I picked up the paper and read this this morning, less than a week after Whiteface and Green Mountains were buried in a record late 36” snow.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
N.H. ski areas join petition to fight climate change
The Mount Sunapee Ski Area, shown Tuesday, April 30, 2013, in Newbury, is among 108 alpine ski areas around the country to sign the Climate Declaration, a document calling for policymakers to address climate change. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)
BOSTON - Seven New Hampshire ski areas are among 108 alpine areas from across the U.S., as well big firms like GM and Levi Strauss, to sign the Climate Declaration, which calls upon federal policymakers to address climate change. New Hampshire ski areas that signed are Attitash, Cranmore, Gunstock, Loon Mountain, Mount Sunapee, Ragged Mountain and Waterville Valley.
The petition, at www.climate declaration.us, does not call for specific legislative or other action. It argues that “tackling climate change is one of America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century. It is obvious that the success of ski business operations depends greatly on climate, which is why we are so invested in programs that keep our slopes sustainable. But our actions alone won’t be enough without strong policies,” said Brent Giles, chief sustainability officer for Powder Corp., of Utah, parent company to Park City Mountain Resort in Utah, Copper Mountain in Colorado and Killington Resort in Vermont. “We welcome legislative and regulatory initiatives that will reduce carbon emissions, incentivize renewable energy development and help improve our resiliency in the future.”
Ski areas in the U.S. employ approximately 160,000 people and generate approximately $12.2 billion in annual revenue, according to the National Ski Areas Association, which calculates that visitors to U.S. ski areas spent $5.8 billion at those resorts a year ago.
“The past ski season was a banner year for our guests and for our resort, but we can’t gamble on the weather in an uncertain climate. We have to take action,” said Jerry Blann, president of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming.
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TO WHICH I COMMENTED BACK:
It is a money making scheme. Some ski areas have figured how to get credits or offsets (money) for being green (recycling water for snow making, wind turbines (Jiminy Peak), using methane (cow farts) to power gondolas (Killington), etc). Never mind that this November to April period for the hemisphere ranked #1 all-time for snow extent beating out 1977/78.
The idea that climate change will put an end to the industry was advanced by the UCS in 2007 before the snowiest winter on record in northern New England (Concord, Caribou) and the winter with record snows from Alaska to Oregon to Colorado to New England.
They were silenced until 2011/12 when the US had a down year and this year in winter they felt it safe to repeat it again before record later winter and spring snows made them look foolish. Last weekend (Memorial Day Weekend) a record late 36” snowfall occurred at Whiteface Mountain and 1 to 3 feet in the higher Green Mountains. They waited to release their scare story for the first warm spell of the summer. Sorry not buying it. As meteorologist/climatologist in the business for 40 years, my advice is to ignore the hoax. We can explain all the climate changes with natural factors. And they point to very cold and snowy winters most years for the next few decades. Don’t waste a nickel on climate change remedies. Make sure we have the energy we need to keep warm at a price we can afford.
As a former major ski area PR person wrote me this am:
Doesn’t surprise. There are certainly people in the industry who buy the nonsense; these include Austen Schendler at Aspen, and Aspen management (who apparently aren’t bothered by their well-heeled clientele’s tendency to park their private jets at the local airport and run their APUs nonstop for the weekend), and the editor and publishers of the industry’s leading trade magazine (they ARE nice people, I’d add, even if they refuse to get it). And there are those who have made heavy investment in wind or other alternative energy - Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts has gotten lots of nice ink for its windmill, and Killington boasted this winter that the K1 gondola is powered by cows (methane credits). However, the bulk of the industry is, I suspect, quietly skeptical of the AGW premise and is simply going along to get along. A fair percentage of ski industry’s clientele is sufficiently ignorant to buy into the theory, and the industry would prefer not to risk pissing them off. I rather suspect the industry would be delighted to see AGW get the knockout punch it so richly deserves - this stuff is a PITA - but believes it has other battles to fight that are more important than this one.
Icecap Update: Please see the winter summary by Icecap Meteorologist Art Horn as published on the Energy Tribune. By the way here are images from Whiteface Mountain on the Memorial Day weekend when a snowstorm hit the mountains of the northeast. An amazing 36 inches was reported at Whiteface and 12-16 inches at Jay Peak and Mt. Mansfield.
Also listen to Joe D’Aleo’s May 23rd radio interview with Mike Janocik on WLCR AM
At Weatherbell.com we try to show people the ‘why’ before the ‘what’. My father taught me that if you are right, then you should have the reason why first, and not excuses for being wrong later. From where I stand, the reasons why we are right are clear. But the barrage of excuses coming from the other side is growing shriller with each passing day. But the idea that people spouting the CO2 idea are being driven from the field in spite of the overwhelming evidence against them is nonsense. When facts don’t matter, it’s not the facts that will force them to quit. This is well beyond science.
Any rational person can see what is going on and can say that in the least there is enough doubt to stop the madness that demonizes those that disagree. In reality, their point has been driven from the field.
What I am doing here is giving you the ‘why’ before the ‘what’. What I’m amazed at is how people can keep seeing things that are opposite of what they claimed would happen 5 years ago, simply change the terminology, and then say the things they say. That kind of mentality is one that does not accept any answer except the one they think it should be. So the fight is not on a level of a normal argument. The arguing is with people who believe they possess the “truth” and that anything short of their “truth” cannot be tolerated.
But we must smile and fight with facts. Debunk, and try not to demean.
In any case the following link will be very helpful in trying to get my point across, and I am going to use mixing ratios to show some of this. See.
Here is why this should be simple. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So what is the source of energy to the Earth? Answer: the sun. If outgoing radiation equals incoming, then there is no trapping and all this hullabaloo is a moot point. Since that is the case, the game should be over.
However if you want to start confusing the issue, you assign major importance to very minor items, control the language, and then you can control the perception.
The fact is that the Earth has been warming since the very cold period of the 1700s (Little Ice Age). It just so happened sunspots were in the tank, and it was cold. When sunspot activity increased, the Earth responded by getting warmer. Should be simple, right? The link to the oceans in the overall rise that has occurred is obvious in the graph below (from the outstanding site: Climate4you.
Figure 1: CO2 concentration and global temperature.Enlarged
The cumulative effect of the warm AMO and PDO added heat to the atmosphere, so temps rose from the late 1970s to around 2000. After the air absorbed the heat, it leveled off, the PDO flipped, and we started trending down.
Simply using the PDO, as seen in the chart below from Wikipedia, shows an almost direct correlation:
The warm years from the late 1970s to a bit beyond 2000, the latest downturn can be seen as well. The Pacific is much larger than the Atlantic, but the Atlantic turned warm in the mid-1990s so it is still not fully onboard with the cooling. But when it does turn, chances are global temps will respond as one would expect knowing the heat capacity of the ocean is 1000 times that of the atmosphere. This chart alone should cast doubt, if not slay, the CO2 dragon being a major climate factor, if any at all. It’s simply too small to do what these people spouting this agenda-driven idea say it will.
Again the overall rise of the past 200 years is easily explained by sunspots, which is why a lot of people are nervous about cooling. After all, if you are claiming the sun caused the warming, and you take it away, and the oceans flip to their negative phase, and a couple of volcanoes blow to boot, then there is real trouble. Hence the triple crown of cooling, which I showed on national TV 4 years ago when explaining why the cooling would commence, and by 2030 temperatures would return to levels seen in the late 1970s.
As for CO2, the rise may be due in part to a lag that FOLLOWS warming, and doesn’t cause it. Since the 1950s, the only time CO2 was correlated was when the oceans warmed. This is not brain surgery.
There is science and pseudo-science. Science comes up with an idea like the oceans are causing warming, and when they cool, the air cools. Pseudo-science says: well CO2 is adding to this, but how much? IT’S A QUESTION THAT CAN NEVER BE ANSWERED. Does the question then become: Would we already be heading into a mini ice age were it not for CO2 saving us? How do you answer that? Untold amounts of money are being thrown at a question that isn’t even something of consideration.
Now here is the problem. Temps have been dropping as you can see...not a lot, but some. But what should be very disturbing for planners and people looking forward is that the Relative Humidity is dropping. That means the wet bulb has dropped more than the temperatures. So far so good.
Why is the RH dropping? Think about it. A cooling Pacific, especially in the tropics, means less water vapor available to the system. So we get the initial temperature drop off because of the the cooling Pacific, primarily in the tropics, is no longer adding to the warmth of the air. But the RH is dropping too.
Where it’s dry, it does warm up and the large dry land areas do warm in the summer season, until such the entire earth/ocean system adjusts (the AMO flips to cold too). But the drop of RH, seen above in the chart is a big hint!
Notice how at this time, the 1000 mb is lagging. Eventually, though, the transport of moisture from the lagging low levels will cool the mid levels (increased moisture leading to temperatures falling toward the wet bulb), leading to more instability and more cloudiness. Until a balance is reached, the earths temps will cool. Perhaps faster.
A look at the skew T and the mixing ratio relationship to temperature really makes my point about why this is a distortion of temps and not warming. By distortion I mean its obviously warmer in the northern areas, but THE COOLING IN THE TROPICAL AREAS, EVEN THOUGH MUCH SMALLER, CARRIES FAR GREATER WEIGHT TO THE WEATHER AND CLIMATE .
A way to think about it like 2 people that weigh the same, but one may have more mass in one part of the body than the other.
An example of this can be seen when one looks at what it takes to change the mixing ratio 2g/kg at 30c, vs -20C.
Look at how the mixing ratios increase dramatically with higher temps. In other words, suppose we lower the temps 1C at 30C (from Wikipedia chart).
Doing so, we would change the mixing ratio by about 2g/kg. Now how much of a rise at -20C would we need to offset that? At -20C the mixing ratio is about 0.7 g/kg. To move up 2g to 2.7 g/kg, we would have to raise the temp about 15C.
The changes in temperatures in the tropics have a much greater overall impact on the climate than those in the arctic. It is, if you will, easy to warm cold, dry air, but to cool warm tropical air is harder. So if the earth’s temp is about steady, or falling off a bit as we saw in the graph above, and the arctic is still warm, the compensating drop in the tropics means more to the earths climate than the same movement of temps in the arctic It becomes a predictor of what has to happen as the PDO continues cold and the AMO turns cold.. the warmer northern polar regions will cool. A degree is not a degree when it comes to the climate system. A one degree movement up and down where wet bulb temperatures are 80 have far greater effects on the system than a 1 degree change where its near 0. That is the message behind the mixing ratio example above.
Now let me ask you this question, in terms of the climate system, which is far more important: the tropical oceans and the air masses around them, or what is going on in the Arctic?
Again this is simply saying there is a natural large-scale thermostat called the ocean. The warmer the ocean, the more it drives the whole climate system.
The slight cooling while RH is dropping is a sign of bigger things to come. This means the wet bulbs are falling faster than the actual temps. It is a predictor of future temperature falls (it’s worse than we thought). For usually when the RH falls, the temperatures rise. In this case, temps are already falling with the RH falling too!
At the very least I expect temperatures by 2030 to return to where they were in the late 1970s, which was the end of the last cold PDO phase and, by the way, the start of the satellite era: the most objective form of measurements.
Is the cooling worse than I thought? We are going to find out in the coming decades.
The Carbon Sense Coalition has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to Kevin Rudd and coal industry leaders for “flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile ‘research’ on Carbon Capture & Sequestration, a costly and complex process designed to capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as coal, oil and gas”.
It is obviously possible, in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases, so new “research” is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.
About 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left for sale, more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits.
We have come to expect stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same electricity.
Kevin Rudd wins this award for “a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.” There is little to show for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and “operational expenses”.
Pumping gases underground is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil recovery from declining oil fields
Normally, however, CCS will just produce more expensive electricity
This result is not needed as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that.
The increases in winter snows have been ignored but the focus shifted to ‘spring snow declines’ in the warmist reports. Well, this spring is running well above normal, just like the winter.
Snowfall data from NOAA Rutger’s Snow Lab for April is in. It ranked 9th greatest, high enough to make the cold season (November to April) average the HIGHEST in the record (back to 1966).
“Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again,” says this article in the Alaska Dispatch.
“While global temperatures surge hotter and the ice-cap crumbles, the nation’s icebox is getting even icier.”
“That may not be news to Alaskans coping with the coldest winter in two decades or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth”, says author Alex DeMarban.
In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
“That’s a “large value for a decade,” the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks said in “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.”
The cooling is widespread - holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other, the paper notes. It’s most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade, the report says.
“Most noticeable was that for the first time last year, the Bering Sea ice shelf extended south nearly to the edge of the Alaska Peninsula,” said Don Hatten, the National Weather Service forecaster in King Salmon.
“Researchers blame the Decadal Oscillation, an ocean phenomenon that brought chillier surface water temperatures toward Alaska.”
German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is the coldest in 208 years and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, who says it is proof that we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.”
Talking to German media, the scientist said that based on his sunspot studies, we are now on an “unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.”
Building on observations made by English astronomer Walter Maunder, Dr Abdussamatov said he had found that the Earth cools and warms in a 200-year cycles.
The last big freeze, known as the Little Ice Age, took place between 1650 and 1850 which he said coincided with Maunder’s findings that there had been no sunspots between 1645 and 1715.
“The last global decrease of temperature (the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age) was observed not only in Europe, North America and Greenland, but also in any other part of the world during the Maunder minimum of sunspot activity and of the total solar irradiance in 1645 to 1715 years,” says Abdussamatov.
People forced to leave settlements that had been inhabited for several centuries
“All channels in the Netherlands were frozen, glaciers were on the advance in Greenland and people were forced to leave their settlements, inhabited for several centuries,” Abdussamatov continues.
Humanity has always prospered during warm periods and suffered during the cold ones
“The Thames river in London and Seine in Paris were frozen over every year. Humanity has always been prospering during the warm periods and suffering during the cold ones. The climate has never been and will never be stable.”
Heavy snow and cold driving UK into triple-dip recession
Abdussamatov’s warning that cold weather would hit prosperity follows news that Britain is heading for an unprecedented triple-dip recession as economists warned that the combination of heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures might be a crucial factor in whether the economy expanded in the first three months of 2013.
Now the Russian scientist, who first made his prediction in 2005, says the new mini Ice Age will begin next year and will last for 200 years.
The Met Office has warned that temperatures will remain below average until about 20 April, not just in the UK, but in the rest of the world.
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And as Joe Bastardi of weatherbell.com reported on Cavuto today and in a post on WB:
SECOND COLDEST START TO SPRING IN US HISTORY
The only year when the spring started colder was 1975.
Also NoTricksZone reports the spring snows also were seen in Spain and allegedly in Saudi Arabia. Don’t suppose Andrew Freeman at Climate Central has written on this.
Suzanne Goldenberg displayed the establishment media’s inexcusable ignorance and/or willful distortion of the global warming debate in a Thursday ‘news’ article in the prominent U.K. newspaper The Guardian.
Writing about an effort by the Obama administration to politicize the global warming debate and direct public ridicule at Republicans who are skeptical of alarmist global warming claims, Goldenberg describes that effort as one that will “shame members of Congress who deny the science behind climate change.”
Expressing skepticism about alarmist global warming claims and alarmist predictions by one segment of the scientific population whose prior alarmist claims and alarmist predictions have routinely proven to be false is not “denying the science behind climate change.” Subjecting theories, predictions, and scientific claims to critical scrutiny is the lifeblood of science. Attempting to vilify, stifle, and shut down critical scientific analysis of scientific theories, predictions, and claims is the very definition of anti-science.
Goldenberg’s distortion and bias merely grow worse as the article continues. Describing an Obama administration video that attacks Republicans on the topic of global warming, Goldenberg writes that the video features Republicans “who are notorious for denying the existence of climate change, or positing bizarre notions about its causes.”
A key point made by global warming ‘skeptics’ is the Earth’s climate is constantly changing. The nature and extent of current climate change must be viewed within the context of the nature and extent of climate change that has occurred for billions of years. To the extent any faction in the global warming debate “denies the existence of climate change,” it is the alarmists who contend that any climate change that may be occurring now must be unprecedented and alarming. It is these alarmists not skeptics who deny climate change. Both factions agree the Earth’s climate is currently changing, but alarmists deny the longstanding and ongoing existence of past, present, and future climate change.
Regarding Goldenberg’s comment about Republicans “positing bizarre notions about its causes,” she does not identify any examples. How convenient for Goldenberg that she does not feel an obligation to factually justify derogatory opinions that she inserts in her ‘news’ columns.
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Every one of the claims the president (and clueless members of the administration and congress like Markey, Waxman, Boxer) made in the SOTU address were wrong. See John Christy’s testimony to the senate. See this fact checking analysis PDF.
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