Frozen in Time
May 31, 2021
Svalbard Warming and the AMO (a natural cycle in the North Atlantic)

Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

The Science Channel on Discovery is an enjoyable and educational channel and covers many topics including about the universe and earth’s anomalies and mysteries.

They featured a recent show on Svalbard, an island in the far North Atlantic. The island sits between 77 and 81N It’s climate varies as it sits in a regions where warm currents from south, and colder currents from the north and northeast converge. And these currents vary on decadal cycles.

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The story interviewed inhabitants and scientists about the recent warming since 1970, said by some to be the largest on earth and often attributed to greenhouse driven global warming. Alarmists have referred to it as the Canary in the coal mine.

There has been warming from 1970 to 2010s but it mirrors the warming from 1910 to 1940 (both about 8F). Both cycles track with the 60 year North Atlantic Oscillation (AMO).

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Svalbard had an 8F warming in the last 2 warm intervals and a 7C cooling in the cooler phase. The AMO is nearing the end of its warm phase and with aid of the declining solar cycles 24 and 25 and the next overdue major volcanic eruption should begin it decline this decade.

The AMO cycle is depicted here by Ole Humlum (Climate4you).

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See the cold phase is cold in the arctic and Atlantic (and globally on average). The warm cycle is warm though it favors the -NAO which can deliver cold and snow to the east.

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See how the warm water is carried under the arctic ice during the warm part of the cycle, thinning the ice and reducing its extent. In the cold cycle, the melting from beneath is less and the ice extent expands.

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The late great Bill Gray felt the AMO would return negative around or soon after 2020.

See THE REST OF THE STORY here.

The Pacific goes through decadal cycles too. The PDO has a similar positive is warm globally and negative cool.

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It is is closely linked to the El Nino and La Nina. The ENSO events are longer, stronger and more frequent in the coinciding warm or cold phases.

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Though the cycles are out of phase, when they both are either cold or warm, the temperatures globally follow.

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Both the Atlantic and Pacific play a role in arctic ice, like we saw in Svalbard in the Atlantic sector.

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Dr. Willie Soon showed the solar TSI matches arctic cycles not CO2.

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May 23, 2021
Real drivers behind the yearly and decadal changes

Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

The latest UAH Lower Atmosphere global temperatures have dropped below the 30 year mean.

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That is the effect of the latest La Nina that started last summer. Ocean temperature cycles like ENSO and the ENSO multidecadal cycle (PDO) and the Atlantic cycle (AMO) are clearly driving changes. See how PDO reflects the ENSO state.

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The more persistent a cold or warm state, the more the cooling or warming. El Ninos have a cold mode with the warmth displaced to the dateline - called Modoki (right side).

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The AMO (60-70 year) and PDO (60 year) cycles are out of phase.

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When you add the 5-year means of the PDO and AMO, though you see the clustering producing the observed cycles of warming and cooling.

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Look how the negative states are cold, positive warm.

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Volcanism or lack thereof enhances cooling or warmIng.

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See how the UAH temperatures show the spike in El Nino, dips in La Nina and the cooling with volcanism and warming with the 1995 AMO flip.

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The AMO and PDO are useful for seasonal severe weather too.

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See “Imprint of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation on southwestern US climate: past, present, and future” by Petr Chylek etal here.

“The surface air temperature increase in the southwestern United States was much larger during the last few decades than the increase in the global mean. While the global temperature increased by about 0.5C from 1975 to 2000, the southwestern US temperature increased by about 2C. If such an enhanced warming persisted for the next few decades, the southwestern US would suffer devastating consequences. To identify major drivers of southwestern climate change we perform a multiple-linear regression of the past 100 years of the southwestern US temperature and precipitation. We find that in the early twentieth century the warming was dominated by a positive phase of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) with minor contributions from increasing solar irradiance and concentration of greenhouse gases. The late twentieth century warming was about equally influenced by increasing concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and a positive phase of the AMO. The current southwestern US drought is associated with a near maximum AMO index occurring nearly simultaneously with a minimum in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index. A similar situation occurred in mid-1950s when precipitation reached its minimum within the instrumental records.”

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What drives the ENSO and larger scale oscillations?

Many months ago, I posted this chart from NASA of the SSN the last three cycles and marked the El Nino and La Nina years. Note that El Ninos appeared during the declines from solar max (go back a cycle and you find 1982/83 there too). Also El Ninos appear coming off a minimum (and before the minimums). La Ninas occur at the minimum and during the rapid rise phases.

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We asked the question would the declining solar bring a stronger El Nino to 2015/16. The answer was yes and indeed a super El Nino ensued. We have been in La Nina mode the last two years at solar min but like in 2009/10, 1997/98, 1986/88, 1976/78, 1965/66, 1957/59, we might expect an El Nino to follow. Models are uncertain, typical of most springs.

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It could be driven by the changes in pressure of the subtropical high pressures systems with the solar cycles which would affect the strength of the easterlies in the trade winds and equatorial zones and allow for upwelling in the east to increase or decrease.

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And it appears the sun drives the ocean cycles, directly or indirectly (can’t be the other way).

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The temperatures move with CO2 levels only 40% of the time since 1895.

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See the latest attack on our energy economy.

OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
Notice of Availability and Request for Comment on ‘’Technical Support Document: Social Cost of Carbon, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide Interim Estimates Under Executive Order 13990’’

AGENCY: Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President.
ACTION: Notice of availability and request for comments.

SUMMARY: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), on behalf of the co- chairs of the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, including the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), request comments on ‘’Technical Support Document: Social Cost of Carbon, Methane, and Nitrous OxideInterim Estimates under Executive Order 13990,’’ released on February 26, 2021, available here . The estimates of the social cost of carbon (SC-CO2), social cost of methane (SC-CH4), and social cost of nitrous oxide (SC-N2O), collectively called the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (SC-GHG), are used to estimate the value to society of marginal reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, or conversely, the social costs of increasing such emissions, in the policy making process.

DATES: To ensure consideration, comments must be in writing and received by June 21, 2021.

ADDRESSES: Submit comments by one of the following methods:

Federal eRulemaking Portal: (our preferred method). Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.

Please note that we cannot provide an option for written or faxed comments at this time due to COVID-19 protocols. Please submit comments electronically.

All comments and recommendations submitted in response to this notice will be made available to the public. For this reason, please do not include in your comments information of a confidential nature, such as sensitive personal information or proprietary information. The www.regulations.gov website is an ‘’anonymous access’’ system, which means OMB will not know your identity or contact information unless you provide it in the body of your comment.

We submitted numerous comments back in 2008 that wee summarily ignored. The Endangerment Finding from NOAA was never peer reviewed but the EPA used it as gospel and ignored comments to the contrary. They ignored the enormous benefits that fossil fuels and the gas of life CO2 provide - greening the earth and exploding food supplies. We plan to flood them again and resubmits old ones as a reminder.

May 22, 2021
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters

By Tyler Durden, Friday May 21, 2021

Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy.com,

On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science - in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At one point, Koonin read an extract from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report released the previous year. Computer model-simulated responses to forcings - the term used by climate scientists for changes of energy flows into and out of the climate system, such as changes in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and changes in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “can be scaled up or down.” This scaling included greenhouse gas forcings.

Some forcings in some computer models had to be scaled down to match computer simulations to actual climate observations. But when it came to making centennial projections on which governments rely and drive climate policy, the scaling factors were removed, probably resulting in a 25 to 30 percent over-prediction of the 2100 warming.

The ensuing dialogue between Koonin and Dr. William Collins of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - a lead author of the climate model evaluation chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report - revealed something more troubling and deliberate than holes in scientific knowledge:

Dr. Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30 percent factor when you project out a century.

Dr. Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.

Dr. Koonin: What are you using them as?

Dr. Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.

Dr. Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?

Dr. Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.

Koonin was uncommonly well-suited to lead the APS climate workshop. He has a deep understanding of computer models, which have become the workhorses of climate science. As a young man, Koonin wrote a paper on computer modeling of nuclear reaction in stars and taught a course on computational physics at Caltech. In the early 1990s, he was involved in a program using satellites to measure the Earth’s albedo - that is, the reflection of incoming solar radiation back into space. As a student at Caltech in the late 1960s, he was taught by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and absorbed what Koonin calls Feynmans “absolute intellectual honesty.”

On becoming BP’s chief scientist in 2004, Koonin became part of the wider climate change milieu. Assignments included explaining the physics of man-made global warming to Prince Philip at a dinner in Buckingham Palace. In 2009, Koonin was appointed an under-secretary at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration.

The APS climate debate was the turning point in Koonin’s thinking about climate change and consensus climate science ("The Science").

“I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe,” Koonin writes in his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters.”

“I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.”

“Unsettled” is an authoritative primer on the science of climate change that lifts the lid on The Science and finds plenty that isn’t as it should be.

“As a scientist,” writes Koonin, “I felt the scientific community was letting the public down by not telling the whole truth plainly.”

Koonin’s aim is to right that wrong.

Koonin’s indictment of The Science starts with its reliance on unreliable computer models. Usefully describing the earth’s climate, writes Koonin, is “one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems.” Models divide the atmosphere into pancake-shaped boxes of around 100km wide and one kilometer deep. But the upward flow of energy from tropical thunder clouds, which is more than thirty times larger than that from human influences, occurs over smaller scales than the programmed boxes. This forces climate modellers to make assumptions about what happens inside those boxes. As one modeller confesses, “it’s a real challenge to model what we don’t understand.”

Inevitably, this leaves considerable scope for modelers’ subjective views and preferences. A key question climate models are meant to solve is estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (ECS), which aims to tell us by how much temperatures rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet in 2020, climate modelers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute admitted to tuning their model by targeting an ECS of about 3 degrees Centigrade. “Talk about cooking the books,” Koonin comments.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Self-evidently, computer projections can’t be tested against a future that’s yet to happen, but they can be tested against climates present and past. Climate models can’t even agree on what the current global average temperature is. “One particularly jarring feature is that the simulated average global surface temperature,” Koonin notes, “varies among models by about 3C, three times greater than the observed value of the twentieth century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.”

Another embarrassing feature of climate models concerns the earlier of the two twentieth-century warmings from 1910 to 1940, when human influences were much smaller. On average, models give a warming rate of about half of what was actually observed. The failure of the latest models to warm fast enough in those decades suggest that it’s possible, even likely, that internal climate variability is a significant contributor to the warming of recent decades, Koonin suggests. “That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag - it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates.” Neither is it reassuring that for the years after 1960, the latest generation of climate models show a larger spread and greater uncertainty than earlier ones - implying that, far from advancing, The Science has been going backwards. That is not how science is meant to work.

The second part of Koonin’s indictment concerns the distortion, misrepresentation, and mischaracterization of climate data to support a narrative of climate catastrophism based on increasing frequency of extreme weather events. As an example, Koonin takes a “shockingly misleading” claim and associated graph in the United States government’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report that the number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records across the 48 contiguous states. Koonin demonstrates that the sharp uptick in highs over the last two decades is an artifact of a methodology chosen to mislead. After re-running the data, record highs show a clear peak in the 1930s, but there is no significant trend over the 120 years of observations starting in 1895, or even since 1980, when human influences on the climate grew strongly. In contrast, the number of record cold temperatures has declined over more than a century, with the trend accelerating after 1985.

Notes Koonin, “temperature extremes in the contiguous U.S. have become less common and somewhat milder since the late nineteenth century.” Similarly, a key message in the 2014 National Climate Assessment of an upward trend in hurricane frequency and intensity, repeated in the 2017 assessment, is contradicted 728 pages later by a statement buried in an appendix stating that there has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones “nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.”

That might surprise many politicians.

“Over the past thirty years, the incidence of natural disasters has dramatically increased,” Treasury secretary Janet Yellen falsely asserted last month in a pitch supporting the Biden administration’s infrastructure package. “We are now in a situation where climate change is an existential risk to our future economy and way of life,” she claimed.

The sacrifice of scientific truth in the form of objective empirical data for the sake of a catastrophist climate narrative is plain to see. As Koonin summarizes the case:

“Even as human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”

Koonin also has sharp words for the policy side of the climate change consensus, which asserts that although climate change is an existential threat, solving it by totally decarbonizing society is straightforward and relatively painless.

“Two decades ago, when I was in the private sector,” Koonin writes, “I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was ‘a challenge,’ while in government it was talked about as ‘an opportunity.’ Now back in academia, I can forthrightly call it ‘a practical impossibility.’

Unlike many scientists and most politicians, Koonin displays a sure grasp of the split between developed and developing nations, for whom decarbonization is a luxury good that they can’t afford. The fissure dates back to the earliest days of the U.N. climate process at the end of the 1980s. Indeed, it’s why developing nations insisted on the U.N. route as opposed to an intergovernmental one that produced the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.

“The economic betterment of most of humanity in the coming decades will drive energy demand even more strongly than population growth,” Koonin says.

“Who will pay the developing world not to emit? I have been posing that simple question to many people for more than fifteen years and have yet to hear a convincing answer.”

The most unsettling part of “Unsettled” concerns science and the role of scientists.

“Science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected,” Karl Popper wrote nearly six decades ago.

That condition does not pertain in climate science, where errors are embedded in a political narrative and criticism is suppressed. In a recent essay, the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford observes that the pride of science as a way of generating knowledge - unlike religion - is to be falsifiable. That changes when science is pressed into duty as authority in order to absolve politicians of responsibility for justifying their policy choices ("The science says,” we’re repeatedly told). “Yet what sort of authority would it be that insists its own grasp of reality is merely provisional?” asks Crawford. “For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge.”

At the outset of “Unsettled,” Feynman’s axiom of absolute intellectual honesty is contrasted with climate scientist Stephen Schneider’s “double ethical bind.” On the one hand, scientists are ethically bound by the scientific method to tell the truth. On the other, they are human beings who want to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.

“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest,"Schneider said.

“Being effective” helps explain the pressure on climate scientists to conform to The Science and the emergence of a climate science knowledge monopoly. Its function is, as Crawford puts it, the manufacture of a product - political legitimacy - which, in turn, requires that competing views be delegitimized and driven out of public discourse through enforcement of a “moratorium on the asking of questions.” This sees climate scientist gatekeepers deciding who can and cannot opine on climate science. “Please, save us from retired physicists who think they’re smarter and wiser than everyone in climate science,” tweeted Gavin Schmidt, NASA acting senior climate advisor, about Koonin and his book. “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote,” a chair of a university earth sciences department tells Koonin, “but I don’t dare say that in public.” Another scientist criticizes Koonin for giving ammunition to “the deniers,” and a third writes an op-ed urging New York University to reconsider Koonin’s position there. It goes wider than scientists. Facebook has suppressed a “Wall Street Journal” review of “Unsettled.” Likewise, “Unsettled” remains unreviewed by the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post” (though it carried an op-ed by Marc Thiessen based on an interview with Koonin) and other dailies, which would prefer to treat Koonin’s reasoned climate dissent as though it doesn’t exist.

The moratorium on the asking of questions represents the death of science as understood and described by Popper, a victim of the conflicting requirements of political utility and scientific integrity. Many scientists take this lying down. Koonin won’t. For his forensic skill and making his findings accessible to non-specialists, Koonin has written the most important book on climate science in decades.

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Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Green Tyranny and Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.

Apr 24, 2021
‘Too cold’ or ‘too warm’ but always the same remedy

Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

Back just over 40 years ago in the incredible cold of the late 1970s, the world was worrying about the cooling which began in the late 1950s was returning to the climate regime that persisted from 1600 to the 1850s, a period called ‘The Little Ice Age” (The Weather Conspiracy, the Coming of the New Ice Age)

Leonard Nimoy (Spock) presented this story in videos like this.

While I worked on my BS and MS at the University of Wisconsin with my Master’s Thesis on Explosive Redevelopment In East Coast Cyclones), the scientists were blaming fossil fuel burning and man introduced particulate matter acting as a ‘human volcano’ which like volcanos reflected the sun’s rays and lead to cooling that enhanced natural forces.

The solutions were thought to be eliminating pollutants and for even then a quest to find alternatives to fossil fuels. The second goal focus during the 1973 Arab Oil embargo induced shortages and price rises but renewables were not then ready for prime-time and and as the Texas debacle showed even today not reliable for providing the base load and will lead to soaring energy prices and life-threatening blackouts.

THEN THE PACIFIC CHANGED MODES

But after the Great Pacific Climate shift in the late 1970s, warming ensued as stronger, longer lasting El Ninos which produce global warming suddenly were favored over the La Ninas whose dominance lead to the cooling that had dominated in the 1960s to mid 1970s.

By 1988, many began to think this new mode might be the golden opportunity to take control of our energy policies and redirect media coverage. 

SHOWTIME

In 1988 the democrats orchestrated a hearing orchestrated by then Senator Al Gore and stagecrafted by Senator Tim Wirth (later headed up the UN Foundation - see Chris Horner’s Red Hot Lies) featuring NASA scientist James Hansen who had traded in his ice age hat for one advertising man-made global warming.

As the NYT reported:

Senator Timothy E. Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who presided at hearing today, said:

‘’As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth’s atmosphere gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.’’

NYT 1988

As the stagecrated link stagecrafted shows, Tim had other reasons to pursue this path.

“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Timothy Wirth quoted in Science Under Siege by Michael Fumento, 1993

The politicians and media began their 30-year warm cycle attack on fossil fuels and our way of life at that meeting. Fed by a sudden flood of grant money, many people in a wide array of disciplines jumped aboard as self proclaimed climatologists, environmental scientists and modellers.

So at both ends of the warm and cold cycle, the enemy was the same - people and fossil fuel.

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Notice the flatlining since the late 1990s. My guess if a cooling ensues as the oceans both cool in the second straight dud of a solar cycle, the leaders and media will find a way to try and convince the gullibles it was their own fault.

See this one of several papers on the new Grand Solar Minimum we may have entered.

Note the greatest scientific fraud belies the truth about the blessing increased CO2 levels have provided to mankind.

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See who benefits from the propagation of the fraud,

Apr 17, 2021
Coldest February since 1989 and fifth coldest since the Dust Bowl era, behind 1960, 1978, 1979, 1989

The Arctic invasion that recently swept the United States was truly historic, and the record books prove it. First see this NOAA February map and the very large areas with -12F or greater cold anomalies in pink.

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For the nation, it was the 19th-coldest February in the 127-year record. The nation’s monthly average temperature of 30.6F was 3.2F below the 1901-2000 mean, the coldest February since 1989 and fifth coldest since the end of the Dust Bowl era, behind 1960, 1978, 1979, and 1989.

According to NOAA, 10,127 record low mins and maxes were observed, 703 monthly record low maxes and mins and 200 all time record low maxes and mins (year -to-date) dating back 100+ years. Note also the 3514 record snow reports too this year to date.

Dalles has ts coldest ever three day assault, beating out 1983 and the incredible 1899.

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A new all-time never-before-witnessed benchmarks often in record books dating back 100+ years.

NOAA said the “cold snap” peaked between Feb. 14-16, during which time approximately 30% of available U.S. sites set cold-maximum records, and about 20% set cold-minimum records:

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The severity of the polar cold was extreme, unexpected, and ill-prepared for the western world has been instructed to brace for catastrophic warming for going on 4 decades now:

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A Closer Look at What Happened in Texas During the Deep Freeze:

WUWT Reposted from Chris Martz Weather

BY CHRIS MARTZ on 9 MAR 2021

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
Benjamin Franklin

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Meteorological Analysis
Three weeks ago, a major cold snap and series of winter storms enveloped the southern plains and parts of the Mississippi River Valley, sending temperatures below zero as far south as central Texas. According to NOAA NCEI, a total of 8,632 daily record low temperatures - including both maximums and minimums - were set or tied from February 10-20, as opposed to only 262 daily warm records. Additionally, a whopping 693 monthly record lows were set, 199 of which were all-Time record lows.

According to the NOAA Weather Prediction Center, over 30% of all of the official weather stations in the United States set at least record low maximum temperatures between February 14 and 16. Without a doubt, this was the coldest 10-day period that this part of the country had experienced in over a century.

The animation HERE conveys just how widespread the cold was between February 10 and 20.  Locations approaching or surpassing daily, monthly, and/or all-time record lows; February 10-20, 2021 - coolwx.com.

While no statewide records were broken, some of the records that were reported were quite shocking to say the least. The two coldest days were Monday, February 15 and Tuesday, February 16, where temperatures were some 40-50F below average across Oklahoma and Texas. Between February 11 and 18, temperatures across much of the Heartland averaged some 30F below average (Figure 2). Temperatures this cold for such a sustained period can lower the monthly and seasonal average by a wide margin.

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Figure 2: 7-day 2 meter air temperature anomaly (F) with contour lines labeled; February 11-18.

On Monday, February 15, Oklahoma City only rose to 4F (-15.6C), which was colder than the daily record low of 7F (-13.9C) set in 1909! San Angelo, Texas dipped to a bone-chilling -1F (-18.3C), which tied with December 29, 1983 and February 2, 1985 for the city’s second coldest temperature, only behind the reading of -4’F (-20C) set on December 23, 1989. That was also the only subzero reading for the date, smashing the old record of 16F (-8.9C) from 1909. Houston, Texas dipped to 16F on Monday the 15, which was their coldest temperature since December 24, 1989, when it plunged to 11F (-11.7C). That also broke the old daily record of 18F (-7.8C) from 1918. 

Kansas City, Missouri plunged down to -10F (-23.3C), breaking the old record of -6F (-21.1C) from 1936, while the high of -1F smashed the old record of 8F (-13.3C) from 1900. According to the local National Weather Service office, a wind chill of -32F (-35.6C) was recorded, the coldest wind chill there since 1989.

The following morning, Tuesday, February 16, even more notable record lows were set. Oklahoma City once again set a record low, this time falling to a jaw-dropping -14F (-25.6C), which not only obliterated the old daily record of 4F (-15.6C) set in 1903, it was the coldest reading there in over 120 years, only second to the -17F (-27.2C) recorded on February 12, 1899. Oklahoma City also recorded its longest stretch of temperatures at or below 20F (-6.7C), at 210 consecutive hours, surpassing 1983. Meanwhile, Tulsa dropped to -13F (-25C), tying the city’s coldest temperature on record, originally set on January 12, 1918.

Dallas, Texas even dipped to -2F (-18.9C), which matched January 31, 1949 for the second coldest temperature ever recorded there, just behind February 12, 1899, when it dipped to a bone-chilling -8F (-22.2C). Tyler, Texas broke their all-time coldest temperature of -3F (-19.4C) from January 18, 1930, dipping to six below zero. Hastings, Nebraska tied their all-time coldest temperature of -30F (-34.4C), originally set on January 12, 1912. It also obliterated the old daily record low of -13F set in 1979.

In Arkansas, Fayetteville fell to -20F (-28.9C), which not only anihilated the old record of 7F from both 1958 and 2007, it was their all-time coldest temperature, and only nine degrees short of the statewide record set on February 13, 1905 in Gravette.

Perhaps the most impressive record that was set was in Bottineau, North Dakota, approximately ten miles from the Canadian border. On the morning of February 13, the mercury dove to an incomprehensible -51F (-46.1C), which not only crushed the previous daily record of -37F (-38.3C) from 1936, it also broke the towns prior all-time record low of -50F (-45.6C) set on February 3, 1893, a record that stood for over 128 years! This reading was only nine degrees off the statewide record, set on February 15, 1936 in Parshall. Other impressive readings were temperatures as low as minus 20 as far south as northern Texas.

Now that we have flipped the calendar to March, to really shed some light on how large of an impression the Arctic outbreak had on the monthly outcome, last month was the coldest by departure from average in the Continental United States since December 2000 (Figure 3) and third coldest since December 1989.

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Figure 3. PRISM temperature anomaly analysis for February 2021 - weathermodels.com.

Major cold snaps that impact the southern plains all share similar characteristics with respect to their meteorological evolution. While the event itself was arguably predictable with moderate confidence as early as two weeks out, something my friend meteorologist Joe Bastardi over at WeatherBELL.com was very bullish -and ultimately correct - on from over ten days out, the threat for such cold became elevated within weeks following the sudden stratospheric warming event which was the primary cause of the stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) displacement.

Winter Rolls on for Denver

By the way, a blizzard left behind 27.1 inches of snow in Denver this weekend, the 4th largest snow in the history back to 1881.

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Also see A CLIMATE AND ENERGY PRIMER FOR POLITICIANS AND MEDIA by contributing author Allan MacRae Allan is a highly respected energy leader in Canada who has worked with true climate experts and has helped make Alberta the shining star of Canadian energy over the decades. There too the politicians and media and the public have been programmed by false claims and green energy frauds and are willing to toss the low cost clean fossil fuel energy legacy out and replace it with unreliable and expensive green energy. Greens expect population to adapt its consumption to the available supply and simply come to accept rationing and power interruptions, of the sort that are unfortunately still common in underdeveloped countries. They insist that is the necessary price for averting the phoney climate apocalypse.

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