KSL TV

National Weather Service issuing a blizzard warning for much of the state. A strong cold front is expected to arrive in Northern Utah by 2-4pm, in the Wasatch Front between 3p-6p, and then through the rest of the state. Expect the wind gusts to blow between 30 and 50mph as the front arrives. Bitter cold air should move in quickly, with temperatures in the teens tonight. Single digits possible tomorrow morning. More snow is possible along the Wasatch Front tomorrow morning as well. Highs tomorrow could stay below 20. Lows Thanksgiving could drop below zero if skies clear - Grant Weyman, Live 5 Weather HD.

Residents urged to prepare for expected blizzard conditions

“Hunker down, wait it out a bit. It’s going to be that significant.”—Glen Merrill, NWS SALT LAKE CITY—A blizzard is expected to hit Utah later today, just in time for one of the biggest travel days of the year.

The latest estimate from the National Weather Service predicts the storm front will reach Ogden between 4:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. and Salt Lake City between 5:30 p.m and 6:00 p.m. High winds are possible even before the front hits.

Meteorologists say the 3 to 6 inches of snow anticipated in the valleys is not the problem—it’s the combination of snow, extreme cold and possibly damaging winds.

Glen Merrill, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Salt Lake, said, “This will far surpass anything that we’ve seen, probably for the last several years.”

The storm will begin in the north, move south and could affect most of the state. It should end by noon Wednesday. (CLICK HERE for the KSL forecast)

National Weather Service situation room Merrill says when the storm front hits, “It would be like driving from dry pavement to instantly snow-packed roads within 15 minutes.”

“The first few couple minutes of the front, the snow might actually attempt to melt on surfaces. But a few minutes later it will instantly freeze and accumulate very quickly,” he added.

Automobile preparation

The Utah Department of Transportation is encouraging drivers to leave work early enough to get home before the storm hits. UDOT says driving in blizzard conditions is more dangerous than driving in normal snowy conditions, and unnecessary travel is discouraged.

Mary Burchett, with the American Red Cross, says if you get stuck, having a car emergency kit can be a lifesaver.

“The best things to have in your car are definitely food and water, some granola bars, a pair of boots in case you need to get out, some extra clothes, blankets, hats, gloves, things like that to keep you warm, keep you safe and stay prepared for this crazy weather,” she said.

The Red Cross also suggests keeping your gas tank full to prevent the gas line from freezing. If you get stranded in your car, run the engine about 10 minutes each hour for heat.

In blizzard conditions, heavy snow, wind, and extremely cold temperatures make it nearly impossible for crews to keep the roads clear. Salt is not effective, and while UDOT crews will be working to push the snow off the roads, heavy winds almost certainly will blow it back onto the roads.

The storm is expected to bring 3 to 6 inches of snow to the valleys. Lake-effect snow could hit the Wednesday morning commute and bitter cold temperatures should last through Thanksgiving Day.

Related:  Storm barrels through Northwest as travel ramps up
A vicious storm struck the Pacific Northwest and other western states at the start of the holiday travel season, dumping heavy snow on roads, knocking out power to tens of thousands of people and causing a cargo plane to overshoot its runway in Seattle.The forecast has many people lining up to upgrade their vehicle’s tires.

The Les Schwab store in Tooele, for example, was extremely busy over the weekend. Manager Wade Gipson says things haven’t slowed down much. On Monday, customers waited an hour and a half to buy new tires.

If you’re wondering whether or not you have enough tread for winter, Gipson says things get dicey anywhere below a half tread. If you can afford it, Gipson recommends having two sets of tires—one designated for winter, the other for all seasons.

Home preparation

Those at home should be prepared for possible power outages. Rocky Mountain Power says this major storm could knock out power. It recommends keeping blankets handy but to be careful with portable heat sources.

“You should never operate a kerosene or propane-powered heater without proper ventilation, and never run a generator inside your home or garage without that proper ventilation,” Jeff Hymas, with Rocky Mountain Power said. “Don’t put your safety at risk while trying to stay warm. Bundle up, wear layers. There are other things you can do to stay warm.”

Rocky Mountain also suggests having a 72-hour kit with food, water, a can opener and a flashlight.

Another idea to stay warm is close off unneeded rooms and place blankets and towels around doors to block off areas where the heat will escape. You can also cover windows with blankets at night.

It’s also important to keep eating when it’s cold because the food will help your body stay warm.

Impending blizzard a reminder of other harsh storms
By Steve Fidel

SALT LAKE CITY - It’s been long enough since Utah last saw blizzard conditions that the National Weather Service had to dig into its archives to find the last time it issued a blizzard warning.

“We’re thinking it was 2001,” said hydrologist Brian McInerney.

But that doesn’t mean Utah has had a shortage of notable storms, or that all of the nasty ones can be categorized as blizzards.

National Weather Service Staff in Salt Lake City also found other notables in their archives on Tuesday, all while cranking out reports about the approaching arctic blast expected to bring “Blizzard 2010” to Utah this afternoon.

Here’s a partial list, quickly compiled with help from Kevin Barjenbruch, warning coordinating meteorologist of the NWS, of some past big storms:

2003: Beginning Christmas day, a three-day storm clobbered northern Utah, depositing heavy wet snow. Trees and power lines collapsed under the weight of the wet snow, leaving more than 70,000 people without power. Emergency shelters were opened in Salt Lake City and Ogden. More than 15,000 traffic accidents were reported during the three-day storm period. On December 26, a large avalanche released near Aspen Grove, claiming the lives of three people.

1993: A whopping 23.3 inches of snow fell at Salt Lake City International Airport, the greatest single storm total, between Jan 6-10. For the month of January, 50.3 inches of snow fell, an all time monthly record.

1984: An early-season lake effect snow storm deposited 18.4 inches of snow at Salt Lake City International Airport, a new record for 24 hour snowfall. Power was lost at approximately 20,000 homes and about 500,000 trees were damaged.

1978: A 120 mile-per-hour wind gust was recorded at Bountiful on Nov. 11.

1948: The National Weather Service lists that winter as the No. 4 weather event for the Beehive State during the 20th century. It was the coldest winter on record to date, with record amounts of seasonal snowfall with nearly a 25 percent loss in some livestock herds reported. Many fruit trees were killed and 10 people died from exposure.

1933: The mercury dropped to minus 30 degrees on Feb. 9, the coldest reading ever recorded at Salt Lake City International Airport.

By Dr. Vincent Gray, NZ Climate Truth Newsletter

Environmentalists believe that humans are destroying the earth (or as they prefer to call it, “the planet"), and they routinely manipulate news items that can be distorted to support their views. “Resources” are being “depleted”, oil is about to run out, everything is about to become extinct, all chemicals are “toxic” and all human activities must be prevented because they “damage the environment”

The “greenhouse effect” was a golden opportunity to blame every climate event on humans and prevent many classes of industrial activity.

The “greenhouse effect” is a real physical phenomenon, although it has nothing to do with what happens in a greenhouse. A greenhouse inhibits convection and confines the air warned by contact with the ground that has been heated by the sun’s radiation.

The “greenhouse effect” results from absorption of part of the infra red radiation from the earth by several trace gases in the atmosphere, causing an increase in the surface temperature of the earth,

In order to show that there are increases in this effect caused by humans which are damaging the climate several propositions had to be proved.

· Greenhouse gases are increasing because of human activity

· The temperature of the earth is increasing

· This rise is damaging the climate

· Future changes can be predicted to be disastrous

Let us take these problems one at a time.

Are Greenhouse Gases increasing?

The British scientist John Tyndall in the 1860s, who fist established the existence of the greenhouse effect, showed that the most important greenhouse gas is water vapour, so this should be the main emphasis of any investigation into possible damage from increase of greenhouse gases. Unfortunately the concentration of water vapour in the atmosphere varies over several orders of magnitude, being dependent on temperature, time and place. No accurate average value has ever been reliably measured and there is no acceptable evidence of any changes that have been taking place. Even if these were established it might be difficult to blame them on humans.

So, somehow, water vapour had to be ignored. This is done by leaving it out of lists of greenhouse gases, discussing it as little as possible and leaving it out of the main components of their model by calling it a “feedback”. assuming that its average value is exclusively dependent on average temperature.

So then, emphasis was placed on the next trace gas, carbon dioxide. This is a much more suitable candidate, because its concentration in the atmosphere can be blamed on combustion of fossil fuels by humans.

But then another snag arises. Its concentration in the atmosphere has been shown to be highly variable from some 40,000 measurements that have been reported in learned scientific journals, going back to 1850. Some of these measurements were made by Nobel Prize winners, all were respected scientists of the day, and the papers were peer reviewed in the days when this meant something.

In order to show carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is increasing it is necessary to make continuous measurements distributed everywhere in the atmosphere on a representative basis. This is plainly impossible.

But do they despair? No. The first thing to do is to suppress all knowledge of any measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 1850 and 1950. Then they publicized the measurements near the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii as the only authentic measurements and followed this up by taking measurements that had been made in a negligibly small sample of ice cores as representative of concentrations before the industrial era, Subsequently they permitted the use of measurements made over the sea in several places to be added, but they have prevented or suppressed all measurements over any land surface, or in any other than an approved direction which are regarded as “noise” (unwelcome data). These restricted results showed a fairly steady increase, but this was not large enough, so they more than doubled it for their models.

THE TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH

Temperature on the earth’s surface is highly variable. It is impossible to show if there. a general increase unless you can measure the average surface temperature. This would surely involve the placing of measuring instruments randomly all over the earth’s surface, Including the 71% that is ocean, and all the forests, pastures, deserts and icecaps. Such an enterprise is impossible with current technology, so it is not possible to find if the average temperature of the earth is increasing.

But, again, a way of faking it was evolved. The originator, Jim Hansen of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York features on his website a discussion headed “The Elusive Surface Temperature” which shows that there is no satisfactory way of defining or measuring the surface temperature of the earth. Yet he proposed to make use of temperature measurements that were routinely made at weather stations around the world as part of weather forecasting services, to derive what is called a “mean global temperature anomaly”.

Weather stations are not situated in representative places on the earth’s surface. They are predominantly near towns. Their number and location varies daily, so there is no fair statistical comparison over any time period. Although many (but not all) thermometers are housed in a standard screen, their positioning is far from standard and it changes over time. Many are close to buildings, sources of heat, concrete, tarmac, vegetation and other changing circumstances. There is no way of allowing either for the lack of representativity or the changes in circumstances.

Then, no weather station actually measures the average local temperature. They typically measure the maximum and the minimum over a 24 hour period which depends on the time of observation. This makes sense for weather forecasting since the temperature regimes by day and night are so different that an average between the two is meaningless.

Recent studies have shown that most weather stations, even today, cannot assess local temperature to better than a degree or two Celsius. Weather forecasters know that their figures are only rough. They never use decimals of a degree.

The “mean annual global temperature anomaly” involves multiple averaging, by week, month and year, plus a subtraction from the average for a reference petiod. This process must involve very large accumulated inaccuracies so that a claim of an increase in the “anomaly” of several decimals of a degree over 100 years is meaningless.

Then there is the overall warming effect of urban and land use change. The 1990 paper in “Nature” which was routinely used to claim the urban effects are negligible was shown by Keenan in 2000 to be fraudulent when he tried to find the Chinese data upon which it was partly based. Phil Jones recently admitted that the data did show an urban effect (and then promptly denied it) but the effect is still ignored in the teeth of the evidence in its favour

IF THERE IS WARMING, IT IS NATURAL?

There is overwhelming anecdotal evidence of warm periods In history which may have exceeded temperatures today, Efforts to discount these by manipulating unreliable “proxies” such as thickness of tree rings have been unsuccessful. There is even evidence from tree rings that the current era is not unusual leading to the need to “hide the decline”.

Besides being affected by urban and land use effects, the unreliable “mean global temperature anomaly” is affected also by currently known changes in the sun and in the ocean oscillations, particularly the North Atlantic Decadal Oscillation and the Southern Oscillation Index. Our knowledge of both of these effects is currently limited. Sunspots are an extremely crude measure of the Sun’s activity, and the ocean oscillations also have crude definitions.

FORECASTING THE FUTURE

The problem of forecasting future climate is also impossible to solve. Genuine honest scientists working in meteorology have struggled for several hundred years to try and provide a model of the climate which could help future forecasting. They have collected every measurable climate variable; wind, rain, temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, sunshine hours and cloud cover, and they have launched weather balloons to study the atmosphere. One measurement they have not found useful is the concentration of carbon dioxide, although that also has been measured in many places. Yet everybody, including the IPCC, knows that forecasts beyond a week or so are unreliable.

Yet in order to confirm the influence of increased greenhouse gases forecasting is essential, otherwise any theory is worthless.

It is insufficiently understood that the IPCC admits that computer based models of the climate are currently incapable of forecasting any aspect of future climate. This fact is freely admitted. Models never make “predictions”, but always “projections”, which are the results obtained by accepting the plausibility of the model assumptions. No “projection” from any climate model has ever successfully predicted any future climate behaviour

Since this is so, all the IPCC conclusions are based on the unproven opinions of those persons who are paid to produce the models. This conflict of opinion is so severe that any model maker who has a poor opinion of the results of his model would probably lose his job and career. This unreliable process is concealed by a system of levels of “likelihood” combined with fabricated figures of the statistical reliability of the “estimates”.

The forecasts made by meteorologists can be checked. If they are consistently wrong the model has to be modified. The “projections” made by the IPCC are usually so far ahead (100 years) that they cannot be checked until the experts have enjoyed their generous pensions. There is no way of telling whether one model is better than another. When more recent “projections” fail there is always the excuse that it is due to “natural variability”.

ARE THE MODELS PLAUSIBLE?

The assumptions made by the IPCC computer models of the climate are all in complete conflict with what is known about the climate. They assume that the earth is in energy equilibrium. This means that the earth is flat, the sun shines all day and all night with one quarter of its maximum intensity, clouds are constant, and the temperature of the earth is constant. Such a model is essential if you want to calculate the possible effect of greenhouse gas increases as this can only be done if everything else is unchanging. In addition the concentration of greenhouse gases has to be constant at any point in time

All these assumptions are ridiculous. No part of the earth is ever in energy equilibrium and it is never “balanced” as a whole. It warms by day and cools by night, when there is no sun. The seasons, wind, cloud changes volcanism and ocean circulation come on top and inevitably confuse any possible change that might result from the greenhouse effect.

“ANTHROPOGENIC” INFLUENCES ON THE CLIMATE

All organisms influence the climate to a greater or lesser degree and humans are no exception.  We try to maintain our body temperature by clothing and dwellings.  Our buildings and our heating systems raise urban temperatures. We influence the land to encourage crops. There are wind breaks and fences and terraces and dams, and, again, climate is modified. None of these “anthropogenic” effects are allowed for by the IPCC.

NATURAL VARIABILITY

Climate has always changed in an irregular manner over many time periods and its causes are at present imperfectly understood. Some changes (for example ice ages) take millions of years to develop. Others (such as the effects of a large volcanic eruption) influence only a year or so. The idea that natural changes can only be “variable” and not cause “climate change” is therefore incorrect. Also it is impossible to claim with any certainty that a particular change is “unprecedented” over such a short period as a few centuries.

The very existence of natural climate influences means that climate models that are not able to predict their influence cannot hope to detect any change caused by the greenhouse effect.

CONCLUSION

Any routine scientific study would have abandoned the attempt to justify the current emphasis on the greenhouse effect because of the impossibility of carrying out any of the necessary observations to confirm its importance. It could only have been established as a potential threat by multiple fraud from each of the considerations listed above.

See PDF here.

By Paul Taylor, LA Politics Examiner

This week is the one-year anniversary of the “climategate” scandal involving the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thousands of IPCC climate scientist e-mails from the U.K. University of East Anglia were published by computer hackers in November 2009. Investigations of the e-mails suggest that world-renowned climate scientists manipulated data and exaggerated findings to support the basic theory that manmade greenhouse gases are the cause of global warming.

Decades of hysterical fear mongering and out right science fraud may now end after independent review and reform of the U.N. IPCC standards and practices. Global warming has become a goldmine of scary propaganda to boost eco-group fundraising and to grow global governments. Conceited climate “debate denier,” Al Gore, would become the world’s first “carbon billionaire.” Global government regulators have spent (or proposed to spend) hundreds of billions of dollars to control climate based primarily upon IPCC reports.

Some of the climategate setbacks to the climate crusaders are:

• Hundreds of E.U. industries and power plants have requested, and been granted, exemptions from costly 2005 Kyoto-like greenhouse gas controls. Less than a 4% reduction in greenhouse gases has been achieved since 2005;

• The U.K. estimates that fuel and energy costs will rise 18% and 33% over the next decade under proposed climate regulations;

• U.S. carbon cap-and-trade and direct carbon taxes are dead in the wake of the recent historic U.S. House and governorships taken over by Republicans;

• Al Gore has abandoned his Chicago climate exchange venture that would have profited from trading fanciful carbon credits. Similar global carbon trading markets have been shaken by the climategate scandal;

• U.S. EPA and the science czar have accepted the semantics replacement of “global warming” with “climate change.” They now want to politically-correct “climate change” with “climate disruption”;

• Scientific American polled its readers and found that about 16% believe the U.N. IPCC to be credible, while 84% believe the IPCC to be “a corrupt organization, prone to groupthick, with a political agenda”;

• The forthcoming December IPCC meeting in Cancun is not expected to accomplish much more than to subtly shift the operative regulatory imperative from “climate change” to “global biodiversity.”

Given climategate, it is clear that partisan ideologies and cultish environmentalism have replaced prudent science and economic realities in climate policy. What is also clear is that radical environmentalism no longer offers any product or service in support of our future security and prosperity. Militant environmentalism and green-obsessed bureaucrats have become an “axis of antagonism” that we can no longer afford. Maybe we should replace “Earth Day” April 22 with “Climategate Day” November 20 celebrations.

See post here.