Snow worldwide

[x-y-no]

kenl01:

No response to my question?

Here it is again, in case you missed it:

The interesting thing is that you seem to understand that regional warm spells don't indicate anything WRT global warming, but you don't seem to understand that regional cold spells have the same limitation. I wouldn't want to accuse you of deliberately biasing your argument, so perhaps you can offer some other explanation for this disparity?

[kenl01]

already on the winter weather topic, but I'll post it anyways:


Thousands trapped in China snow and 43 C below zero

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4586558.stm


Almost 250,000 people in north-western China have been trapped by heavy snowfall, as the country faces its worst winter in 20 years.
Temperatures have plummeted to -43C, and snow is blanketing large parts of Xinjiang province.

Almost 100,000 people have been evacuated after their homes collapsed under heavy snow.

More than 5,000 people are being treated for frostbite, four of whom had to have limbs amputated.

But forecasters are warning this is just the beginning of a cold freeze, and that China needs to brace itself for the chilliest winter in 20 years.

According to the BBC correspondent in Beijing, Louisa Lim, this wraps up a year of extreme weather conditions following the hottest summer in more than 50 years.

Government appeal

About 60cm (two feet) of snow is covering parts of Xinjiang, according to Wang Zhenyao, a disaster relief official with the civil affairs ministry.


"The most urgent issue right now is to ensure traffic and transportation," Mr Wang told a briefing in Beijing on Friday.

Snow has reportedly blanketed the eastern province of Shandong too, cutting off roads and grounding aircraft.

China's government is appealing to private companies and millionaires to give more money to those in need across the country, saying 18 million people affected by natural disasters are still waiting for aid.

There has also been heavy snow in Japan in the past few weeks - killing dozens of people and paralysing the transport system.

Most of the casualties have been elderly people who tried to clear snow from the roofs of their houses.

According to Reuters news agency, a 93-year-old woman and her daughter were crushed to death in Ishikawa prefecture on Thursday, when their house collapsed under the weight of the snow.

The snowfalls have been among the heaviest the country has ever seen.

Japanese meteorologists expect another two powerful cold air masses to pass over the country during the weekend.

[kenl01]

kenl01:

No response to my question?

Here it is again, in case you missed it:

The interesting thing is that you seem to understand that regional warm spells don't indicate anything WRT global warming, but you don't seem to understand that regional cold spells have the same limitation. I wouldn't want to accuse you of deliberately biasing your argument, so perhaps you can offer some other explanation for this disparity?

Well yes, they do have both limitations and I would seem to think it depends on the strength of troughing and ridging (or amplification) for any particular area whether it's hot or cold over a wide area. What I find more interesting is that the upper atmosphere (above 25,000 feet) has cooled by about -.24C since 1979, according to a satellite study. Now some might have different results to that claim, but when there's cooling in the upper atmosphere over a long period of time it would seem to indicate that the depth of the troughs (cold air) would increase in coverage and extent whenever the pattern favors. So more locations would experience increasing heavy snowfalls and extreme cold (as arctic air extends further south) whenever there is a cold pattern that favors strong blocking and deep troughs downstream, on average. It won't happen with every trough, but when conditions favor a very cold pattern (like China or Russia right now), new records for snow and cold become more frequent further south. Recent years have also seen record snows and cold in Mongolia in 2000/01, Jersualem had lots of snow in recent winters, Saudi Arabia more snow incidences, and even the Sahara desert of Africa in January 2005 and Germany at -50 F in March 2005, just as examples of locations making snow and colds records.

True you still get heatwaves because of strong ridging also, but IMHO the cold and snow seems more important with so many dramatic records being set.

Ken

[x-y-no]

Well yes, they do have both limitations and I would seem to think it depends on the strength of troughing and ridging (or amplification) for any particular area whether it's hot or cold over a wide area.

That's true. What I'm trying to understand is why you are only mentioning the cool anomalies and not the warm anomalies. There appears to be a (deliberate?) bias in your selection of weather anecdotes.

Yes, we're seeing significant extreme cold events, but we're also seeing extreme warm events (i.e. southwest US, Australia, etc.) Neither one is evidence either for nor against anthropogenic global warming.

What I find more interesting is that the upper atmosphere (above 25,000 feet) has cooled by about -.24C since 1979, according to a satellite study. Now some might have different results to that claim, but when there's cooling in the upper atmosphere over a long period of time it would seem to indicate that the depth of the troughs (cold air) would increase in coverage and extent whenever the pattern favors. So more locations would experience increasing heavy snowfalls and extreme cold (as arctic air extends further south) whenever there is a cold pattern that favors strong blocking and deep troughs downstream, on average. It won't happen with every trough, but when conditions favor a very cold pattern (like China or Russia right now), new records for snow and cold become more frequent further south. Recent years have also seen record snows and cold in Mongolia in 2000/01, Jersualem had lots of snow in recent winters, Saudi Arabia more snow incidences, and even the Sahara desert of Africa in January 2005 and Germany at -50 F in March 2005, just as examples of locations making snow and colds records.

You're mixing two things here. Yes, the stratosphere has cooled on average. That's predicted by the GCMs as a feature of anthropogenic global warming. But I don't know of any reason that that (in and of itself) should lead to higher amplitude Rossby waves in the mid-latitudes.

However you are right that these extreme events are frequently associated with such higher amplitude waves (although in the case of the southwestern US, the opposite is true - we have seen mostly zonal flow leading to a warmer than average winter so far). But in any case such amplitude or pattern anomalies don't neccesarily tell us anything about the total heat budget. One has to integrate over the whole globe to see that.

True you still get heatwaves because of strong ridging also, but IMHO the cold and snow seems more important with so many dramatic records being set.

Ken

Once again, my question is why you are only taking note of the cold records and not the warm records. The fact is that the global average temperature is rising, and all the cherry-picking of counterexamples in the world doen's change that.

[kenl01]

This article puts this topic into better perspective. Looking at this article convinces me pretty strongly that temperatures are heading for the edge of a cliff, even if the global surface average was a little higher since 2000. I mean, we could be frozen corpuses soon. A similar article from the New York Times a year ago stated "the Heat before the Cold", although I can't find that article right now:

Behold, the Iceman Cometh

http://www.pvbr.com/Issue_1/global.htm

[kenl01]

Here's another:

This site gives data from some 200 weather stations around the globe. Temperatures at some stations have risen slightly, temperatures at 40 stations have remained essentially the same, and temperatures at more than 100 stations have declined!
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stati ... Greenland/

[kenl01]

Another excellent site on this topic from John-Daly:


http://www.john-daly.com/

[kenl01]

And of course Fred Singer was good too:


http://www.nationalcenter.org/KyotoSing ... y2000.html

[x-y-no]

Oh jeez ...

That first link is a political screed. I'm not about to take anything which starts off by saying climate science is all a communist plot seriously.

If you want to raise some particular point from that piece of nonsense, I'll discuss that point. But there are so many obvious errors that it's really not worth answering the entire screed.

The John Daly links offer a curiously restricted selection of temperature records, apparently chosen because they fit his desired result. The same site from which he gets his selected data has the following global average data, which contradict his claim of little to no warming:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

Fred Singer deserves some serious consideration, because he has contributed some significant insights (like the iris effect hypothesis) although he has abandoned many of his past objections as they have been falsified.

I'll try to find the time to post a response regarding Singer tomorrow.

[kenl01]

Now from the American News service:

Asia hit by deep snow, sub-zero weather
Japan and Pakistan report deaths, as China evacuates 100,000


http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10736309/from/ET/

[gigabite]

x-y-no

Let me see if I can help you understand why the mixed gas global warming hypothesis is having trouble holding water. First, lets try to understand that the puritanical westerner social make up deep inside wants the problem to be the result of the sins of Man, and has little trouble accepting the notion that anything that creates comfort that is produced by flawed and greedy humans must have a sympathetic drawback. It was true with DDT. It was true with zoning regulations, or the lack thereof, that allowed over development and clear cutting. So, it could be true with temperature and rainfall anomalies. If it were true that chaotic climate was caused human development then there must be a associated mechanism, and we could just repent and be saved.

That line of thinking is what is called rationalization. Rationalization is a process of developing an explanation for a thing, in the scientific field it is call hypothesis building. The case for global warming that is based solely on waste greenhouse gasses has trouble with the quantity of greenhouse gasses required to produce the poorly described net effect. The representation of that point is the fact that atmospheric water vapor the most plentiful greenhouse gas varies with the sun cycle, as water vapor increases clouds develop, and land cools, therefore case not proven.

Using the scientific method the Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis has to be rewritten. Then as irradiance intensifies the solar constant increases, and as the solar constant increases there is more surface heating. That explains hot summers in the northern hemisphere. The northern hemisphere has more land mass than the southern hemisphere and so more heating. In the summer in the southern hemisphere there is more water and with a higher solar constant there more water is brought to the threshold of evaporation. Hence more Atmospheric Water Vapor. Hadley Global Circulation brings more dustless moisture into the upper atmosphere which is then moved from pole to pole during the month by a tidal ebb and flow.

Another thing that complicates chaotic climate was brought up earlier in this thread, that is orbital elongation. Earths closest approach to the Sun is in the winter, and as the orbit elongates that closest approach gets further away it, and compensates for the increased intensity of the Sun, but not completely. The good thing is that the Earths orbit not only elongates it also wobbles so some times instead of being further from the Sun in the summer when the earth is farthest from some times we are actually closer, thus the Ice Age is averted, for a while at least.

It is not a steady state universe, and it is a complex one also. One mechanism can’t explain the situation.

[kenl01]

Delhi gets first winter ice in 70 years, Indian cold toll soars


http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/ ... 17/1/.html

NEW DELHI - The Indian capital Sunday saw its first winter frost in 70 years as a cold wave sweeping in from the Himalayas killed more people in northern India overnight, officials said.

The capital city of 14 million people ordered schools shut for three days from Monday as the mercury for the first time since 1935 fell to 0.2 degrees Celsius (32.36 Fahrenheit), leaving mounds of ice on parked cars.

White-laced streets greeted early risers, but any novelty value brought by the cold soon died as frost on power cables sparked partial power cuts across large swathes of New Delhi, said the privately-run BSES utility provider.

On January 16, 1935, Delhi recorded minus 0.6 degrees Celsius.

"I was born in New Delhi and this is the first time we are seeing ice on grass," said Supriya Singh, a fashion designer. "It's just like snow ... It's heavenly."

Her jubilation was not shared by the homeless thousands.

The city municipality late Sunday rushed to set up community shelters for some of the city's 150,000 homeless people as the weather office warned the severe chill would continue.

"The indications are that these conditions would continue for the next two days before the temperatures rise," a spokesman for New Delhi's meteorological department told AFP.

Haryana state's Karnal city, which adjoins New Delhi, also shivered at 0.1 degrees Celsius, eight degrees below normal for this time of year, he said.

Overseas visitors received a taste of the cold snap in the popular desert resort of Pushkar in Rajasthan state, where a Hindu priest succumbed to the bitter cold overnight, the United News of India reported.

Nearby Churu felt the icy sting as the mercury tumbled six degrees Celsius to minus three degrees Celsius (26.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the remote desert township, the weather office reported, adding that it was last this cold in 1974.

The army evacuated troops from their insulated bunkers on the Siachen glacier as temperatures dipped below minus 40 degrees Celsius in parts of the 6,969 metre (23,000 foot) high Himalayan wasteland, defence ministry sources said.

The cold death toll, meanwhile, rose by another nine to a total of 146 since early December as eight more people died in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and one in distant West Bengal province.

Uttar Pradesh so far accounts for 112 of the deaths, police spokesman Avinash Mehrotra said in the state capital Lucknow.

Ten people have died in adjoining Bihar state while the bad weather has claimed 18 lives in the northern state of Punjab, four in Haryana, one in Rajasthan and another in West Bengal state, officials said in separate reports.

Also on Sunday, two men and four women were killed in Punjab when a truck rammed their car on a highway in dense fog, which has sowed havoc with air, rail and road traffic in northern India, the police said.

Last year, some 420 people died from cold in Uttar Pradesh alone.

Some low temperatures in Asia:
Asia Low Temperatures - 7 Jan 06
Tompo, Russia -62
Tulihe, China -40
Pyongyan, N. Korea -4
Seoul, S.uth Korea 10
Nagano, Japan 14
(from weather.com)

[Aslkahuna]

During the 1967 winter, there were freezing temperatures in northern Thailand and in 1981 a freeze resulted in crop losses in northen Luzon and in the mid 70's I was working the early morning when Clark AB in the
Philippines broke it's all time low temperature record. So all this means is that we can still get those infrequent cold spells in southern Asia that have occurred in the past and will occur again regardless of the state of the climate system. When one gets dry air off the mainland of Asia during the winter, the dewpoints in northern India, Pakistan, and Thailand and even in the Philippines fall to very untropical levels (I've seen dews in the 40's at Clark AB) which allows for very good radiational cooling overnight.

Steve

[x-y-no]

gigabite:

Thank you for your amateur psychoanalysis, but it's so far off base I wouldn't even know where to begin.

What do you say we stick to science and leave the speculative psychobabble BS about motivations out of it?

[terstorm1012]

Not to take away from our ever wonderful fight over the motivations of those of us who believe in climate change and those who don't . . . but did anyone catch the program on the History Channel about the Little Ice Age last night?

It was well done, and I felt it presented both sides of the issues of global climate change.

Also: Steve, interesting about the dewpoints in SE Asia...thanks.

[x-y-no]

Not to take away from our ever wonderful fight over the motivations of those of us who believe in climate change and those who don't . . . but did anyone catch the program on the History Channel about the Little Ice Age last night?

It was well done, and I felt it presented both sides of the issues of global climate change.

Also: Steve, interesting about the dewpoints in SE Asia...thanks.

Unfortunately, I only caught the last 10 minutes or so. It did look like a good program.

[gigabite]

gigabite:

...stick to science and leave the speculative psychobabble BS about motivations out of it...

That is my point exactly mister x-y-no the Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis is it self a baseless case. The number the best most expert professional biologic/atmospheric/mathematical scientist produced based on the opinion that a specific amount of a combination of a type of gas atmosphere that would give a single watt change at any given point on the surface of the earth was presented in a paper in the late 1980’s.

The Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis as it is explained by the United States Department of Environmental Protection suggest that; based on 4 (four) empirical approaches provided by 4 (four) separate academic agencies, a sea level rise of an average of a half of a foot is expected between the years 2000 and 2050, and that in all 4 (four) models the curve of the sea level rise is exponential.

That is the academic approach and a scholarly one, by prominent scientist. The other side of this problem is addressed by the lowly engineer that simply wants po-po to go down hill. In the course of their work in an effort to provide the population with the perfect sewer. They have developed a system of relating sewer system to sewer system. It is called a Mean Sea Level Datum. The base Mean Sea Level Datum was established in 1929 in Galveston, Texas. It work fine for a couple of epochs, but it was found that a standard adjustment couldn’t be applied to the network to account for the rise in sea level. In 1977 a new datum was established. The difference was about a foot and a half. That is three times the change 75 years earlier, than suggested by the DEP paper.

My point isn’t to say prominent scientist aren’t capable of understanding the aspects of their specialty. They provided a philosophic answer to a hypothetical question. Clearly the Greenhouse Gas aspect of the problem accounts for only about 25 percent of the Sea Level Rise issue.

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

Snow is 10 feet deep in Japan right now in we are talking about Global warming?


Death toll in Japan climbs to 71; troops dispatched for snow removal
- 9 Jan 06 - The death toll from snowstorms in Japan rose to 71 on Monday, according to police and news reports. Also on Monday, Japan 's military dispatched nearly 200 troops to the northern Akita state to help residents dig out, a day after about 100 troops were sent to the hard-hit central states of Nagano and Niigata .
The snow has piled up more than three meters deep in some of the worst-hit areas of Niigata prefecture, northwest of Tokyo .

Some 42 locations across Japan have seen record snowfall for January. The village of Sakae was isolated by up to 10.4 feet of snow. More snow is expected in northern Japan on Tuesday.
http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/060109/w010928.html

[kenl01]

Snow is 10 feet deep in Japan right now in we are talking about Global warming?


http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/060109/w010928.html

Beat me to it !

You guys must be getting smarter. That's pretty unusual but I guess miracles do happen

[x-y-no]

gigabite:

...stick to science and leave the speculative psychobabble BS about motivations out of it...

That is my point exactly mister x-y-no the Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis is it self a baseless case. The number the best most expert professional biologic/atmospheric/mathematical scientist produced based on the opinion that a specific amount of a combination of a type of gas atmosphere that would give a single watt change at any given point on the surface of the earth was presented in a paper in the late 1980’s.

You think that the entire case for the greenhouse effect rests on a single paper? No.

Have you actually bothered to look at the IPCC TAR?

The Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis as it is explained by the United States Department of Environmental Protection suggest that; based on 4 (four) empirical approaches provided by 4 (four) separate academic agencies, a sea level rise of an average of a half of a foot is expected between the years 2000 and 2050, and that in all 4 (four) models the curve of the sea level rise is exponential.

There are a heck of a lot more than four models around. I'm having a very hard time sorting out what it is you're trying to refer to. How about referencing specific research, or specific sections of the TAR, and maybe you'll be more clear.

That is the academic approach and a scholarly one, by prominent scientist. The other side of this problem is addressed by the lowly engineer that simply wants po-po to go down hill. In the course of their work in an effort to provide the population with the perfect sewer. They have developed a system of relating sewer system to sewer system. It is called a Mean Sea Level Datum. The base Mean Sea Level Datum was established in 1929 in Galveston, Texas. It work fine for a couple of epochs, but it was found that a standard adjustment couldn’t be applied to the network to account for the rise in sea level. In 1977 a new datum was established. The difference was about a foot and a half. That is three times the change 75 years earlier, than suggested by the DEP paper.

Land risies and falls for all kinds of reasons in localized areas. Assuming it's true that the Galveston datum has changed substantially, that's probably a local effect. Just like the global average temperature, the global average sea level is determined by combining a very large number of measurements.

My point isn’t to say prominent scientist aren’t capable of understanding the aspects of their specialty. They provided a philosophic answer to a hypothetical question. Clearly the Greenhouse Gas aspect of the problem accounts for only about 25 percent of the Sea Level Rise issue.

I can't even begin to guess what is meant by "They provided a philosophic answer to a hypothetical question." Climate science is science, not philosophy. The radiative/absorptive properties of gasses are scientific facts, not philosophical arguments.