Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
There has been a lot of buzz about the mammoth snowstorm in the media.
Predictably, there is talk this is the result of global warming. They forget the IPCC, UCS and NOAA in their reports for the EPA had stated winters were becoming warmer and less snowy especially in the major metropolitan areas where they historically lie near the critical thermal parameters near the rain versus snow boundary.
See fact check on UCS report.
Instead, the major cities have been blitzed with heavy snows this century.
The last decade through last winter has amazed with 25 NESIS storms (add a new one this year...more to come).
The fact is the snows occur in colder regimes. December was warm and SNOWLESS. It turned colder this month and POW.
Central Park NYC recorded 26.8“, 2nd behind 26.9” in 2006. This was more than the 25.1” whole season average. Philadelphia recorded 22.4”, which was the 6th heaviest in a two day period in records back to the 1870s, exactly the seasonal normal total. In the DC area, Baltimore had 29.2”, the most ever for a single storm, Dulles Airport had 29.3”, second to the February 2010 blizzard.
The last few years were cold in the northeast for January to March (2015 the coldest and 2014 the 11th coldest in the northeast since 1895) and record 2014/15 the snowiest on record in places.
Enlarged
Snow is favored in COLD winters and increases with cooling not warming. In the 39 days last winter when Boston had 100.2 inches of snow, the melted precipitation was 5.69 inches, a ratio of 17.6 to 1. Seasonal snows are high in cold winters, low in warmer winters.
This has support in a new Journal of Climate story in phys.org that shows shows global warming would decrease contrast and extremes.
Extreme winters like we saw in Europe 2008-2013 and in the US the past few years are not due to claimed man made ‘warming’.
CLIMATE CHANGE DOES NOT CAUSE EXTREME WINTERS, NEW STUDY SHOWS
PHYS.ORG
March 27, 2015
Credit: Larisa Koshkina/public domain
Excerpts:
Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability.
Repeated cold snaps led to temperatures far below freezing across the eastern United States in the past two winters. Parts of the Niagara Falls froze, and ice floes formed on Lake Michigan. Such low temperatures had become rare in recent years. Pictures of icy, snow-covered cities made their way around the world, raising the question of whether climate change could be responsible for these extreme events.
It has been argued that the amplified warming of the Arctic relative to lower latitudes in recent decades has weakened the polar jet stream, a strong wind current several kilometres high in the atmosphere driven by temperature differences between the warm tropics and cold polar regions. One hypothesis is that a weaker jet stream may become more wavy, leading to greater fluctuations in temperature in mid-latitudes. Through a wavier jet stream, it has been suggested, amplified Arctic warming may have contributed to the cold snaps that hit the eastern United States.
Temperature range will decrease
Scientists at ETH Zurich and at the California Institute of Technology, led by Tapio Schneider, professor of climate dynamics at ETH Zurich, have come to a different conclusion. They used climate simulations and theoretical arguments to show that in most places, the range of temperature fluctuations will decrease as the climate warms. So not only will cold snaps become rarer simply because the climate is warming. Additionally, their frequency will be reduced because fluctuations about the warming mean temperature also become smaller, the scientists wrote in the latest issue of the Journal of Climate.
The study’s point of departure was that higher latitudes are indeed warming faster than lower ones, which means that the temperature difference between the equator and the poles is decreasing. Imagine for a moment that this temperature difference no longer exists. This would mean that air masses would have the same temperature, regardless of whether they flow from the south or north. In theory there would no longer be any temperature variability. Such an extreme scenario will not occur, but it illustrates the scientists’ theoretical approach.
Extremes will become rarer
Using a highly simplified climate model, they examined various climate scenarios to verify their theory. It showed that the temperature variability in mid-latitudes indeed decreases as the temperature difference between the poles and the equator diminishes. Climate model simulations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed similar results: as the climate warms, temperature differences in mid-latitudes decrease, and so does temperature variability, especially in winter.
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Update: The in-the-tank for the warmist AMS has scheduled a briefing ignoring the benefits that CO2 have provided but focusing on the false claims that CO2 will cause crop issues - continuing the indoctrination campaign the societies, enviro groups, universities riding the green grant gravy train like Yale, GMU, PSU, Columbia, Harvard and of course the lamestream media. Please consider writing them and telling the, what you think: Here is the e-mail we received.
Dear Colleagues,
The American Meteorological Society Policy Program, American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America are pleased to invite you to a Capitol Hill Briefing on climate change and food security.
The briefing is open to the public and will take place from 3:00-4:00pm on January 20th. It will be in Room 485 of Senate Russell Office Building.
The briefing will feature:
Edward Carr, Director of International Development, Community, and Environment Department, Clark University
Bill Easterling, Dean, College of Earth and Mineral Science, The Pennsylvania State University
Cynthia Rosenzweig, Senior Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Climate change can affect food availability, access, and utilization, and the stability of each of these over time. Disruptions at any point can lead to food insecurity through the activities of the food system, including food production, transportation, and storage.
The briefing will explore the possible effects of climate change on domestic and international food security. The speakers will also discuss the recent report Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System, a peer-reviewed scientific assessment that identifies climate change effects on global food security.
Please RSVP to yseidgreen@ametsoc.org by January 18th, COB
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Paul Driessen
The heat is on! Not the unusual winter warmth in much of the United States - but the unrelenting heat generated by propaganda and pressure campaigns that the White House, EPA, Big Green and news media are unleashing in the wake of the Paris climate agreement...and as a prelude to the 2016 elections. Read Paul’s insightful analysis here.
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Satellite data shows the per cent amount that foliage cover has changed around the world from 1982 to 2010.
Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilization, according to CSIRO research.
In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found that this CO2 fertilization correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa, according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr Randall Donohue.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water very efficiently,” Dr Donohue said. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilisation.
This, along with the vast extents of arid landscapes, means Australia featured prominently in our results.”
“While a CO2 effect on foliage response has long been speculated, until now it has been difficult to demonstrate,” according to Dr Donohue.
“Our work was able to tease-out the CO2 fertilisation effect by using mathematical modelling together with satellite data adjusted to take out the observed effects of other influences such as precipitation, air temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes.”
The fertilization effect occurs where elevated CO2 enables a leaf during photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar, to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.
If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants in arid environments will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves. These changes in leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas where the cover is less complete than in wet locations, according to Dr. Donohue.
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas; however there will be secondary effects that are likely to influence water availability, the carbon cycle, fire regimes and biodiversity, for example,” Dr Donohue said.
“Ongoing research is required if we are to fully comprehend the potential extent and severity of such secondary effects.”
This study was published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal and was funded by CSIRO’s Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, Water for a Healthy Country Flagship, the Australian Research Council and Land & Water Australia.
Recently, President Obama scrapped the “97% consensus of scientists believe in climate change” claim - and raised it 99.5%:
While the president noted that “99.5 percent of scientists and experts [and] 99 percent of world leaders” agree human-caused climate change needs to be reckoned with.
If the President relied on facts rather than hyperbole, he would admit that there is no study claiming that 99.5% of scientists agree with the climate change thesis, and that even the study claiming a 97% consensus of scientists is total bunk.
The study reporting the 97% consensus, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” by John Cook and friends, under the halo of the University of Queensland was published in 2013 and, according to Watts Up With That, when the source data for the study was published online, the University of Queensland got so worried they threatened a lawsuit over use of Cook’s “97% consensus” data for a scientific rebuttal.
That threat is antithetical to the scientific method, which says that, for a study to be valid, it must be possible to repeat it and achieve the same results as the initial study. But, the University of Queensland is hiding the fact that Cook’s study was a qualitative study which relied on opinion and produced biased results.
Cook and his buddies looked at peer-reviewed studies and classified them as either agreeing or disagreeing with the climate change hypothesis. The 97% figure was really 97% of the hand-picked studies they reviewed. Even worse, investigative journalists at Popular Technology reported that the 97% Study falsely classifies scientists’ papers as supporting the global warming hypothesis - according to the scientists who published the papers.
Popular Technology looked into precisely which papers were classified within Cook’s asserted 97 percent. The investigative journalists found Cook and his colleagues strikingly classified papers by such prominent, aggressive climate change skeptics as Willie Soon, Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir Shaviv, Nils-Axel Morner and Alan Carlin as supporting the 97 percent consensus.
Cook and his colleagues, for example, classified a peer-reviewed paper by scientist Craig Idso as explicitly supporting the “consensus” position on global warming “without minimizing” the asserted severity of global warming. When Popular Technology asked Idso whether this was an accurate characterization of his paper, Idso responded:
“That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion’s share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.”
A more extensive examination of the Cook study by the New American reported that, out of the nearly 12,000 scientific papers Cook’s team evaluated, only 65 endorsed Cook’s alarmist position. That is less than 0.97%.
The crucial point here is the qualifying clause, “of those who have an opinion.” In other words, even the highly questionable Cook study doesn’t actually claim, as President Obama does, that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree.” In fact, when examined closely, one finds that the study says only one-third of the authors of the published research papers they examined expressed an opinion that the Cook team interpreted as either an implicit or explicit endorsement of AGW. So now its 97 percent of one-third of selected scientists in a sampling of research papers. That’s a far cry from the 97 percent of all scientists claimed by President Obama and many of the media stories. And, as we will show below, even this admitted dramatically lower consensus claimed by the study is fraught with problems and falls apart further under examination.
Another criticism of the Cook’s paper is it didn’t define the “consensus” they were looking for. Is the 97% for people who believe the global warming is real, or people who believe it’s real and caused by mankind?
In fact popular technology listed 97 papers refuting Cook’s study here.
There are scientists, for example, who believe the Earth just went through a warming period caused by high sunspot activity. Many of those scientists blaming sunspots either work or consult for the U.S. or British Governments. Those scientists believe that we have entered a period of low sunspot activity and that might cause a mini-ice age.
Any objective examination of the data and methodology Cook and the University of Queensland have allowed the public to see will conclude that the 97% consensus figure has no basis in fact.
The ‘pause’ in global warming that this administration pressured NOAA to disavow is still present.
See the 64 theories for why temperatures have not risen for 18+ years.
The reality that intelligent people know is:
Here in his last Dragnet show, Jack Webb schools a young man on reality. It is obvious no one ever had that kind of talk with Obama or young people today who march and complain when we don’t respect their opinion or feelings.
This is from a 2007 post. it explains why nonsense stories dominate the news and media coverage. The environmental reporters already left leaning and tending to believe in environmental causes has pushed reporters to abandon objectivity in their coverage of the topic:
SOCIETY OF ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM
This professional organization that prides itself in its Code of Ethics hosted a one-sided global warming session at its last annual event. The organization’s Code of Ethics includes among its stated principles: (1) Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting, (2) Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant, (3) Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others.
However, when the panel was confronted with the question of maintaining the balance between reporting the news and playing the role of advocacy journalist, Greenwald, one of the panelists, offered the standard talking points. “I think the facts are actually quite compelling,” Greenwald said. “We advocate one thing, but a lot of what we do is just report the fact… A lot of scientists worked on that question [if global warming was just natural] and did very sophisticated analysis that are sort of hard to explain because a lot of it is about pattern analysis and if you look at the pattern of global warming and try to find some sort of explanation, the only explanation that actually works for it is the greenhouse gases. We need help from journalists to explain to the public what is at stake and how we are going to be able to move forward.”
As Christopher Alleva in the American Thinker reported in an August 2007 article entitled ”Global Warming Propaganda Factory”.
“In January of this year, the SEJ published what they call Climate change: A guide to the information and disinformation. The guide is neatly organized into twelve chapters. Except for the seventh chapter titled with the freighted descriptive: “Deniers, Dissenters and Skeptics”, the guide is a one sided presentation that resoundingly affirms global warming and puts down anyone with a different point of view. The site is a virtual digest of the global warming industry. If you’re looking for a road map to the special interest groups behind the hysteria, this is the place to go. The journalist members of this association have obviously abandoned all pretense of objectivity.”