The new Arctic Report Card, released Thursday, “tells a story of widespread, continued and even dramatic effects of a warming Arctic,” said Jackie Richter-Menge of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers facility.
Highlighting the immediate consequences of the warming, researchers said last winter’s massive snowstorms that struck the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic U.S. states were tied to higher Arctic temperatures.
“Normally the cold air is bottled up in the Arctic,” said Jim Overland of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. But last December and February, winds that normally blow west to east across the Arctic were instead bringing the colder air south to the mid-Atlantic, he said.
“As we lose more sea ice it’s a paradox that warming in the atmosphere can create more of these winter storms,” Overland said at a news briefing.
In other words, the Arctic Oscillation was very low last winter, so the cold air went south.
Winter snow accumulation on land in the Arctic was the lowest since records began in 1966.
In other words, the Arctic Oscillation was very low last winter, so the snow went south. North America had its snowiest winter on record.
Glaciers and ice caps in Arctic Canada are continuing to lose mass at a rate that has been increasing since 1987, reflecting a trend toward warmer summer air temperatures and longer melt seasons.
In other words, we released this report even though we should have known that the UT GRACE mass loss studies were flawed, and that sea level rise has slowed over the last five years.
Greenland in 2010 has had record-setting high air temperatures, ice loss through melting, and marine-terminating glacier area loss. The largest recorded glacier area loss observed in Greenland occurred this summer at Petermann Glacier, where a piece of ice several times larger than Manhattan Island broke away.
In other words, there was a blocking high pressure system over Greenland during the winter which kept temperatures at -20C instead of -25C. And we should have been familiar with Professor Muenchow’s statement about Petermann “Even a big piece like this over 50 years is not that significant. It’s just the normal rate”
Well done example of formally correct information denied context
I watched an interesting video the other day on ABC TV Australia, where Tim Flannery (The local alarmist) said his qualifications, and then went on to say that there are no real climatologists they really came from other fields like for eg oceanography.
So if there are no real climatologists in pure training, all this rubbish is really being done by people that are not even trained in the area. The only person I see qualified to talk about this stuff in Australia is Ian Plimer, I mean at least he is a Geologist!
Climatology is a degree provided by some universities. One person that I know of who was a professor is Dr Tim Ball. A lot of his work can be found at Friends of Science:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=415
He also writes a weekly article for Canada Free Press:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/members/1/Ball/
Beautiful pic! ahaahahahaha
I studied climatology in college as part of my major. Most of my formal training has been in geology and when I took my first climatology course I was shocked by the mindset of the professor and course material. As a geology student for many years I had learned quite correctly that there are no permanent features on the face of this planet, but then as a climatology student I was told climate is static. Most climatologists who do not have a geology background have a weird world view, and it interferes with their ability to process change on Earth.
Exactly! Any change in the weather is blamed on CO2.
Gator
You are correct- at the heart of this problem is the belief we live in a static world and to this I would a failure to recognize the immensity of time. As another geology major- the above are Geology’s two single most important lessons.
Well you know, Cancun is just around the corner and so expect a barrage of bogus scare reports coming out in the weeks ahead.
I haven’t found any peer-reviewed literature that tied the winter 2010 snowstorms over the mid-Atlantic to warmer Arctic temperatures.
Wally Broecker is an oceanographer. Here’s his CV. He’s a leading scientist researching climate change. http://www.or.is/media/PDF/WSB_publication.pdf
Do not confuse me with facts, my mind is made up.
Did not the Danish meteorological people state that their measurements showed a colder Arctic?
I am 65 years old and according to the believers I am part of the problem. It is mainly older ignorant people who don’t believe in AGW. It probably has something to do with the fact that I have lived through a cooling period and then a warming period and now a cooling period. I may be ignorant but I do discern a pattern here.