A sudden blast of cold polar air accompanied by heavy precipitation led to heavy snowfall in the Alps at levels below 1600 meters. Read here (in German).
Snow falls in August under 1600 meters elevation in southern Germany.

Up to 35 cm of snow fell at some locations. Wetter.24 reports:

Low pressure system “Christine” delivered heavy rains in southern Germany and even the first snow in the Alps. Some passes in the Alps had to be closed. After steady snowfall, several Swiss Alp passes had to be closed for traffic on Friday evening. Streets around the Gotthard range were hit especially hard by the snowfall.”

Imagine the surprise of German vacationers returning from Italy over the Alps and being told to turn back because of snow in the summertime! Wetter.24 continues:

The snow line dropped from the northwest and then a cold polar air mass was fed down to the Alps region.

Snow line at times at 1600 meters. On Friday it was already snowing at 2000 meters and during the past night the snow line dropped to 1600 meters, and even less at some localities, thus many peaks are now covered with a blanket of snow.

A total of 21 cm of snow fell on Santis from Friday morning to Saturday morning. On the Zugspitze 45 cm was reported, of which 35 cm fell during the last 24 hours. The rest fell during the night of Thursday to Friday. In the figure it can be seen that especially the north side is hit by the first snowfall. It is however not unusual that winter shows up for the first time in the Alps at the end of August.”

Oh, now I get it, snows and skiing “are rare and a thing of the past” only in the dead of winter. But snows in August, on the other hand, are completely normal!

Gee, climate science is making more and more sense with every passing day.

Finally, I was just sent the following chart depicting Germany’s summertime temperatures for the last 16 years.

Runaway warming? Looks like it ran away for good 10 years ago - and it’s not coming back. (Chart from Josef Kowatsch).

Icecap Note: in 2011, the warmists were proclaiming the very active April and May tornado months to global warming. We ended 2011 down over 300 tornadoes than 2008. This year despite an early outbreak in February, the season may rank as one of the quietest in the record. Guess what the alarmists are claiming? I did a podcast for the Heartland on this issue, hurricanes and drought. Hear it here.

Enlarged
The Global Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index (for global tropical storm activity) is a three decade lows despite Isaac.

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute reports:

The year 2012 is breaking all-time records for lack of tornado activity, inviting the question whether

Is global warming is causing a long-term decline in destructive extreme weather events.

According the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, only 12 tornadoes touched down in the United States during July 2012, shattering the previous July record low of 42 tornadoes recorded in 1960. Because radar technology in 1960 could not detect many of the smaller tornadoes that are detectable today, scientists believe the actual number of tornadoes that occurred in the previous record-low July 1960 was actually about 73. Accordingly, six times more tornadoes occurred in July 1960, the previous record-low year, than occurred in July 2012.

Similarly, less than 300 tornadoes were recorded in this year’s peak tornado season, which runs from mid-April through late-July. Approximately 850 tornadoes touch down during the peak season in an average year. Accordingly, three times more tornadoes occur during an average peak-tornado season than occurred in 2012.

Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, says the lack of tornado activity is due to warm, dry weather in the American Midwest and a northerly tracking jet stream this year. These two factors have also reduced the number of strong thunderstorms that global warming alarmists claim are made more frequent and severe by global warming.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show a long-term decline, at least since the mid-1970s, in strong tornadoes. This decline in strong tornadoes began precisely when global temperatures rebounded from a 30-year cooling spell.

Although strong tornado activity is declining in sync with the recent modest rise in global temperatures, global warming alarmists frequently assert that whenever one of the ever-less-frequent tornadoes occurs, global warming must be to blame. This is typical of the tactics of global warming alarmists, who rarely miss an opportunity to misrepresent scientific facts to further their political agenda.

After some tornadoes touched down in March of this year, for example, Brad Johnson of the leftist activist group Center for American Progress wrote an article tying the tornadoes to global warming. “In the face of this warning, we must ask if our current path of increased pollution and decreased investment in public safety is the wisest course,” wrote Johnson.

Similarly, CNN meteorologist Alexandra Steele told viewers in April of this year that global warming was responsible for tornadoes that touched down in the Dallas area that month.

Tornadoes are becoming less frequent and less severe as our planet modestly warms. Yet global warming alarmists focus attention on the few tornadoes that still do occur and say that global warming is causing these increasingly rare tornadoes. The true question, however, is not whether global warming is causing more tornadoes, but whether the declining frequency and severity of tornadoes is being caused by global warming.

Icecap Note: the real story in the cold PDO and more La Ninas which produce big outbreaks and big seasons. The downtrend since the 1970s was due to the warm El Nino rich phase of the PDO.

Christopher Monckton on the economics of fighting ‘global warming’

The capture of the once-pure environmental movement by the hard left is far from cheap for the rest of us. I have just told the annual planetary-emergencies conference of the World Federation of Scientists that on the basis of the lunatic anti-CO2 policies now fashionable among scientifically illiterate governments, it would cost $6 quadrillion to prevent the 6 degrees Fahrenheit of predicted “global warming” that will not happen anyway.

Professor Antonino Zichichi, one of the world’s top six particle physicists (he discovered a form of anti-matter 40 years before the multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider did), is the most famous Italian scientist since his hero Galileo. He founded the Federation half a century ago and, at the age of 83, is its president to this day.

Nino looks like a proper scientist. Imagine giving his friend Albert Einstein an electric shock, and that is what his hair looks like. He is fitter than me and attributes his good health to walking an hour every day, not drinking alcohol and not eating lunch (that’s for wimps). He lives in a medieval stone house in the unspoiled, monastic village of Erice, Sicily, perched high on a 2,500-foot crag overlooking the blue Mediterranean.

He is an angry man. Angry because he, like me, was brought up in the Classical tradition, which insists that the duty of every “seeker after truth” (Al-Haytham’s beautiful phrase for the scientist) is to be logical and rational. He founded the Federation at the height of the Cold War to remind scientists of their moral responsibility to use their craft for good, not for ill, and of their intellectual obligation to adhere rigorously to the scientific method.

Nino is furious at the politicization of climate science. Science these days is a monopsony. There is only one paying customer: the State. Scientists increasingly produce the results their political paymasters want rather than seeking after truth.

Nowhere is the buying of desired results by governments clearer than in Nick Stern’s now-discredited report of 2006 on climate economics. The U.N.’s absurd climate panel had already at least tripled the true (and harmless) rate of warming to be expected from our adding CO2 to the air. Stern, to please his socialist paymasters, tripled it again without the slightest justification. Then he divided by 10 the true cost of making global warming go away and multiplied by 10 the true cost of not acting to Save The Planet (memo to Old Nick: The planet was triumphantly saved 2,000 years ago and doesn’t need saving again).

Tony Blair, the shifty socialist prime minister of the day, was so delighted with this nonsense that he gave Stern a peerage and installed him as head of the Grantham Institute, a lavishly funded propaganda institution promoting fear of climatic Armageddon and hatred of the West.

Using Old Nick’s report as a pretext, Blair (with the near-unanimous support of all parties, including Call-Me-Dave Cameron’s Not-The-Conservative-Party) introduced the biggest tax increase in human history. With only three votes against, the Climate Change and National Economic Hara-Kiri Act was passed on the very night when the first October snow for 74 years was falling outside in Parliament Square.

With the help of the Italian Government, which takes an intelligent interest in science, Nino Zichichi bought three redundant monasteries in Erice and turned them into a center of scientific excellence, where the world’s finest minds come throughout the year to attend courses and seminars and to exchange ideas.

The creme da la creme come to the annual seminars on planetary emergencies every August. This year, at my suggestion, the Federation’s climate panel organized a discussion on climate economics. None of the distinguished speakers had a kind word for Old Nick and his silly report. In particular, he was criticized for his wild exaggeration of the supposed threat. After 15 years without any global warming at all, his conclusion that there is a 10 percent chance the world will end this century because of global warming now looks sad and dated.

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic gave the keynote lecture. At the U.N.’s Save-The-Planet climate conference in 2007, he had been the only leader to speak out publicly against the climate scam. A dozen other world leaders told him privately that they agreed with him but did not dare say anything publicly.

President Klaus demanded a hard-headed rational approach to climate policy-making, as did Lord Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister. Professor Ross McKitrick, who had exposed the U.N.’s fraudulent attempt to abolish the medieval warm period in 2001, said climate models and the policies based on them should be adjusted to take account of the failure of temperature to rise as predicted.

Using Australia’s new carbon dioxide tax as a case study, I demonstrated that it is 48 times more expensive to try to make global warming go away than to let it happen and enjoy the sunshine.

Nino, having heard the arguments, announced a new permanent panel to monitor developments in climate economics. Now hear this, if you are thinking of writing a bogus report like Old Nick’s to please your government paymasters: We are watching.

President Klaus’ lectio magistralis to the Federation is available here. My paper is here.

Hear also Dr. Tim Ball’s radio interview here.

Europe’s green policy this administration is determined to follow is a huge failure. Ohio State Study finds America Recovery Act, 80% of which funded Obama’s Bundlers (who proved to be bunglers) actually cost US 550,000 jobs. An example of the worst kind of crony capitalism. Obama promises to double down on this failed agenda in a second term.

WASHINGTON:  President Obama has frequently cited Denmark as an example to be followed in the field of wind power generation, stating on several occasions that the Danes satisfy “20 percent of their electricity through wind power.” The findings of a new study released this week cast serious doubt on the accuracy of that statement. The report finds that in 2006 scarcely five percent of the nation’s electricity demand was met by wind. And over the past five years, the average is less than 10 percent - despite Denmark having ‘carpeted’ its land with the machines.

“As climate officials descended upon Copenhagen in a raging snowstorm in 2009 to continue their work to engineer a world in which energy is rendered less reliable, less affordable and increasingly scarce, the eyes of the world naturally fell upon the host country as well,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), which commissioned the report.

“In the case of Denmark,” added Pyle, “you have a nation of 5.4 million, occupying some of the most wind-intense real estate in the world, whose citizens are forced to pay the highest electricity rates in Europe - and it still doesn’t even come close to the 20 percent threshold envisioned by President Obama for the United States. This may indeed be the model for the future – but only if you believe that a combination of smoke, mirrors and prohibitively high utility rates are the key to our economic and environmental salvation.”

Prepared by the independent Danish think tank CEPOS and co-authored by economist Henrik Meyer and Hugh Sharman, a prominent Denmark-based international energy consultant, the report details the extent to which Denmark’s claim to wind superiority is essentially founded on a myth – the function of a complicated trading scheme in which the Danes off-load excess, value-subtracted wind generation to other nations for roughly free, asking only in return that these countries sell some of their baseload power back to Denmark on the frequent occasions in which the wind does not blow there

The upshot? The Danes retain the title of world’s most prolific wind producer, and President Obama cites their experience as a path to be followed. The cost? Danish ratepayers are forced to pay the highest utility rates in Europe. And the American people are led to believe that, though wind may only provide a little more than one percent of our electricity now, reaching a 20 percent platform – as the Danes have allegedly done – will come at no cost, with no jobs lost and no externalities to consider.

Speaking of jobs, the report also pulls back the curtain on the wind power industry’s near-complete dependence on taxpayer subsidies to support the fairly modest workforce it presently maintains. Just as in Spain, where per-job taxpayer subsidies for so-called “green jobs” exceeds $1,000,000 per worker in some cases, wind-related jobs in Denmark on average are subsidized at a rate of 175 to 250 percent above the average pay per worker. All told, each new wind job created by the government costs Danish taxpayers between 600,000-900,000 krone a year, roughly equivalent to $90,000-$140,000 USD.

“That the current political leadership in Washington is enamored of the European energy model has been made abundantly clear - from the president himself, all the way on down,” added Pyle. “Less clear is the extent to which these people actually know what’s taking place over there, and whether they’re willing to level with the American people about the serious costs associated with following this dubious path.”

Report co-author Hugh Sharman joined CEPOS chief executive officer Martin Agerup in Washington, D.C., part of a three-day tour in 2009 aimed at explaining to a wider American audience the core conclusions of their report. Those interested in speaking with Messrs. Sharman and/or Agerup or setting up an interview should contact Patrick Creighton (202.621.2947) or Chris Tucker (202.346.8825).

Note studies in Spain, where wind and solar were heavily subsidized found for every green job created, 2.2 real jobs were lost as soaring energy costs sent businesses into bankruptcy or to ship production overseas and only 1 in 10 green jobs were permanent. In Italy, a study found the number was 3.4 jobs lost for every green job created. New Hampshire has been awarded over $1.1 million in stimulus funds for every full-time job funded under the three-year old federal spending program, according to state and federal reports. The influx of federal cash also led to the creation of 56 full-time and 26 part-time positions within New Hampshire government.

Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor have studied the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and they reported their findings in a paper titled ”The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled.” and found the act may have cost the US 550,000 jobs. “Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.” administration’s stimulus job creation record is abysmal. The ‘green job ideal may be an environmentalist’s wet dream but it is the taxpayers nightmare.

So, as you might have heard, Michael Mann of Climategate infamy is threatening to sue us.

Mann is upset - very, very upset - with this Mark Steyn Corner post, which had the temerity to call Mann’s hockey stick “fraudulent.” The Steyn post was mild compared with other things that have been said about the notorious hockey stick, and, in fact, it fell considerably short of an item about Mann published elsewhere that Steyn quoted in his post.

So why threaten to sue us? I rather suspect it is because the Steyn post was savagely witty and stung poor Michael.

Possessing not an ounce of Steyn’s wit or eloquence, poor Michael didn’t try to engage him in a debate. He sent a laughably threatening letter and proceeded to write pathetically lame chest-thumping posts on his Facebook page. (Is it too much to ask that world-renowned climate scientists spend less time on Facebook?)

All of this is transparent nonsense, as our letter of response outlines.

In common polemical usage, “fraudulent” doesn’t mean honest-to-goodness criminal fraud. It means intellectually bogus and wrong. I consider Mann’s prospective lawsuit fraudulent. Uh-oh. I guess he now has another reason to sue us.

Usually, you don’t welcome a nuisance lawsuit, because it’s a nuisance. It consumes time. It costs money. But this is a different matter in light of one word: discovery.

If Mann sues us, the materials we will need to mount a full defense will be extremely wide-ranging. So if he files a complaint, we will be doing more than fighting a nuisance lawsuit; we will be embarking on a journalistic project of great interest to us and our readers.

And this is where you come in. If Mann goes through with it, we’re probably going to call on you to help fund our legal fight and our investigation of Mann through discovery. If it gets that far, we may eventually even want to hire a dedicated reporter to comb through the materials and regularly post stories on Mann.

My advice to poor Michael is to go away and bother someone else. If he doesn’t have the good sense to do that, we look forward to teaching him a thing or two about the law and about how free debate works in a free country.

He’s going to go to great trouble and expense to embark on a losing cause that will expose more of his methods and maneuverings to the world. In short, he risks making an ass of himself. But that hasn’t stopped him before.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.