As part of Hansen’s “hottest year in history,” there is heavy summer snow forecast for the Alps over the next three days.
http://www.snow-forecast.com/maps/static/europe/next3days/snow
Meanwhile, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina also enjoy heavy snow – as their special way to celebrate the world’s hottest year.
http://www.snow-forecast.com/pages/twitter
It must be that new kind of hot snow, caused by too much CO2.
Following the record minimum in 2007, experts began a fun process of trying to outdo each other with their “ice-free Arctic” forecasts. I am going to explain here why they have it backwards.
Dr. Olav Orheim, the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, remarked in 2008 :
“If Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away (in 2008), which is highly possible judging from current conditions”
Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School forecast an ice free Arctic by the year 2013.
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007.. So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
Dr. David Barber from the University of Manitoba has forecast an ice free summer by the year 2015.
“Things are happening much faster in the Arctic. I think it will be summer ice-free by 2015,”
These forecasts are ridiculous, but they are worse than it seems.
The 2007 record minimum was caused by southerly winds, which compacted the ice at higher latitudes and melted it at lower latitudes. The PIPS2 video below shows the thickening of the ice as the summer progressed.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeBatHtMtYY]
A good analogy is shoveling the snow in your driveway. You decrease the area, while increasing the thickness. The last place the snow melts in your yard is the pile of snow next to the driveway. Same thing in the parking lot at the mall. The graph below shows the relative thicknesses of the ice over the last five years. In September, 2007 (during the record minimum extent) ice thickness was at a maximum.
Now consider the geographic location of the ice. The thick ice was at high latitudes near Canada and Greenland, where temperatures are coldest and the melt season is the shortest. In summary, the ice was piling up thicker in the locations where it is also least likely to melt.
In order to have a ice-free Arctic, we would have to see the opposite pattern occur – i.e. the ice would have to spread to lower latitudes and thin.
Forget about seeing an ice-free Arctic. It isn’t going to happen any time soon.
Everyone in the hurricane forecast business predicted a big season this year. NOAA reaffirmed their position this week, as reported on WUWT.
One of the main reasons cited for the forecasts was “record high Atlantic SSTs.” So let’s look at the SST anomalies in the region between the Cape Verde Islands and the US. That is the normal hurricane formation track.
SSTs have plummeted and are now not much above normal. Compare SST anomalies vs those in late May. The hurricane breeding ground has not kept it’s unusual warmth.
Has this affected hurricane formation? Circumstantial evidence says yes. Hurricane numbers are average , and ACE is well below average.
http://www.weatherstreet.com/hurricane/2010/named-storms-climatology.gif
What do readers think?
A popular theory explaining the cold, snowy weather this winter has been that it is being driven by “excess heat due to global warming.” Intuitively this makes no sense, and it doesn’t scientifically either.
If excess heat produced cold fronts and snow, we would see frontal movement occur primarily during the warmer months. Yet summer weather tends to be more stable, despite the larger amounts of energy in the system. Storms are the result of differences in energy, not absolute energy. If the entire planet was 100 degrees all the time, there would be very few, if any, storms.
Heat flows between temperature differences. It will flow from a warm object to a cold one. It will not flow from a warm object to another equally warm one. For example, if the tropics are warm in the summer and the Poles are cold, nature tries to balance it by creating hurricanes which move heat from the Tropics towards the Poles. This generally only happens in the summer/fall because there isn’t enough total energy available in the winter.
Tornadoes are similarly driven by differences in temperature. The spring of 2008 was one of the worst tornado seasons in US history, and it was typified by cold weather. Note that severe tornadoes have generally declined as the climate has warmed, and they were most frequent during the ice age scare of the 1970s.
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg
Snow falls when cold air bumps into warmer moist air. Mountainous regions see more snowfall at higher elevations where the temperature is lower. Below is a chart showing monthly distribution of snow at the fifty snowiest sites in Colorado. Note that these sites are at high elevation (i.e. cold) and that the bulk of the snow falls during the coldest months.
It is true that the interior of Antarctica sees very little snow. This is due to the very low absolute humidities at minus sixty degrees, which make it nearly impossible to precipitate snow.
Wind blows between areas of high pressure and low pressure. If the entire planet was at very high (but equal) pressure there would be no wind. High pressure systems are typified by calm air. Hurricanes have very low pressure.
Now lets look at some other analogies. Two cars travelling at the nearly the same high speed in the same direction will not generate a lot of damage in a collision. A car travelling at high speed bumping into a parked car will release a lot of energy. It is the energy difference that is important.
A rock sitting on top of a high plateau has a large amount of potential energy, but no way to release it. A rock sitting on the edge of a cliff can release it’s energy by falling to a region of lower potential energy below it. It is the difference in energy that is important.
If you connect two batteries together positive to positive, and negative to negative, no energy flows. If you connect opposite polarities, energy flows quickly in the short circuit. Once again, it is the difference in energy that is important.
The point is that the snow in Florida, Washington D.C, Rome, etc. is being driven by unusually cold air which is colliding with warmer moist air. It is the difference in energy which creates the snow, not the absolute energy in the system. In order for snow to fall, it has to be cold.
SETH BORENSTEIN | 04/ 8/09 09:29 PM | AP
WASHINGTON — Tinkering with Earth’s climate to chill runaway global warming _ a radical idea once dismissed out of hand _ is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president’s new science adviser said Wednesday. That’s because global warming is happening so rapidly, John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month. One option raised by Holdren and proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.
Below is what US temperature anomalies have looked like since October 1. Most of the country has been running well below normal for almost half a year, after one of the coldest summers on record in the midwest.
Holdren is worried that global warming is accelerating very quickly. He also thinks that Arctic Ice is going to disappear in as little as six years.
His concern is that the United States and other nations won’t slow global warming fast enough and that several “tipping points” could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said…..Earth could be as close as six years away from the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, he said
Holdren also criticized Bush for using NASA money to go to the Moon, when it would be better spent on Mann.
He said the Bush administration’s plan to return astronauts to the moon was underfunded so money was taken from science and aeronautics. Those areas, including climate change research, were “decimated,” he said.
Obama still plans to increase funding to climate scientists, who have no doubt shown themselves worthy of praise, adulation and funding.
NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way….the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change
Will Holdren get the green light to pollute the atmosphere and make it even colder? What do readers think?
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