From head to toe there is barely a patch of land not blanketed by the heaviest snowfall in 50 years.
It was taken at 11.15am on Thursday by the NASA satellite Terra and transmitted to the University of Dundee Satellite Receiving Station.
Snow UK: what happens when it hits -18C The image gives an impression of just how deep with snow has been across most parts, including the southern belt of England: parts of Hampshire received more than 16 inches in just a few hours earlier this week.
Only the western coastal extremes, such as Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck in the south and more surprisingly Jura and Islay in the Inner Hebrides, have escaped widespread coverage.
The picture also demonstrates how little thawing has taken place, as most of the snow lying across lowland parts fell on Tuesday and Wednesday. That betrays the continuing icy north and north-easterly winds which have ensured temperatures remain low, pulling in sub-zero air from the Arctic and Scandinavia.
Temperatures early on Thursday morning dropped as low as 1F (-17C) in Benson, Oxfordshire, making it as cold as Moscow, while parts of Manchester saw the mercury fall to 5F (-15C). Even central London recorded 27F (-3C).
Up to 8,000 homes across Sussex, Kent, Surrey and Hampshire were left without electricity for hours after the conditions affected power lines. Plunging temperatures have caused major transport problems as the snow turned to ice, with many councils warning their grit supplies were running low. Most parts are expected to remain below freezing on Friday, warming only marginally at the weekend. See post here.
Back on December 12th 2009 I posted an article titled:
Solar geomagnetic activity is at an all time low - what does this mean for climate?
We then had a string of sunspots in December that marked what many saw as a rejuvenation of solar cycle 24 after a long period of inactivity. See December sunspots on the rise.
It even prompted people like Joe Romm to claim: “The hottest decade ends and since there’s no Maunder mininum - sorry deniers! - the hottest decade begins”.
But what Joe doesn’t understand is that sunspots are just one proxy, the simplest and most easily observed, for magnetic activity of the sun. It is the magnetic activity of the sun which is central to Svensmark’s theory of galactic cosmic ray modulation, which may affect cloud cover formation on earth, thus affecting global temperatures. As the theory goes, lower magnetic activity of the sun lets more GCR’s into our solar system, which produce microscopic cloud seed trails (like in a Wilson cloud chamber) in our atmosphere, resulting in more cloud cover, resulting in a cooler planet. Ric Werme has a nice pictorial here.
When I saw the SWPC Ap geomagnetic index for Dec 2009 posted yesterday, my heart sank. With the sunspot activity in December, I thought surely the Ap index would go up. Instead, it crashed.
Annotated version enlarged here.. Source data here.
When you look at the Ap index on a larger scale, all the way back to 1844 when measurements first started, the significance of this value of “1” becomes evident. This graph from Dr. Leif Svalgaard shows where we are today in relation to the past 165 years.
With apologies to Dr. Svalgaard, I’ve added the “1” line and the most current SWPC value of “1” for Dec 2009. As you can see, we’ve never had such a low value before, and the only place lower to go is “zero”. But this is only part of the story. With the Ap index dwindling to a wisp of magnetism, it bolsters the argument made by Livingston and Penn that sunspots may disappear altogether by 2015. See Livingston and Penn - Sunspots may vanish by 2015.
Above: Sunspot magnetic fields measured by Livingston and Penn from 1992 - Feb. 2009 using an infrared Zeeman splitting technique. [more] from the WUWT article: NASA: Are Sunspots Disappearing?
The theory goes that once the magnetic strength falls below 1500 gauss, sunspots will become invisible to us.
Note where we are on this curve that Dr. Svalgaard also keeps of LP’s measurements:
They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating. And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder.
Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years. On New Year’s Day 10 extreme weather warnings were in place, with heavy snow expected in northern England and Scotland.
Despite New Year celebrations passing off mostly unaffected by the weather, drivers in parts of the country, particularly areas of Northumberland, Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands, were warned not to travel unless absolutely necessary.
The continued freezing temperatures did not signal bad news for everyone however. CairnGorm Mountain said it has had its best Christmas holiday season in 14 years. With heavy snow in the area, the resort said that over a four-day period following Christmas Day it has had more than 8,000 skiers and snowboarders using its runs - including 800 on New Year’s Eve. Over 15,000 skiers have used the resort since the start of December, compared to 2,000 last year.
A spokesman for the Met Office said: “It is certainly a while since we had cold weather like this and there isn’t any sign of any milder weather on the way.”
Considerable amounts of “showery snow” is expected over Scotland and eastern England over the coming days, he said, whilst the rest of the United Kingdom would remains dry but very cold.
He added that temperatures in the Scottish highlands could dip to minus 16 degrees while even southern areas of England could see lows of minus 7 (celsius).
The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years. Paul Michaelwaite, forecaster for NetWeather.tv, said: “It is looking like this winter could be in the top 20 cold winters in the last 100 years. It’s going to be very cold the for the next 10 days and although there could be a milder spell at some stage the indications are that the second half of the month will be even colder.”
Revellers braved temperatures of minus 6 degrees to see in the New Year, with only the celebrations in Inverness being cancelled because of the cold. Matt Dobson, forecaster for MeteoGroup, the Press Association’s weather division, said last month had been the coldest December for 13 years. “It has been the coldest December on average since 1996,” he said. “The second half of the month was very cold indeed but the first half was relatively mild. If it had been colder in the first few weeks we would have seen more records broken.”
Police divers searching a lake for two duck hunters who had been missing over Christmas have found a second body. The hunt for Paul Lichfield had been called off over Christmas because sub-zero temperatures made searching the ice covered lake too perilous. However, as the weather conditions improved police frogmen resumed their search for the 30-year-old at Brightwell Lake at Ringstead, Northants. Police found the body of his friend, Philip Surridge, before Christmas after the pair fell in on December 22 whilst trying to rescue their dog.
Meanwhile, a fleet of gritters (salt trucks many fitted with plows) in Perth, central Scotland, was grounded this week because it was so cold, leaving roads untreated in temperatures of minus 10 degrees. Perth and Kinross Council said the gritters were unable to leave the depot after the extreme weather led to difficulties in refuelling.
Perth resident Ian Thomson said: “I’ve heard of the rail companies blaming the wrong kind of snow and leaves on the line for disruption but for the council to say it was too cold to get the gritters out is just ridiculous.”
If we happen to see an unusually large number of winter storms this year, we suspect some reporter or some scientist will insist we are witnessing the effects of global warming, or at least declare we are witnessing climate change before our very eyes. Oppositely, if this year’s winter storms are infrequent, we will expect to learn from someone that we have seen the effects of climate change. In fact, in a recent paper in the International Journal of Climatology, the authors begin their piece noting “One area of growing concern in climate science is the impact that global warming could have through modulations of the nature and characteristics of naturally occurring extreme events, such as severe mid-latitude storms.” In the very next sentence, the research team from the United Kingdom and Australia state “However, both observational and modelling studies of historical and future storminess patterns and scenarios are divided on the role that global warming has played, or could play, in changing patterns of mid-latitude storms”. Once again, we find any straightforward link between global warming and winter storms is a bit more dicey than originally thought...there is always more to the story.
The authors of the latest piece are Rob Allan, Simon Tett, and Lisa Alexander of the UK Met Office, the University of Edinburgh, and Monash University in Australia; funding for the research was provided by various sources including the UK Ministry of Defense...go figure? Anyway, Allan et al. made use of a newly digitized 3-hourly station surface pressure data for the United Kingdom and Ireland to extend previous analyses that used data beginning in the 1950s; the new dataset allowed analyses to extend back to 1920. They used the 3-hourly surface pressure data to identify severe winter storms, and their analyses suggested that no major severe winter storm would go undetected by their network of stations.
Allan et al. divided their work into two sub-periods including October - December (OND) and a second period including January - March (JFM). The first figure (Figure1) of special interest to us is below, and it immediately shows the importance of having the additional 30 years of data. The authors note “pronounced inter-annual variations in OND severe storminess across the British Isles are evident” “with most prominent activity in the 1920s and 1990s. There is evidence in the literature to support the 1920s period of a high frequency of severe storms in OND.”
Figure 1. History of OND decadal average severe storm frequency over the British Isles from 1920 (from Allan et al., 2009).
The authors also conducted the analyses for the JFM period, and when the results for OND are combined with the JFM period, the pattern below is established (Figure2). Allan et al. conclude “The results from this study suggest that natural climate variability will play an important role in future changes in storminess, and thus could overwhelm any anthropogenic signal there might be.” We completely agree, and yet, the popular press continues to suggest that global warming is to blame for anything from few storms to big storms - it is all climate change!
Figure 2. History of October - March decadal average severe storm frequency over the British Isles from 1920 (from Allan et al., 2009).
A second article on storminess in Europe takes on a different perspective in terms of time period; Sorrel et al. were interested in reconstructing storm activity over the past 3,000 years. The research team is from impressive institutions in France, and effort was funded by the French state, the Haute Normandie Region and the other regions of the Paris Basin, the Agence de l’Eau Seine Normandie, and the industrial firms of the Haute-Normandie. Allan et al. collected sediment cores near the mouth of the Seine River in northwestern France and they used radiocarbon dating and paleomagnetic information to date the material in the core. The marine hydrodynamics are reflective of storm activity in the Seine River basin, and the sediment patterns within the core reveal periods of frequent large storms and periods with few or any storms.
Sorrel et al. found periods of intense storm activity around 2,700 BP and 1,250 BP, and they note both of these were unusually cool periods. They note that the Medieval Warm Period (around 900 AD to 1200 AD) was a time of few storms, while “In the subsequent 600 years after the MWP, corresponding to the so-called Little Ice Age (LIA), our proxy records mark the return towards more energetic conditions in the Seine estuary”. Basically, they showed over and over that storm activity increases in cold periods and diminishes in warm periods. Claiming that global warming will result in increased mid-latitude storm activity is simply not consistent with 1,000s of years of climate information collected in northwestern France.
Finally, President Obama returned home from Copenhagen recently only to find a massive snowfall covering much of the Northeast, including Washington DC. With climate change fresh on his mind, he might have wondered global warming impacted the massive winter storm. Fortunately, an article has just appeared in the Journal of Climate on trends in extreme snowfall seasons in the United States. To make a long story really short, Kunkel et al. conclude “The 1900-01 to 2006-07 trends in the annual percentage of high- and low-extreme snowfall years for the entire United States are not statistically significant.” Once again, there is no evidence of any trend upward or downward in extreme storm events in the winter season.
References:
Allan, R., S. Tett, and L. Alexander. 2009. Fluctuations in autumn–winter severe storms over the British Isles: 1920 to present. International Journal of Climatology, 29, 357-371.
Kunkel, K.E., M.A. Palecki, L. Ensor, D. Easterling, K.E. Hubbard, D. Robinson, and K. Redmond. 2009. Trends in twentieth-century U.S. extreme snowfall seasons. Journal of Climate, 22, 6204-6216.
Sorrel, P., B. Tessier, F. Demory, N. Delsinne, D. Mouaze. 2009. Evidence for millennial-scale climatic events in the sedimentary infilling of a macrotidal estuarine system, the Seine estuary (NW France). Quaternary Science Reviews, 28, 499-516.
As representatives of the nations of the world meet in Copenhagen to attempt to restrict the use of energy produced from coal, gas and oil in the guise of fighting global warming, many scientists and scholars are expressing grave concerns about what they are trying to do. Recognizing these concerns, we have posted a series of YouTube video vignettes in which such scientists and scholars present the reasons behind them.
We invite you to view the videos and do all you can to inform the public about their presence. Each of the videos can be accessed from the CO2 Science website, from the CO2Science YouTube channel , and other locations across the Internet, such as here. A categorized-list of the videos we have posted is presented on these sites. Wise decisions are made only when all pertinent aspects of an issue are examined. It is our sincere hope that the information presented in these videos will elucidate important truths that are presently ignored. See four posted videos with Dr. Lindzen, Dr. Soon, John Coleman and Joe D’Aleo on KUSI’s web site here.
See also audio interviews with many scientists on Its Rainmaking Time here.
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Urban vs Rural in US
A comparison of data from urban and rural sites to see if there is an Urban Heat Effect. Data from NASA GISS. Graphs made with Microsoft Excel.
A Statement by Mr Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, Australia.
The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Australian Parliament to repudiate the Copenhagen giveaways promised by PM Rudd to the failed states of Africa and the welfare beggars of the islands.
The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that the three Climate Crusaders, Obama, Brown and Rudd, had been comprehensively conned in Copenhagen by African mendicants and fakers from the islands.
They have agreed to hand over mega-bucks of our money (anywhere from $5 billion to $100 billion) as compensation for alleged damage caused by our production of carbon dioxide - the Africans citing climate damage and the islanders claiming rising sea levels. Even a cursory examination of the facts would prove that both of these claims are fraudulent.
There is no evidence that carbon dioxide has caused global warming, or causes damage to any aspect of life on earth. The vast majority of earth’s warming originates from the sun, and fluctuations there are the major cause of climate changes. In addition, careful recent surveys show no unusual rising of sea levels.
Moreover, all plant and animal life on earth benefit from industry’s production of carbon dioxide. Crops, grasses, forests and fruit trees are growing more profusely, the planet is becoming greener, and the oceans can produce more algae, more plankton and more life - all because of this free bounty of aerial plant food released whenever carbon fuels are burnt. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant - it is a boon to all mankind. Africa and the islanders should pay us to release more valuable carbon dioxide, not the reverse.
This giveaway is just a back door extension of the foreign aid program which has done so much harm to both donors and recipients. The vast majority of mendicant African nations have sterilised vast agricultural and mineral resources by their failed political systems. The foreign aid has mainly assisted their dictatorial governments to stay in power, harm their people and amass ill-gotten wealth.
To increase the resources controlled by these dictators does nothing to improve the lot of their ordinary citizens. What they need is not welfare or climate compensation, but investment funds, low cost reliable energy, efficient infrastructure, sound currency, fair taxation and secure property rights.’
For the beneficial effects caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere go here.
To watch Christopher Monckton interview a Greenpeace spokesman in Copenhagen go here.
For a summary on some of the tactics used to manufacture a Climate Consensus go here.
For a look at how global warming is affecting the Canadian Prairies go here.
For a great story on how a coal powered steam train rescued passengers when the electric trains failed during the global warming snap in Britain go here.
Climategate in Detail By Vincent Gray, NZ Newsletter
I have just spent a whole day reading details of the Emails from the Hadley Centre that are contained in the vast package of material, known as Climategate. as portrayed on the website of Dr John P Costella here.
They are really astonishing. Many are yet to be revealed generally. They display a network of conspiracy to defraud, manipulate, distort and intimidate which even I, who have been in the middle of it from the beginning, have difficulty in believing. Dr Costello even identified excerpts which are likely to be used in the trials of some of the participants,
The one where Phil Jones states that he has got to “hide the decline” shown by recent tree ring temperatures because they did not show the required global warming has already been pilloried. I also liked the one where Tom Wigley advocated putting in the data “Whether they are correct or not”.
It was interesting to read how they organized the dismissal of Chris de Freitas as an Editor of “Climate Science” for publishing a paper they did not like.
It is far too long to summarize, so let me just copy some of the most recent specimens, from Kevin Trenberth
“Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The data published in the August [20]09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”
“How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter[?] We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty! “
“Here are some of the issues as I see them: Saying it is natural variability is not an explanation. What are the physical processes? Where did the heat go?But the resulting evaporative cooling means the heat goes into atmosphere and should be radiated to space: so we should be able to track it with C[louds and the] E[arth’s] R[adiant] E[nergy] S[ystem] data. Th[at] data are unfortunately w[a]nting and so too are the cloud data. The ocean data are also lacking although some of that may be related to the ocean current changes and burying heat at depth where it is not picked up. If it is sequestered at depth then it comes back to haunt us later and so we should know about it.”
From Mike Mann to Kevin Trenberth and others
“ that doesn’t mean we can explain exactly what’s going on”.
October 27, 2009: email 1256735067
“It is appropriate that the last word in Climategate go to Mike Mann, explaining what it’s all about. Mike Mann to Phil Jones and Gavin Schmidt:
As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations[.]
And again: it’s tough when even your allies are starting to turn:
[B]e a bit careful about what information you send to Andy [Revkin of the New York Times] and what emails you copy him in on. He’s not as predictable as we’d like[.] “
