OT; Widespread Global warming

Winter snow is normal, being that Hawaii is over 2.6 miles tall. You can even ski there if you don't mind the difficult access, volcanic ash, UV radiation, brutal winds, and altitude sickness.

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I will not see posts or email from Google because I must filter them as spam

The Sea of Okhotsk is one the areas the alarmists claims shows signs of AGW.

The ruskies have been trying to rescue ships for nearly 2 weeks. In places the sea is frozen all the way to the bottom.

India and China are also suffering.

Remember hot is climate, cold is weather.

Actually, it's more important to remember that Ravinghorde is a nitwit.

Isolated extreme weather conditions are always weather. If you get repeated extreme weather conditions, year after year, it may be worth thinking about climate change - anthropogenic global warming is going on, despite Ravinghorde's deluded maunderings, but this just means that the average surface temperature of the earth - averaged around the globe and through the year - is rising. It doesn't say anything much about local temperatures in specific places at particular times of the year, and anthropogenic global warming can obviously change weather patterns in ways that could make previously unusual weather patterns more likely.

The Younger Dryas was a more extreme case, chilling the area around the North Atlantic for 1300 years at a time when the earth as whole was warming up after the most recent ice age.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I refer you to Phil Allison's topic about Bill Slowman.

You've been sussed boy.

Just to add to the discussion....

The north polar region has the lowest level of surface sea ice (as they measure that figure) in the satellite record (since 1979) for the averaged month of December.

"The low ice conditions in December occurred in conjunction with above-average air temperatures in regions where ice would normally expand at this time of year. Air temperatures over eastern Siberia were 6 to 10 degrees Celsius (11 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal in December. Over the eastern Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Baffin Bay/Davis Strait and Hudson Bay, temperatures were at least 6 degrees Celsius (11 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than average. Southern Baffin Island had the largest anomalies, with temperatures over 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than normal. By sharp contrast, temperatures were lower than average (4 to 7 degrees Celsius, 7 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit) over the Alaska-Yukon border, north-central Eurasia, and Scandinavia.

"The warm temperatures in December came from two sources: unfrozen areas of the ocean continued to release heat to the atmosphere, and an unusual circulation pattern brought warm air into the Arctic from the south. Although the air temperatures were still below freezing on average, the additional ocean and atmospheric heat slowed ice growth."

That's at the same time there is snow across the US. Surprise? No. Not at all.

On a more local note.... in my area of Portland, Oregon, this report made the front page of a local paper, the Portlanbd Tribune, on Thursday, January 6th, 2011, titled:

IT JUST DOESN"T SNOW LIKE IT USED TO

"It used to snow in Portland. Big time. The average annual snowfall in downtown Portland in the 1870s was 20 inches. In the winter of 1871-72, it snowed 50 inches, followed by 30 inches the next winter and 36 the following.

"That was nothing compared to the winter of 1892-93, when nearly 61 inches of snow hit the ground.

"Even through the 1950s and ?60s, significant snowfall was common in Portland: 24 inches in 1955-56, 20 inches in 1959-60, 13 inches in 1964-65 and 26 inches in 1968-69.

"In the early part of the 20th century, a permanent tow rope lifted skiers up the north side of Mount Tabor.

"The past 10 years? Portland has averaged 2 inches per winter. Almost all of that came in December 2008. Take away that winter, and downtown Portland has averaged 1.5 inches of snow per winter during the past decade. In seven of the past 10 years, the city has seen an inch or less of total snowfall."

See the article here:

And their copy of NOAA's record of snow in Portland here:

(I pick up the SF6 dataset from NOAA, regularly, and track instrumentation changes over hte years, as well.)

I have lived in Portland since 1955. I used to see what we'd call either a "silver frost" or "sliver thaw" once every two years, or so. I'd go out at about 2AM in the morning and sit

200' above the Portland area over the Willamette River and watch as power stations blew up from those weather events. The last one I saw was in 1981. Hasn't been one since.

I also farm. I've seen the growing season change by well over a month in my lifetime. I count that as good for me, right now. But it's a big change all the same.

And the glacier system (11 of them) on Mt. Hood, which supplies nearly all of the fresh water used by 1.5 million people in this area have diminished their mass balance by nearly 1/2 in the last 30 years. (Personal conversations with two research scientists studying the Cascade system.)

Jon

You're close. Bad is climate. Good is weather.

Ah. No facts, so it's ad hominem time.

Why am I not surprised?

Thanks, Rich

SNIP

Doesn't take long for climate "scientists" to crawl out of the woodwork and link AGW to Australian floods. QED.

/quote

?I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change,? said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

/end quote

/quote

Prominent U.S. climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors.

...

He said a portion, about 0.5C, of the ocean temperatures around northern Australia, which are more than 1.5C above pre-1970 levels, could be attributed to global warming.

/end quote

SNIP

.

Ravinghorde finds Phil Allison a good judge of character.

Need I say more?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ravinghorde is a nitwit. That a fact - an ad hominem fact, but both relevant and true.

You then snipped the rest of my post, which included two references to matters of fact, without marking the snip. In somebody with a better grasp of reality, this would be dishonest, but with you it is simpel incompetence.

Because you don't understand much, and rely on your dim-witted preconceptions to guide your reactions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

If Ravinghorde knew a little more science, he might be aware that warmer oceans evaporate more water, so there's more water in the air to fall out as rain when the air moves inland.

If Ravinghorde knew even more science, he'd be aware that half a degree Kelvin isn't much - so there's only a couple of percent more water in the air as a consequence of global warming - which does mean that the scientist involved was giving the answer that the reporter wanted to hear rather than saying anything useful or informative.

One can argue that the extra few percent of water vapour is not only extra rain, but also extra heat, which is released when the water vapour condenses as rain, driving faster atmospheric circulation and thus sucking in even more damp air off the ocean, but it's still small beer.

In fact the current Queensland floods aren't as bad as the 1974 floods, so its probably safer to write them off as just weather, but that doesn't suit the average journalist.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

SNIP

It's bullshit.

The flood of 1893 was 4 metres, 13 feet higher than this one.

In fact there were 3 floods around 1890 bigger than this one.

Or the average climate "scientist".

The average climate scientist tells journalists to get lost when they show up with silly questions. The exceptionallu dull and unworldly climate scientist isn't quick enough to end the conversation before the journalist has harvested the quote they were looking for.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Wow. You're known to readily point out the errors that can occur in using proxies to deduce past temperature, but now you want to use the level of flooding on a single river to show that atmospheric water vapour has not changed in the last century.

Perhaps you should consider what other factors that influence flooding might have changed since then. Eg, has the river been dredged, has it been confined to its channel anywhere with stopbanks, has the vegetation cover of surrounding land changed, have storage dams to mitigate flooding been built (from another post you seem to be aware that they have), how much rain actually fell and over what period?

Without considering these and other relevant factors, your claim is the bullshit you complain about.

-- Regards Malcolm Remove sharp objects to get a valid e-mail address

What's scary is when policy makers assume hot and dry so don't prepare for snow and floods. People die. Blame the journalists!

No, they just roust up more funding to improve their models.

John

This would be scary if it actually happened. Ravinghorde claims that this actually did happen in Queensland, but he didn't cite his evidence, which presumable came from one of the denialist web-sites he favours.

Of course neither you nor Ravinghorde has yet come up with a prediction that climate scientists have made that has turned out wrong. Ravinghorde has come up with a quote which a UK journalist has attributed to a climate scientist, but it didn't look much like a "prediction" to me.

As they should.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

SNIP

If CO2 causes warming then lack of warming rather than cooling is adequate to disprove the hypothesis.

The only points then are:

1: the period required. 10 years? 15 years? 20 years?

2: An acceptable measurement. I believe that has to be satellite and given your dislike of Spencer that leaves RSS.

For you what time scale disproves AGW assuming a continued rise in CO2 at or faster than the current trend?

For example will a zero RSS trend from 1998 to 2013 disprove AGW?

Correct.

That depends on what we know about wandering ocean currents. We've now got some understanding of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation

of which we've seen two cycles in about 140 years - which isn't to say that it has a regular period.

The Bond events, which seem to recur every 1500 years or so, may be the same kind of thing

The fact that Roy Spencer is a fundamentalist Christian, and was remarkably slow to correct the errors in the UAH temperature data doesn't mean that the current UAH temperatures - since the 2005 correction - aren't now as reliable as anybody elses. Unlike religion, science can detect and correct errors.

About fifty years - it took that long for the current warming to start looking significant.

No. 1998 was an exceptionally warm year, mainly due to the strongest El Nino of the century. Only a cherry-picking idiot would propose it as the base year for such a comparison. More to the point, CO2 levels have been rising steadily and continously since reliable CO2 measurments began back in 1958 and it makes sense to compare global average temperatures over as much of that span as we can.

Any sensible test would include using what we now know about the ocean- current-induced fluctuations in global temperature to cancel this part of the signal from the data we were looking at.

There are obviously signals for the ocean-current-induced fluctuations

- local sea surface temperature differences come to mind - that give a reliable and relatively noise-free indication of what the El Nino/La Nina and Atlantic Multidecal Oscillation are doing at any given time, which should allow us to subtract this particular noise out of the global temperature record. Getting a similar handle on the Bond Cycles would be nice, but since these are slow - about 1500 years - they won't have much effect on the decade-on-decade trend.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Not just something, but something simple enough that you can think you understand it. Anthropogenic global warming is a complicated subject, and trying to turn it into baseball isn't going improve anybody's comprehension of what is actually going on - not that you are interested in understanding anything. You can barely manage point scoring.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen