Interesting piece on Lintzen/climate change

>and people say mistakes of the past can't happen again today.
oh mistakes are happening again, we are seeming the same mass delusion and thieving that has gone on since man was on this earth.
we've even seen in a number of times in the past 15 years - the tech bubble, the iraq war and the mortgage crisis. now we have the renewable energy/global warming/sustainable "delusion".
don't miss out! "everybody knows". i suggest you look into it.
 
rfarren":1ubvdj9b said:
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Horrifying???? The size of that glacier piece is like a pebble in the ocean.
yet, it is completely ignored that in Antartica it is the summer, and has record summer minimum, which according to this poster the excess is 1/10 of the ENTIRE SIZE OF GREENLAND.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/01/s ... nt-1580076
And you are "horrified" about a pebble breaking off and falling into the ocean because somehow you think 1 part of the atmosphere in 20,000 in controlling the climate of the earth. Tell me, who is filling your head with this complete nonsense?

Adults are scarying our children telling them the "icecaps are melting", yet the global sea ice average for the entire past year as been simply average.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere ... htrend.jpg
 
Thanks for posting the link. Interesting analysis. I have to say I have been surprised when Admin and others have posted photos of traffic on the road going down from Alta and Snowbird and there appeared to be little or no snow by the side of the road. I didn't realize it has been that warm in February in SLC. In accordance with your comment to this article, I think it is always somewhat risky to extrapolate the "weather" for one month in a particular location with overall long-term climate change. In the Northeast US, we have had a colder than average and snowier than average Winter. In central New England, we still have about 18 inches of snow on the ground and it was minus 1 (F) at my house this morning. I also see a news report this morning that snow cover in North America is at the third highest level since records began in 1966 and ice cover on the great lakes is the second highest in weather record history. I realize we have had discussions on this board ad nauseam about global warming and climate change, but I'm still not 100% convinced that the alleged long-term warming trend globally is caused directly and 100% by man made emissions into the atmosphere. There's no doubt that there has been a dramatic and sustained increase in the amount of CO2 and methane and other so-called greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere over the last 100 years but temperatures globally have fluctuated up and down over that same time period, with an apparent gradual increase overall. Does this indicate a direct correlation? I'm no statistician or climate scientist but I think you have to be somewhat skeptical about the direct connection.
 
berkshireskier":2dzhuz8h said:
I think it is always somewhat risky to extrapolate the "weather" for one month in a particular location with overall long-term climate change.

Actually, although Jim appears to be a believer he took great pains to precisely not do that. He was merely pointing out that if climate models are to be believed, the pattern that we experienced here in February could be indicative of what a "normal" February could look like by the end of the century.
 
It's been an interesting season defined even more heavily by the storm track than most years given the unique location of the track for most of this winter.

As relatively close as SLC is to Denver at 375 miles as the crow flies, Denver ended Feb at 4.3F BELOW normal (compared to the 7.9F above normal in SLC). That is quite a variation that you won't see in 95%+ of winters.
 
EMSC":354t287g said:
It's been an interesting season defined even more heavily by the storm track than most years given the unique location of the track for most of this winter.

As relatively close as SLC is to Denver at 375 miles as the crow flies, Denver ended Feb at 4.3F BELOW normal (compared to the 7.9F above normal in SLC). That is quite a variation that you won't see in 95%+ of winters.

And that's directly attributable to the arcing southwest to northeast, then northwest to southeast storm track that we saw for much of the month. We were on the warm side of that arc -- you were on the cold side.
 
My point, in response to chicken littles like Porter Fox and his Future of Snow book, is that a lot of western ski areas, including nearly all in Colorado, are at such high elevation that even the more dire forecasts of temperature rise will not result in much rain vs. snow in those areas. The fact the that 7.9F above average temperatures in Utah were a non-issue as far as snow in the Cottonwoods are concerned is a demonstration of that point.

If I were running Squaw Valley, I'd be a bit more concerned. Long term the base of Squaw has averaged 61% of the snowfall at 8,200 feet. This year it's averaged 32% with a lot of rain. :shock:
 
Speaking of rain at pcmr, the NCAA championship SL race was postponed today due to overnight rain and temps too warm...
 
Tony Crocker":3lv6gqsw said:
Interesting analysis by Jim Steenburgh on Utah's February, which was abnormally warm.

What is interesting is how absurdly stupid the human race appears to be, but they are good writers, that's for sure. They are good at spouting sheer nonsense which sounds very convincing.
You can go here, to the NOAA State temp data site.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
and plot Utah Feb temperatures. I went back 50 years and put in 1963-2014 in all the boxes and clicked the check boxes. the result is there is an essentially no trend for 50 years of Feb temp data in Utah. And this is plotted using temp data which many skeptics don't trust.

So we have 50 yrs of fluctuating Feb Utah temperature. We should have scientists explaining to us that nothing abnormal is happening with Feb Utah temp. Columnists who write such nonsense as Steenburgh did, based on one warm year, (when it has been bitter old at my house in Pa since mid-Jan), they would be rebuked. What happens, Steenburgh would be applauded in so many circles. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. We need science to make our lives better. Instead science is being used as a tool to take our money and our freedom - plain and simple.

Climate science is not so much as a study in physics etc, it is more a study of the evil aspects human nature and society.
 
SnowbirdDevotee":2qmtq64r said:
science is being used as a tool to take our money and our freedom - plain and simple.
Seriously...

wow.

SnowbirdDevotee":2qmtq64r said:
Climate science is not so much as a study in physics etc, it is more a study of the evil aspects human nature and society.

Yes, I think scientists should stop studying and hypothesizing. Since, they haven't nailed it yet they might as well quit. But they won't, because clearly it's a massive conspiracy to rob you of your "money and freedom."

=D> =D> =D>
 
Steenburgh never said, "This is what is going to happen to our climate." He tried to examine the question of what would happen to the rain/snow line IF February temperatures are 8F above normal. To me this was very constructive exercise. We hear these ridiculous hypotheses that "Aspen's climate in 2100 will be what Amarillo's is now," or Porter Fox' overall demise of North American skiing. I've been saying for a long time what we should be looking at is the change in the rain/snow line because speculation about precipitation is just that, and logically more water vapor in the air means more precipitation not less.

So I was quite interested to see this question directly examined with a real life example, albeit confined to one month and one state's ski areas.

rfarren":2axm3f7d said:
The cottonwoods would be okay, but places like PCMR & Snowbasin would expect a lot of rain.
There are a couple of issues here. First is that those areas still have substantial terrain above 8,000. Second is that we have successful ski areas that get a lot of rain now (Washington State) or at least some (much of Tahoe). So I don't necessarily see PCMR and Snowbasin becoming "non-viable ski areas." They might be somewhat like Heavenly is now, with fairly reliable upper terrain, but lower terrain that has good skiing in high snow years and when they can make enough snow.
 
Tony Crocker":32tybxp7 said:
rfarren":32tybxp7 said:
The cottonwoods would be okay, but places like PCMR & Snowbasin would expect a lot of rain.
There are a couple of issues here. First is that those areas still have substantial terrain above 8,000. Second is that we have successful ski areas that get a lot of rain now (Washington State) or at least some (much of Tahoe). So I don't necessarily see PCMR and Snowbasin becoming "non-viable ski areas." They might be somewhat like Heavenly is now, with fairly reliable upper terrain, but lower terrain that has good skiing in high snow years and when they can make enough snow.

I didn't mean to say that they wouldn't be viable ski areas. Indeed, the east coast of America has viable ski areas which have at least 4 major rain events each season. My assumption would be that you wouldn't see that in places like Snowbasin or PCMR.
 
rfarren":1zg5ucc3 said:
Indeed, the east coast of America has viable ski areas which have at least 4 major rain events each season.
A generous comment. The Mansfield Stake at 3,900 feet averages 7 days of rain between December and March. My guess is that number is a lot bigger for places farther south and lower in altitude. And a "major rain event" is not necessary to #$%^ up surface conditions, probably 0.1 inch of water will do the job.
 
Here's what The Economist had to say about it a week ago. They present a plausible set of arguments why global warming paused for the last decade and will resume shortly. None of us will live long enough to see who is right and who is wrong in this. What I see continuously is the total confusion between climate and weather and it shows up in this thread.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... goes-being


BETWEEN 1998 and 2013, the Earth’s surface temperature rose at a rate of 0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18°C increase in the 1990s. Meanwhile, emissions of carbon dioxide (which would be expected to push temperatures up) rose uninterruptedly. This pause in warming has raised doubts in the public mind about climate change. A few sceptics say flatly that global warming has stopped. Others argue that scientists’ understanding of the climate is so flawed that their judgments about it cannot be accepted with any confidence. A convincing explanation of the pause therefore matters both to a proper understanding of the climate and to the credibility of climate science—and papers published over the past few weeks do their best to provide one. Indeed, they do almost too good a job. If all were correct, the pause would now be explained twice over.

This is the opposite of what happened at first. As evidence piled up that temperatures were not rising much, some scientists dismissed it as a blip. The temperature, they pointed out, had fallen for much longer periods twice in the past century or so, in 1880-1910 and again in 1945-75 (see chart), even though the general trend was up. Variability is part of the climate system and a 15-year hiatus, they suggested, was not worth getting excited about.

An alternative way of looking at the pause’s significance was to say that there had been a slowdown but not a big one. Most records, including one of the best known (kept by Britain’s Meteorological Office), do not include measurements from the Arctic, which has been warming faster than anywhere else in the world. Using satellite data to fill in the missing Arctic numbers, Kevin Cowtan of the University of York, in Britain, and Robert Way of the University of Ottawa, in Canada, put the overall rate of global warming at 0.12°C a decade between 1998 and 2012—not far from the 1990s rate. A study by NASA puts the “Arctic effect” over the same period somewhat lower, at 0.07°C a decade, but that is still not negligible.

It is also worth remembering that average warming is not the only measure of climate change. According to a study just published by Sonia Seneviratne of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, in Zurich, the number of hot days, the number of extremely hot days and the length of warm periods all increased during the pause (1998-2012). A more stable average temperature hides wider extremes.

Still, attempts to explain away that stable average have not been convincing, partly because of the conflict between flat temperatures and rising CO2 emissions, and partly because observed temperatures are now falling outside the range climate models predict. The models embody the state of climate knowledge. If they are wrong, the knowledge is probably faulty, too. Hence attempts to explain the pause.

Chilling news

In September 2013 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did so in terms of fluctuating solar output, atmospheric pollution and volcanoes. All three, it thought, were unusually influential.

The sun’s power output fluctuates slightly over a cycle that lasts about 11 years. The current cycle seems to have gone on longer than normal and may have started from a lower base, so for the past decade less heat has been reaching Earth than usual. Pollution throws aerosols (particles such as soot, and suspended droplets of things like sulphuric acid) into the air, where they reflect sunlight back into space. The more there are, the greater their cooling effect—and pollution from Chinese coal-fired power plants, in particular, has been rising. Volcanoes do the same thing, so increased volcanic activity tends to reduce temperatures.

Gavin Schmidt and two colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Institute quantify the effects of these trends in Nature Geoscience. They argue that climate models underplay the delayed and subdued solar cycle. They think the models do not fully account for the effects of pollution (specifically, nitrate pollution and indirect effects like interactions between aerosols and clouds). And they claim that the impact of volcanic activity since 2000 has been greater than previously thought. Adjusting for all this, they find that the difference between actual temperature readings and computer-generated ones largely disappears. The implication is that the solar cycle and aerosols explain much of the pause.

Blowing hot and cold

There is, however, another type of explanation. Much of the incoming heat is absorbed by oceans, especially the largest, the Pacific. Several new studies link the pause with changes in the Pacific and in the trade winds that influence the circulation of water within it.

Trade winds blow east-west at tropical latitudes. In so doing they push warm surface water towards Asia and draw cooler, deep water to the surface in the central and eastern Pacific, which chills the atmosphere. Water movement at the surface also speeds up a giant churn in the ocean. This pulls some warm water downwards, sequestering heat at greater depth. In a study published in Nature in 2013, Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in San Diego, argued that much of the difference between climate models and actual temperatures could be accounted for by cooling in the eastern Pacific.

Every few years, as Dr Kosaka and Dr Xie observe, the trade winds slacken and the warm water in the western Pacific sloshes back to replace the cool surface layer of the central and eastern parts of the ocean. This weather pattern is called El Niño and it warms the whole atmosphere. There was an exceptionally strong Niño in 1997-98, an unusually hot year. The opposite pattern, with cooler temperatures and stronger trade winds, is called La Niña. The 1997-98 Niño was followed by a series of Niñas, explaining part of the pause.

Switches between El Niño and La Niña are frequent. But there is also a long-term cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which switches from a warm (or positive) phase to a cool (negative) one every 20 or 30 years. The positive phase encourages more frequent, powerful Niños. According to Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research, the PDO was positive in 1976-98—a period of rising temperatures—and negative in 1943-76 and since 2000, producing a series of cooling Niñas.

But that is not the end of it. Laid on top of these cyclical patterns is what looks like a one-off increase in the strength of trade winds during the past 20 years. According to a study in Nature Climate Change, by Matthew England of the University of New South Wales and others, record trade winds have produced a sort of super-Niña. On average, sea levels have risen by about 3mm a year in the past 30 years. But those in the eastern Pacific have barely budged, whereas those near the Philippines have risen by 20cm since the late 1990s. A wall of warm water, in other words, is being held in place by powerful winds, with cool water rising behind it. According to Dr England, the effect of the trade winds explains most of the temperature pause.

If so, the pause has gone from being not explained to explained twice over—once by aerosols and the solar cycle, and again by ocean winds and currents. These two accounts are not contradictory. The processes at work are understood, but their relative contributions are not.

Nor is the answer to what is, from the human point of view, the biggest question of all, namely what these explanations imply about how long the pause might continue. On the face of it, if some heat is being sucked into the deep ocean, the process could simply carry on: the ocean has a huge capacity to absorb heat as long as the pump sending it to the bottom remains in working order. But that is not all there is to it. Gravity wants the western-Pacific water wall to slosh back; it is held in place only by exceptionally strong trade winds. If those winds slacken, temperatures will start to rise again.

The solar cycle is already turning. And aerosol cooling is likely to be reined in by China’s anti-pollution laws. Most of the circumstances that have put the planet’s temperature rise on “pause” look temporary. Like the Terminator, global warming will be back.
 
Appreciate the post by Geoff.

PDO is the reason Joe Bastardi and some other meteorologists called for a 20-30 year cooling period.

Geoff":59qp746p said:
The solar cycle is already turning.
Actually not. We're at solar max now and it's the weakest max in 200 years. The analogous Dalton minimum 200 years ago lasted 2 full solar cycles.

We're all guessing on this, but the above factors lead me to to believe the current "pause" lasts another 10-15 years, then the warming resumes at a similar rate as during the 1980's and 1990's.
 
Tony Crocker":12gxwhgl said:
We're all guessing on this, but the above factors lead me to to believe the current "pause" lasts another 10-15 years, then the warming resumes at a similar rate as during the 1980's and 1990's.

No no no no... Everybody knows Global Warming is a left wing conspiracy to steal our freedom.
 
rfarren":2l5k8dg8 said:
SnowbirdDevotee":2l5k8dg8 said:
science is being used as a tool to take our money and our freedom - plain and simple.
Seriously...

wow.

SnowbirdDevotee":2l5k8dg8 said:
Climate science is not so much as a study in physics etc, it is more a study of the evil aspects human nature and society.

Yes, I think scientists should stop studying and hypothesizing. Since, they haven't nailed it yet they might as well quit. But they won't, because clearly it's a massive conspiracy to rob you of your "money and freedom."

=D> =D> =D>

Why of course it is being used to take our money. All alternative energy is more expensive and harmful to our environment. They have to come up with some crazy scheme or "common sense" people would say, that sounds crazy. But the common sense people are not running things anymore. Money is running the show, money getting more money. Why would they want us to loose freedom? Because loss of freedom creates jobs. Jobs are created and filled by people who now earn a living as regulators. It's inconsequential to the movement if those regulations jobs actually cause a net job loss. In fact, that's part of the plan. People loose jobs = more poor people = more people on the teet and dependent on Gov't. It might sound like a crazy hypothesis, but we just heard this is exactly one of the benefits of Obamacare. You don't have to work anymore.

Scientists aren't studying, they are scheming, altering data, creating absurd theories which they present as fact, and making wild outlandish guesses about the future - this is all now taken as scientific fact. The world has turned upside down. Just get the theory right - and move forward from there and throw anything against the wall. Just about anything goes with Climate, it's a free for all of nonsense.
 
1554467_795275293826817_3170772117949184924_n.jpg
 
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