Note that 2012 ranked as 5th coldest in Fairbanks and coldest in McGrath. It had very cold water off the coast then and modern day record Bering Sea ice resulted.
Early departure of Bering Sea ice in 2019 due to strong NPAC storms lead to early ocean warming and record early summer high temperatures.
When NCEI has the monthly data, we will repost with graph of Januarys statewide.
Often cold Alaska retards cold in the lower 48.???
See earlier story when heat followed early Bering Sea ice loss in last years’ warmer winter here.
Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, record cold and snow.
And at Kazakh, capital of Kazakhstan, snow brought deep cold. The cold developed over the deep snowcover, the +NAO had Atlantic flow into Europe and Russia, deflecting the cold air south into Kazakhstan and the Middle East.
With the cold continuing in the arctic and Alaska, ice has increased for the second year in a row.
Puget Sound Islanders Look for Hope, Climate Solutions
Islanders Look for Hope, Climate Solutions, in the January 22 Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber link
RESPONSES:
Washington’s Vashon Island residents may be concerned when they hear reports that the world isn’t doing enough on climate change, but they would be very relieved to be informed that the NOAA National Climatic Data Center Climate at a Glance website reports the official Washington climate change data indicating that:
Meteorological winter (December - February) temperatures in Washington’s Puget Sound Lowlands Climate Division have officially trended downward at a rate of 0.2 degrees F per decade during the last 30 winters from 1990 to 2019, even as Washington’s atmospheric CO2 concentrations have continued to increase.
Meteorological winter (December - February) temperatures in Washington’s Puget Sound Lowlands Climate Division have officially trended downward at a rate of 0.6 degrees F per decade during the last 20 winters from 2000 to 2019, even as Washington-s atmospheric CO2 concentrations have continued to increase.
Meteorological winter (December - February) temperatures in Washington’s Puget Sound Lowlands Climate Division have officially trended downward at a rate of 1.5 degrees F per decade during the last 10 winters from 2010 to 2019, even as Washington’s atmospheric CO2 concentrations have continued to increase.
Meteorological winter (December - February) temperatures in Washington’s Puget Sound Lowlands Climate Division have officially trended downward at a rate of 13.2 degrees F per decade during the last 5 winters from 2015 to 2019, even as Washington’s atmospheric CO2 concentrations have continued to increase!
Meteorological winter (December - February) temperatures in Washington’s Puget Sound Lowlands Climate Division have officially trended downward at ever-increasing downward rates during the last 30 winters from 1990 to 2019, even as Washington’s atmospheric CO2 concentrations have continued to increase.
Dr. Gordon Fulks replied to the newspaper:
The best way to deal with climate hysteria is to learn something about our climate. As soon as you do, you realize that it is far more complex than those in the media maintain. It is certainly not a one parameter (carbon dioxide fits all) situation.
In fact carbon dioxide appears to have its greatest negative effect when the level drops below 200 ppmv, and plant life starts to die. That turns high deserts, like the Gobi in China, into wastelands with vast dust storms that sweep the planet for tens of thousands of years. That turns continental glaciers that cover large portions of the Northern Hemisphere darker, such that they begin to melt. During a Milankovitch Cycle ‘Great Summer’ lasting 5,000 years, the Earth is then able to break free of a 100,000 year Ice Age and bring us into an Interglacial Period like the present Holocene Climate Optimum. Those generally last about 10,000 years, before another ‘Great Winter’ drags us into the next Ice Age. When that happens, Vashon Island will be again covered by an ice sheet thousands of feet thick!
But recent legitimate science (not the Global Warming Bad Science) suggests that we may have 50,000 years before the next Ice Age, due to both decreasing Obliquity (decreasing tilt of the Earth’s axis) and decreasing orbital Eccentricity. The giant planet Jupiter, more than two and a half times as massive as all of the other planets in the solar system combined, causes these Milankovitch Cycles.
As to Greenland melting and other climate hysteria, let me point out that Greenland has always lost ice into the North Atlantic as RMS Titanic discovered a hundred years ago. And Greenland just set an all-time record low of -87 F at the National Science Foundation site of Summit Camp.
If you want more authoritative information on our climate, you should visit such sites as wuwt, icecap.us, and co2coalition. I am one of the unpaid Directors of the CO2 Coalition, along with Princeton Professor of Physics Will Happer, Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore, and Dr. Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist to have walked on the moon.
MUST READ BACKGROUND ON THE PLANS AFOOT here written by Zuzana Janosova Den Boer, who experienced Communist rule in Czechoslovakia before coming to Canada.
And this post from Greenpeace co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore.
--------------------------
US Chamber of Commerce projects $130 a barrel oil prices from a Fracking Ban and implementation of any of the Democrat plans they clam will put an end to heat waves, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, sea level rises.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned about the implications of banning fracking ahead of Thursday night’s Democratic debate.
If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren fulfill their pledges to ban fracking upon becoming president in 2021, it would cause natural gas prices to rise by 324%, causing household energy bills to “more than quadruple,” the Chamber projected in a new report.
By 2025, drivers would pay twice as much at the pump for gasoline as oil prices spike to $130 per barrel.
A fracking ban would eliminate 19 million jobs and reduce GDP by $7.1 trillion by 2025. Most of the job losses would occur in Texas, home to the oil-and-gas rich Permian Basin, where more than 3 million jobs would be affected.
Oil and gas production is also a significant contributor to federal, state and local revenue, the Chamber notes. Tax revenue at the local, state, and federal levels would decline by nearly a combined $1.9 trillion if a Democrat bans fracking.
Not great for emissions either: Banning fracking would have a questionable impact on emissions.
In the near term, coal use might increase to offset the loss of electricity from natural gas plants. That could increase emissions overall, even if fracking limits lowered emissions of methane and raised the price of oil.
It’s also challenging to replace gas use from buildings and in the manufacturing sector immediately, so that would likely require importing more fossil fuels.
The economy in every country that has moved down an extreme green path have seen skyrocketing energy costs - 3 times our levels.
Renewables are unreliable as the wind doesn’t always blow nor the sun shine. And don’t believe the claims millions of green jobs would result. In Spain, every green job created cost Spain $774,000 in subsidies and resulted in a loss of 2.2 real jobs. Only 1 in 10 green jobs were permanent. Industry left and in Spain unemployment rose to 27.5%.
Tom Steyer is a hypocrite having made his billions from trading coal. He is pushing the globalist agenda and pretending he is just a simple family man and he and his wife started a fund to help people and has come to believe climate change is the greatest threat the world faces. He says his green plan would create millions of great jobs. That has not worked out anywhere it has been tried and the poor have suffered the most.
Many households in the countries that have gone green are said to be in “energy poverty” (25% UK, 15% Germany). The elderly are said in winter to be forced to “choose between heating and eating”. Extreme cold already kills 20 times more than heat according to a study of 74 million deaths in 13 countries.
Politicians in the northeast states are bragging that they stopped the natural gas pipeline, shut down nuclear and coal plants and blocked the northern Pass which would have delivered low cost hydropower from Canada. In Concord, they are now scurrying to try and explain why electricity prices are 50 to 60% higher than the national average here and are speculating they have not moved fast enough with wind and solar. Several states have even established zero carbon emissions. This will lead to soaring energy prices and life-threatening blackouts. For a family of 4 in a modest house with 3 cars, the energy costs could increase over $10,000/year. And by the way like in Europe where this plan was enacted, many will lose their jobs.
Prosperity always delivers a better environment than poverty.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else” Yogi Berra
------------
Dems seek to squash suburban, single-family house zoning, calling it racist, bad for environment
Virginia House Del. Ibraheem Samirah introduced a bill that would override local zoning officials to permit multi-family housing in every neighborhood, changing the character of quiet suburbs. Oregon passed a similar bill, following moves by cities such as Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; and Seattle. Proponents say urban lifestyles are better for the environment and that suburbs are bastions of racial segregation.
Democrats in Virginia may override local zoning to bring high-density housing, including public housing, to every neighborhood statewide - whether residents want it or not.
The measure could quickly transform the suburban lifestyle enjoyed by millions, permitting duplexes to be built on suburban lots in neighborhoods previously consisting of quiet streets and open green spaces. Proponents of “Upzoning” say the changes are necessary because suburbs are bastions of segregation and elitism, as well as bad for the environment.
The move, which aims to provide “affordable housing,” might be fiercely opposed by local officials throughout the state, who have deliberately created and preserved neighborhoods with particular character - some dense and walkable, others semi-rural and private to accommodate people’s various preferences.
But Democrats tout a state-level law’s ability to replace “not in my backyard” with “yes, in your backyard.”
House Delegate Ibraheem Samirah, a Democrat, introduced six housing measures Dec. 19, coinciding with Democrats’ takeover of the state legislature in November.
“Single-family housing zones would become two-zoned,” Samirah told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Areas that would be impacted most would be the suburbs that have not done their part in helping out.”
“The real issues are the areas in between very dense areas which are single-family zoned. Those are the areas that the state is having significant trouble dealing with. They’re living in a bubble,” he said.
He said suburbs were “mostly white and wealthy” and that their local officials - who have historically been in charge of zoning - were ignoring the desires of poor people, who did not have time to lobby them to increase suburban density.
In response to a question about whether people who bought homes in spacious suburbs have valid reasons, not based on discrimination, for preferring to live that way - including a love for nature and desire to preserve woods and streams ‘ he said: “Caring about nature is very important, but the more dense a neighborhood is, the more energy efficient it is.”
He said if local officials seek to change requirements like setbacks to make it impossible to build dense housing in areas zoned to preserve a nature feel, “if they make setbacks to block duplexes, there’d have to be a lawsuit to resolve whether those zoning provisions were necessary.”
He wrote on Facebook, “Because middle housing is what’s most affordable for low-income people and people of color, banning that housing in well-off neighborhoods chalks up to modern-day redlining, locking folks out of areas with better access to schools, jobs, transit, and other services and amenities.”
“I will certainly get pushback for this. Some will call it ‘state overreach.’ Some will express anxiety about neighborhood change. Some may even say that the supply issue doesn’t exist. But the research is clear: zoning is a barrier to more housing and integrated communities,” he continued.
He tweeted Sunday that that would include public housing. “Important Q about new social/public housing programs: where are we going to put the units? Under current zoning, new low-income housing is relegated to underinvested neighborhoods, concentrating poverty more. Ending exclusionary zoning has to be part of broader housing reform,” he said.
Tim Hannigan, chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Committee - in one of the areas Samirah represents -s aid that urban Democrats were waging war on the suburbs.
Residential life, because of the urbanization that would develop,” he told the DCNF. “So much of the American dream is built upon this idea of finding a nice quiet place to raise your family, and that is under assault.”
“This is a power-grab to take away the ability of local communities to establish their own zoning practices… literally trying to change the character of our communities,” he said.
He said suburbs were not equipped to handle the increased traffic, and “inevitably it will just push people to places where they feel they’ll get away from that, they may move to West Virginia to get their little plot of land.”
Minneapolis became the first city to eliminated single family zoning in December 2018, after a push by progressive advocacy groups promoting “equity.” Austin, Texas, and Seattle soon followed suit.
But those cities were amending zoning codes that have always been the domain of local governments. Oregon passed state legislation blocking local governments[ single-family zoning in July, CityLab reported.
It quoted Alex Baca, a Washington, D.C., urbanist with the site Greater Greater Washington, saying that single-family zoning is a tool for wealthy whites to maintain segregated neighborhoods and that the abolition of low-density neighborhoods is necessary for equity.
CityLab acknowledged that “residents might reasonably desire to keep the neighborhoods they love the way they are,” but said that implementing the law at the state level makes sure that those concerns can be more easily ignored.
“By preempting the ability of local governments to set their own restrictive zoning policies, the state policy would circumnavigate the complaints of local NIMBY homeowners who want to block denser housing,” it wrote.
While he implied that suburbs are prejudiced, Samirah himself has a history of anti-Semitic comments, including saying sending money to Israel is worse than funding the Klu Klux Klan.
“I am so sorry that my ill-chosen words added to the pain of the Jewish community, and I seek your understanding and compassion as I prove to you our common humanity,” he said in February.
He interrupted a speech in July by President Donald Trump in Jamestown, Virginia, and said, “You can’t send us back! Virginia is our home.”
His father is Jordanian refugee Sabri Samirah, who authorities banned from the U.S. for a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in part because of his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2014.
-----------
This is just part of a master plan slowly being put in place across the world. Remember this recent story about Ireland.
The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.
You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades - nay centuries - of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.
Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.
Matt Ridley and climate change campaigner Leo Murray debate the future of wind power:
Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.
Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority - three quarters - is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’ sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.
Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.
If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and[a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.
At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.
Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.
As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low-density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.
As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines - killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands - is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal-mining output.
Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.
The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.
The truth is, if you want to power civilisation with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which - thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing - are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.
And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer.
Spectator.co.uk/podcast
Matt Ridley discusses wind power
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow, Co-chief Meteorologist Weatherbell.com
Preliminary Weather Year in Review - A year of Extremes , Now Winter Snow Season Kicks in here. Complete Alarmist Claim Rebuttals (fact-checking the top 12 alarmist claims) here.
On average, it has been a cold year in the prime central growing areas
Growing degree days ran well behind normal.
The last 30 days were very cold with many record lows.
We have had 4,700 record lows the last 30 days, 17,190 this year-to-date, 17,870 the last 365 days (NOAA NCEI Record)
It was a very wet year in the central areas.
NWS Year-to-Date Precipitation Anomalies (inches)
See the departures in rainfall (inches) since April 1 when normally farmers are in the fields to prepare for planting or actually putting seed into the ground.
The average maximum temperatures in the primary corn and bean belt were below normal Note the century trend is flat.
As expected, corn yield forecasts are down, the first year below the trend line in 6 years.
Corn production is down and may fall further.
Soybean production was down below trend line and production was down more than corn.
There is still grain in the field. As of November 10, sixty-six percent of the 2019 acreage was harvested by week’s end, 17 percentage points behind last year and 19 points behind the 5-year average pace. Harvest progress was behind the average pace by 13 percentage points or more in ten of the 18 estimating states. Soybean harvest across the nation was 85 percent complete, 2 percentage points behind last year and 7 points behind the 5-year average.
Early snowcover slowed or stopped harvest.
A window has opened with warming after the killer cold for harvest in the central where there is something worth harvesting.
The next 5 days are warmer than normal.
It begins cooling days 5 to 10 and more so days 10 to 15.
It is wetter and snow will return across the northern states.
Flooded fields Illinois
Snow in Southern Canada on small grains (similar story into the
northern Plains on grains and field crops)
_thumb.gif)
_thumb.png)
