinois University scientists suggests American winters late this century could experience significant decreases in the frequency, intensity and size of snowstorms.
Under an unabated greenhouse gas emissions scenario, the study projects 28% fewer snowstorms on average per year over central and eastern portions of North America by the century’s last decade, with one-third the amount of snow or frozen precipitation and a 38% loss in average snowstorm size.
“If we do little to mitigate climate change, the winter season will lose much of its punch in the future,” said Walker Ashley, an NIU professor of meteorology and lead author of the study, published today (May 25) in Nature Climate Change.
“The snow season will start later and end earlier,” Ashley said. “Generally, what we consider an abnormally mild winter now, in terms of the number and intensity of snowstorms, will be the harshest of winters late this century. There will be fewer snowstorms, less overall precipitation that falls as snow and almost a complete removal of snow events in the southern tier of the United States.“
…
The study is believed to be the first to objectively identify and track individual snowstorm projections of the distant future—from minor snow accumulations, to average winter storms, to crippling blizzards.
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Read more: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-climate-snowstorms.html
The abstract of the study;
Reduced frequency and size of late-twenty-first-century snowstorms over North America
Walker S. Ashley, Alex M. Haberlie & Vittorio A. Gensini
Nature Climate Change (2020) Cite this article
Understanding how snowstorms may change in the future is critical for estimating impacts on water resources and the Earth and socioeconomic systems that depend on them. Here we use snowstorms as a marker to assess the mesoscale fingerprint of climate change, providing a description of potential changes in winter weather event occurrence, character and variability in central and eastern North America under a high anthropogenic emissions pathway. Snowstorms are segmented and tracked using high-resolution, snow water equivalent output from dynamically downscaled simulations which, unlike global climate models, can resolve important mesoscale features such as banded snow. Significant decreases are found in the frequency and size of snowstorms in a pseudo-global warming simulation, including those events that produce the most extreme snowfall accumulations. Early and late boreal winter months show particularly robust proportional decreases in snowstorms and snow water equivalent accumulations.
Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0774-4
Climate alarmists just can’t seem to help themselves. Their most extreme models might hindcast absurdity, but climate alarmists choose to believe in their models anyway, so they follow where their models lead.
“climate alarmists choose to believe in their models anyway”
That’s because climate modelers are not scientists and have no idea how to evaluate the reliability of their own models.
Models that are, in any case, predictively useless.
These people blithely continue on because they pay no price for their incompetence. Modelers don’t even know they’re incompetent.
The cure is to stop the money-flow. Utterly. It’s the only way.
By definition, pseudo is anything pretended, not real.
So they admit a simulation based on pretend, not real global warming.
I hope they were funded with pseudo grants.
Don’t they ever get tired of being WRONG?
LOL.
“Climate change could dramatically reduce U.S. snowstorms”
COULD???
Greta explains.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/07/24/greta3/
An admonition from the past:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/6/19/here-come-de-heap-big-warmy.html
From the Phys.org article on this so-called study:
“”There could be benefits in some areas, such as for air and road transportation systems,” Ashley said. “But there also could be serious negative consequences, especially for freshwater resource-dependent industries such as agriculture, recreation, refining, manufacturing, power generation and river and lake transport.”
Why do they think less snow will cause serious negative consequences for any of these industries? Less snow doesn’t mean less precipitation. The study says this decrease in snow will occur in late fall land early spring for the most part. By those points in time the freshwater supplies will have already been mostly determined for these industries by summer and fall precipitation. Snowfall on winter crops like winter wheat primarily provide a protective cover from winter cold. If winter is not as cold then there is less need for snowfall!
This is exactly the type of study Freeman Dyson warned against. The *true* impact of climate change requires a holistic study, not a study of just one factor. The climate is determined by many factors. If these factors are not compiled as a holistic whole then the studies are worthless for predictive conclusions!
Don’t just tell us we are going to have less winter snow. Tell us if this means we will have wetter or dryer springs as well. Tell us if we are going to have longer growing seasons or shorter growing seasons. Tell us what sub-soil moisture will be in the early spring. Tell us what sub-soil temperatures will be in the early spring.
*THEN* perhaps we can judge what the actual change in climate will bring!
It’s been known since forever that regional climate models have no predictive power, including when they’re downscaled from global models.
In Nature Climate Change, the very same journal as the above supposed prediction, we have this warning:
D. Maraun, et al., (2017) Towards process-informed bias correction of climate change simulations N.C.C. 7, 764–773, here.
Abstract: Biases [that is, errors, mistakes, and wrongnesses — P] in climate model simulations introduce biases [that is, errors, mistakes, and wrongnesses — P] in subsequent impact simulations. Therefore, bias correction methods are operationally used to post-process regional climate projections. However, many problems have been identified, and some researchers question the very basis of the approach. Here we demonstrate that a typical cross-validation is unable to identify improper use of bias correction. Several examples show the limited ability of bias correction to correct and to downscale variability, and demonstrate that bias correction can cause implausible climate change signals. Bias correction cannot overcome major model errors, and naive application might result in ill-informed adaptation decisions. We conclude with a list of recommendations and suggestions for future research to reduce, post-process, and cope with climate model biases.(my bold)
“ill-informed adaptation decisions” indeed. Read it and weep, Walker S. Ashley, Alex M. Haberlie, and Vittorio A. Gensini
When some paper says there’ll be less snow in some region, based on projections of some regional climate model, even the authors of the paper know that it’s all just speculative bushwah.
One wonders whether the editors of Nature Climate Change suffer from cognitive dissonance.
How do you correct for uncertainty? If you make two runs of the same model and get two different answers but both are within the uncertainty interval then how do you even evaluate what bias to correct? What do you cross-correlate with? Another model? Again, if each have an uncertainty interval and the difference between the two is within that interval then how do you even evaluate what bias to correct?
To me it’s like a physicist saying “If I fudge Planck’s Constant just a smidge then my space-time calculation comes out right” Huh? How do you know what “right” is?
Poor Dr. Viner it appears, was simply ahead of his time.
within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”
It does sound like the alleged researchers above took the previous decades old “end-of-snow” prediction, changed a few words, extended when their forecast is valid then proclaimed the same nonsense.
If these researchers are so good, they should be able to accurately predict next year’s snow levels.
I was always taught about “weasel” words. Could, can and might. Meaningless waffle.
Weasel words are part and parcel of Science, necessary limiters, and always have been. But, as you add more and more weasel words, a paper’s significance becomes thinner and thinner, until it says nothing at all, an empty publication, a phantom canid baying at the moon.
Will Illinois still be a viable state late this century?
…not viable NOW!
Claiming an almost complete removal of snow events from southern states sure is a low hanging fruit…
since that’s what we call “normal” down here.
If there actually is less cold weather, it will be a benefit for the health of all life, plants, animals, and humans. Did that get included in the article?
Mosh will tell you that the consensus of science and projections is that some will get more snow, some will get less, and some will stay the same.
Meanwhile here in the U P we are under a freeze warning for tomorrow night……
“…Reduced frequency and size of late-twenty-first-century snowstorms over North America…”
They even specifically mention reduced size of snowfall events the eastern US. But…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/11/26/with-climate-change-washington-may-have-entered-era-more-blockbuster-snowstorms-less-snow-overall/
“…With climate change, Washington may have entered era of more blockbuster snowstorms but less snow overall…”
More blockbuster snowstorms seems like an increase in size….funny how that works…
‘The study is believed to be the first to objectively identify and track individual snowstorm projections of the distant future—from minor snow accumulations, to average winter storms, to crippling blizzards.’
Distant Future? I’ll start paying attention when their ‘projections’ are for 10,000 years from now. Otherwise, FO…
As someone who grew up in a suburb of Chicago, I think I can be confident in saying that most people will be happy if there were less snow and cold in the winter.
Chicago winters can be brutal.
Just never ends with these Snow Deniers.
All the way back to Al Gore and “climate scientists” in the late 19080’s
So their “high resolution” models projected 70-80 years out say:
“28% fewer snowstorms on average per year over central and eastern portions of North America by the century’s last decade, with one-third the amount of snow or frozen precipitation and a 38% loss in average snowstorm size.” They “know” the answer to two significant figures, 28 and 38 percent. Really? Are they sure it might not be 27.53% and 38.44275%?? Wow! I would not have believed 30 and 40%, but 28 and 38? Put some error bars around that, say + or – 50%.
Gotta love how they claim the “study is believed to be the first to objectively …” Everybody is looking to be the first at something.
Yada, yada, yada.
“28% fewer snowstorms” ? And how is that supposed to be bad news ?
Could someone please make my day and overbid with”40% fewer cumulonimbus” ?
And ten years ago Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years.
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
Context is everything.
“They then tracked snowstorms to see to how those winter events would change in a climate that was warmer by about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit).
”
This is what is known as a worst case scenario.
What if Yellowstone blows its lid?
What if an asteroid hits?
What if it warms by 5C
what if.
what if is NOT a prediction.
what if is a SCENARIO
FFS
So totally IMAGINARY !
Thanks Mosh ! 🙂
What if?
What if I don’t wake up tomorrow morning?
All this AGW conjecture will have been for nothing!
Oh, the humanity!
Time after Time we have climate research papers with authors and co-authors whose names we cannot pronounce, let alone spell. Foreign looking names.
Foreigners are equally able to do good research as people with names like the Smith or Brown, familiar to English speaking countries.
But, when we meet a barrage of author names from the regions in and around Germany, we have to question if we are meeting a planned program of deliberate activism that could be contrary to our own broad aspirations.
What would you deduce for a working hypothesis if globally, papers on science mostly included the author name of “Kim”? That Korea had some special interest?
Geoff S
Let’s assume they are correct for a second *quit laughing*
From my seat in ND, milder winters don’t sound like a bad thing.
They have learnt their lesson.
This prediction cannot be falsified for 80 years, by which time they will all be dead,
It is like politicians setting targets decades away, safe in the knowledge that they will not be in power when the date arrives.