Real Climate Science

Twitter / billmckibben: Heat records raise possibi

People making comparisons to the heatwave of 1936 have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. From June 14 to September 13 1936, high temperatures in Oklahoma City averaged  104 degrees.

Seventy-two out of ninety-two days were over 100F. Eleven days were over 110F.  Four days were over 115F

By contrast, since June 13 2012, temperatures have averaged 94F – eight degrees cooler than the same period in 1936. Holocaust deniers attempt to rewrite the history of the 1930s, and thus have much in common with Hansen et. al.

http://news.google.com/newspapers

http://trove.nla.gov.au/

h/t to Marc Morano

2002 was the year of the actual largest fire in recent Colorado history. By May 18th of that year, the fire season was in full swing and testimony at a Senate Committee warned that lots of people were building new homes in places that were doomed to burn. Ten years later they burned.

People do stupid things like build houses in the middle of a pile of kindling wood, and later blame their stupidity on global warming.

IMPLEMENTATION OF NATIONAL FIRE PLAN IN COLORADO

———-

SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2002

U.S. Senate,
Committee on Energy and Natural Resource,
Golden, CO.

……..

Now, Brandi, if you take that map, maybe, and hold it up next to the next one, the next one is the year 2000, just 4 years later, the year that Los Alamos burned. By the way, we had a very bad start. By the end of May, we had burned over one million acres with a total of 8.4 million acres for the year, and look how green that vegetation is. Look at the difference between those two areas of Colorado just in that amount of 2
years.

And we have a third one, too. And this one is 2002. And if you’ll look at the lack of moisture we are facing this year, look at how brown we are, and it’s only May. How little snowpack there is, too, between even 2000 and 2002. It’s clearly, you know, when you read the papers and you see the news about the great floods, they’re sure not here. You can see how green it is in just around the Mississippi Valley area, Mississippi Delta area, but clearly, here in the Rocky Mountain range from Canada to Mexico, it is a dry, dry year. That doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but in the relative difference between what we had just a couple years ago and now, that should give us a big indication of what we might be facing this summer.

One thing I don’t show, of course, on any of these maps is all the new homes that are being built in high-fire areas asColorado grows in population. We’re the fourth fastest growingState, as you know. And many of the people in our inwardmigration, they came to this beautiful State because they want to be near the mountains, and they want to be on some nice
secluded dirt road right out there where they land butts upright up to the national forest.

– IMPLEMENTATION OF NATIONAL FIRE PLAN IN COLORADO

The Guardian gets stupid (as always) while CSM actually tries to make a comeback.

Scorching heat, high winds and bone-dry conditions are fueling catastrophic wildfires in the US west that offer a preview of the kind of disasters that human-caused climate change could bring, a trio of scientists said on Thursday.

“What we’re seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University’s Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author for the UN’s climate science panel. “It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster … This provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future.”

In Colorado, wildfires that have raged for weeks have killed four people, displaced thousands and destroyed hundreds of homes. Because winter snowpack was lighter than usual and melted sooner, fire season started earlier in the US west, with wildfires out of control in Colorado, Montana and Utah.

The high temperatures that are helping drive these fires are consistent with projections by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said this kind of extreme heat, with little cooling overnight, is one kind of damaging impact of global warming.

US wildfires are what global warming really looks like, scientists warn | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Complete BS – from propagandists. The 1871 Michigan/Wisconsin/Chicago fires which killed thousands of people and burned millions of acres were catastrophic. The 1910 fires which burned millions of acres were catastrophic. The 2012 fire season is below normal so far, with acreage much smaller than many previous years.

Amazingly, CSM actually has an intelligent story.

“You can’t say it’s climate change just because it’s an extreme condition,” said Colorado state climatologist Nolan Doesken. So far, Doesken told LiveScience, the spring of 2012 looks much like the spring of 1910, when warm temperatures hit early. That year, he said, was a bad one for fires.

This year has been extreme in terms of heat and dryness, he said, as was 2002 (a record-breaking year for fires in Colorado). So far, 2012’s weather looks very similar to the weather of 1910. That year, spring was warm and dry, which fed into a hellish fire season. Among the blazes was the Great Fire of 1910, also known as “the Big Burn,” which destroyed 3 million acres of forest in Washington, Idaho and Montana.

Are Colorado’s wildfires caused by global warming? – CSMonitor.com

Who gave the go ahead to people like Hansen, Oppenheimer, Mann, etc. to lie about climate?

TOM BEARDEN: Rideout says the High Park fire is something of a perfect storm, a very dry winter, high winds fanning the flames, and a great deal of fuel to burn. Add the very difficult terrain, and experts say this fire is likely to keep on burning until the fall.

In Colo., Drought and Wind Fuel Summer of Fire | PBS NewsHour | June 15, 2012 | PBS

The burn area has had flash flood warnings for the last two days. I haven’t seen any smoke  since Sunday. There probably still are a few smoldering logs somewhere up there, but for all intents and purposes the fire is done. The picture below was taken in the burn area on Wednesday.

h/t to Russell C

Temperatures in Boulder have not increased for 60 years, yet the University of Colorado has obtained $800,000 to study how global warming has affected the local rodents. Perhaps the fat furry rats are teleconnected to Yamal?

The massive grant — from the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation — is designed to give the researchers three years in the field to try and figure out how climate change is altering prairie dog habitat and how the rodents are responding to those changes. The study also will examine the interactions between native and non-native plants, including whether new species are taking up water used by the native variety.

Heather Swanson, Boulder’s wildlife ecologist, said some of the changes reported in recent years include loss of topsoil and changes in plant species where prairie dogs can be found. One of the primary questions is whether those changes are causing prairie dogs to change their habits, including being more active during the winter — which can lead to soil erosion after the rodents eat plants to the bare ground.

“I’m concerned that our management plan has not been informed by science that would look at what’s happening on these fragmented parcels” of open space, Wilson said. “We’ve seen some impacts that are disturbing, where (prairie dogs) totally defoliate these areas. We need to understand why that’s happening so that we can manage our grasslands better.”

CU to study impact of climate change on Boulder prairie dogs – Boulder Daily Camera

Let me save the taxpayers almost a million bucks and complete the study in the next 30 seconds.

Boulder’s most famous Prairie Dog town is at the corner of Arapahoe and Foothills. Both roads are about eight or nine lanes wide at the intersection. If you look closely at the Google Earth image below, you can see dozens of circular Prairie Dog mounds in an overpopulated village of  potential Bubonic Plague carriers. The animals are boxed in, their natural predators have been nearly eliminated, and they are protected by law.

The little rats are overpopulated and they eat all the grass.

Our friends have been telling us that Pikas die after 20 minutes of 60 degree temperatures.

The hockey team and Peter Gleick are very honorable people, so we can safely assume that all Pikas in Colorado are now dead. RIP Pikas.

Europe 2003 – Moscow – Texas – Colorado … the cherry pickers are at it again.

June 29, 2012

As the American West’s fire season races off to a ferocious start, researchers suggest that the increasingly hotter, drier region is just beginning to pay off a “fire deficit.”
By Tom Yulsman
DailyClimate.org

BOULDER, Colo. – As the West has warmed and dried over the past 30 years, headlines describing fire season have grown ever more apocalyptic: “epic” dryness, “monster” fires, new records for damage and devastation.

There is no trend in western precipitation. We were having floods and record snowpack in Colorado during the previous two Junes. The fires in the west this year have been small compared to the giant fires of 1871, 1881 1898, 1910, etc. The only thing that is epic is the level of bullshit from climate alarmists.

This year is no exception. The Waldo Canyon Fire has incinerated hundreds of homes in Colorado Springs, and every indication points to another big, early start to the wildfire season.

The Waldo Canyon fire is not a huge fire. A lot of people built houses in a very vulnerable location, and the inevitable is happening. The monsoons are starting, and as happens every year, fire activity in the southwest will decline during July and August.

Recent research, however, suggests these severe conflagrations could be a prelude. Climate stressors are putting increasing pressure on a “fire deficit” the West has accumulated over the past 100 years, say scientists who have compared today’s burn rates with fire activity over thousands of years. As the West continues to warm, that debt will come due – possibly with interest – triggering fires that are fiercer and harder to contain, they warn.

In other words, a century of fire suppression has left a forest where the tree density is about 10X higher than it was 100 years ago, so the fires are burning very hot. Yulsman completely misrepresented the point of the study – which was that we have been through 100 years of historically low fire activity and that fire activity may return to normal.

With eight or nine weeks left in the melting season, the bear body count is piling up.

N_daily_extent.png (420×500)

Current Cheyenne NEXRAD Radar Map | Weather Underground

This picture was taken yesterday at ground zero of the High Park Fire west of Fort Collins, which the governor recently described as being the worst fire in Colorado history. No more smoke, no more flames – most of the burn area will be green in six weeks.

If lots of people hadn’t of built houses in stupid places, it would have been just another fire out of hundreds of thousands which burn in the US every year.

Colorado is not on fire. There are some forest fires burning, just like every year. Click on the image to see it full size.