Real Climate Science

Unprecedented – yet normal, cyclical and expected

Steve Cole
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
[email protected]

July 24, 2012

Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt

Even the area around Summit Station in central Greenland, which at 2 miles above sea level is near the highest point of the ice sheet, showed signs of melting. Such pronounced melting at Summit and across the ice sheet has not occurred since 1889, according to ice cores analyzed by Kaitlin Keegan at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather station at Summit confirmed air temperatures hovered above or within a degree of freezing for several hours July 11-12.

I look at the Greenland Summit webcam just about every day. There has never been any visible indication of melt this month, and the month has averaged about -10C.

“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data.

NASA – Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt

When the next batch of sea level data comes out, we will again see that there was no spike in sea level, because there was no measurable increase in melting – indicating that the people behind this scam are completely FOS.

The Earth is warming and human activity is the primary cause. Climate disruptions put our food and water supply at risk, endanger our health, jeopardize our national security, and threaten other basic human needs. Some impacts—such as record high temperatures, melting glaciers, and severe flooding and droughts—are already becoming increasingly common across the country and around the world. So far, our national leaders are failing to act quickly to reduce heat-trapping emissions.

Global Warming | Union of Concerned Scientists

Time to man up and admit that the complete lack of warming over the last 15 years is your fault. With 50% of the country obese, Paul Ehrlich`s warnings about starvation have proven to be correct. Your SUV ended the last ice age, and we never had heatwaves or droughts before. One more thing – we are changing our name to the Union of Neurotic Morons.

Wood for Trees: Interactive Graphs

Gossiping about the weather is possibly the oldest human topic of conversation. Most of the time this is a harmless activity, but humans occasionally go through periods of superstition where they blame the weather on angry gods, human misbehavior, or witches.

We are unfortunate to live in a time when government has learned that they can profit through promoting the idea that people can change the weather (which they have caused) – by paying more taxes. This spectacularly irrational idea has been pounded into the heads of a couple of generations, and we now have a certain percentage of the population who could be classified as climate zombies.

If you want an idea of just how clueless James Hansen is about the 2011 heatwave, check out the graph below.  Maximum July temperatures in Iowa averaged more than ten degrees cooler in 2011 than they did in 1936.

Ninety-two percent of all USHCN Iowa July record daily maximums occurred prior to 1955. As the EPA reports, US heatwaves were much more severe during the 1930s.

Check out this heatwave from May, 1934! If we had a May heatwave like that now, Joe Romm would demand immediate world communism.

  IOWA Temperatures - May 30, 1934  
  LOGAN          	109
  LE MARS        	108
  STORM LAKE 2 E 	107
  ALGONA 3 W     	106
  ESTHERVILLE 2 N	106
  FORT DODGE 5NNW	106
  INDIANOLA 2W   	106
  ROCK RAPIDS    	106
  ROCKWELL CITY  	106
  CLARINDA       	105
  IOWA FALLS     	105
  ALBIA 3 NNE    	103
  BELLE PLAINE   	103
  MT AYR         	103
  TOLEDO 3N      	102
  FOREST CITY 2 N	101
  FAIRFIELD      	100
  FAYETTE        	100

With Warming, Peril Underlies Road to Alaska

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: July 24, 2012

WHITEHORSE, Yukon Territory – In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the Army Corps of Engineers an assignment: Build a road from British Columbia across the Yukon to Alaska – in eight months, before winter sets in.

Japan had just destroyed much of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. Alaska was vulnerable to invasion (in fact, the Japanese occupied two Aleutian Islands that June). If Americans did not build a supply road linking Alaska to the heart of North America, the thinking went, invading Japanese would do it for them.

But prospects for success were poor. The road would traverse 1,500 miles of mountainous subarctic terrain, most of it unsettled, heavily forested and unmapped. Engineers would face fierce cold, fierce heat, vicious insects, and vast stretches of permafrost and boggy terrain called muskeg that swallowed bulldozers whole.

Nevertheless, the Alaska Canada Military Highway was declared open the following October. Nicknamed the Alcan, this so-called pioneer road was little more than a gravel lane passable only by military trucks. Still, people called it the 20th century’s greatest engineering feat, after only the Panama Canal.

Today, as the road now known as the Alaska Highway celebrates its 70th birthday, cars and trucks flash along what Wally Hidinger calls “a very good standard two-lane highway” from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Fairbanks, Alaska. “Our mantra is bare, dry pavement 365 days a year,” said Mr. Hidinger, who directs transportation engineering for the Yukon territorial government. It is a vow he and his staff can keep.

They rely on remote sensing technology to anticipate bad weather and keep the pavement clear. They work to unkink twists and turns left over from the original construction, when the builders dealt with muskeg and other obstacles by curving the road around them.

But today the Alcan faces challenges that could not have been predicted when it was built. By far the biggest is permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that underlies much of the road.

As the climate warms, stretches of permafrost are no longer permanent. They are melting – leaving pavement with cracks, turning asphalt into washboard and otherwise threatening the stability of the road.

NYT: With Warming, Peril Underlies

Ah don' wanna talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food-trough wiper!  Ah fart in your general direction!  Your mother was  hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!

Twitter / billmckibben: Arctic sea ice has greates …

Every month these geniuses report a record loss, and then at the end of the year we end up above 2007.

This uses the famous McKitten-Masters equation

-10  + -10 + -10 + -10 + -10 + -10 + -10 + -10 + -10  =  0

The moron twins are at it again

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Some species of pine trees in Colorado can not germinate without a crown fire. Fire is a normal part of the forest cycle, and if you build your house in Colorado pine forest, sooner or later it is going to burn. Last June we were dealing with record snowpack and flooding.

When the USHCN raw data comes out at the end of the year, chances are that 2012 won’t be close to a number of years in the 1930s in terms of high temperature records. NOAA has been jacking temperatures up for more than 327 months in a row, and using McKitten/Masters nincompoop math, we can conclude that the 150,000 years when temperatures were below normal during the last ice age was impossible.

Bill McKibben and Joe Romm are not intelligent enough to be discussing science, and would do the world a favor if they stopped.

If Aurora Cinemark wasn’t a gun-free zone, this joker would be in the morgue – and a lot of other people wouldn’t be. Then we wouldn’t have to see his ugly mug, or wait four years to watch him fry.

The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased.

An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (?) warmer than climatology.

This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface in the period of climatology, now typicallycovers about 10% of the land area.

We conclude that extreme heat waves, such as that in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, were “caused” by global warming, because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming. We discuss practical implications of this substantial, growing climate change.

US Politics | AMERICAblog News: Quarter to half of species on earth may die from global warming

This is nonsense and a disgrace to both NASA and science in general. According to the EPA graph below, the heatwaves of the 1930s were more than three standard deviations warmer than climatology.

USEPA

Heat waves occurred with high frequency in the 1930s, and these remain the most severe heat waves in the U.S. historical record  (see Figure 1). Many years of intense drought (the “Dust Bowl”) contributed to these heat waves by depleting soil moisture and reducing the moderating effects of evaporation.

• There is no clear trend over the entire period tracked by the index. Although it is hard to see in Figure 1 (because of the extreme events of the 1930s), heat wave frequency decreased in the 1960s and 1970s but has risen since then (see Figure 1).

www.epa.gov/climate/climatechange/pdfs/print_heat-waves.pdf

According to the USHCN database, maximum temperatures in Oklahoma during the summers of 1936 and 1934 were both warmer than 2011, and 1954 was just as hot

June-August
1936	99.98
1934	99.90
2011	99.51
July-September
1954	99.50

state34_OK.txt.gz

Hansen needs to step down. He is attempting to drive policy with claims that have no basis in fact. This is not acceptable, and he has been doing it for decades.

h/t to Marc Morano