The Excellence In Weather Network

By Richard Keen, Ph.D. Canyon Creek, CO

At 19.4 degrees, February 2010 was the second coldest February of record here (since 1983), missing February 1989’s 18.2 by just over one degree.

� There were three less-than-impressive daily record lows in the 0 to -3 range. But there were other more impressive records:

� 17 consecutive days with daily max temperatures at or below 32F tied a record set in December 1983.

� 22 days with daily max temperatures at or below 32F tied the January 1988 record (and exceeds it if you consider that February is a short month).

� The monthly maximum of 40F tied December 1983 for the lowest monthly max on record.

And the biggie record….

� The three-month winter average (December-February) of 20.2F is, by almost one degree, the coldest winter on record here (28 winters). History of the past five winters: 2005-06 – coldest winter since 1997-98. 2006-07 – coldest winter since 1992-93; last snow drift melted July 6. 2007-08 – coldest winter on record, beat 83-84 by 0.7 degrees. 2008-09 – near normal. 2009-10 – coldest winter, beat 07-08 by 0.9 degrees.

For comparison here’s my ten coldest months: Dec-09 16.5 Dec-83 17.2 Feb-89 18.2 Dec-90 18.5 Jan-85 18.7 Jan-07 18.8 Jan-88 19.1 Dec-07 19.4 Feb-10 19.4 Jan-08 19.7 Note that five of the cold months occurred during 1983-1990 (8 years), None during 1991-2005 (15 years), And five during 2007-2010 (4 years). The season’s snow stands at 140.5 inches, the fourth greatest end-of-February total (after 2007, 1987, and 1998). February 28th is the normal mid-point of our snow season, with, on average, 100 inches by February and another 100 inches in March and the other “spring” months (including June).

A series of cold winters at one location may not seem too important, but the story is the same across much of the country (and both hemispheres of the planet). On an annual basis, Coal Creek correlates with the entire state of Colorado With a correlation R = 0.95. The IPCC projects Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, and the Intermountain West to have the greatest warming in the “lower 48” states – about 4C, or 7F, over this century (see IPCC fig-11-8-3). According to the IPCC models, greenhouse gas warming should be greatest over continental interiors and in the middle troposphere, so Coal Creek Canyon is an ideal “global warming” monitoring site. Annual and winter temperatures here in the Rockies show that the new century’s projected warming is off to a shaky start. Here is a graph of winter temperatures since 1983 with various trend lines and curves fit to the data. The linear trend has winter temperatures cooling by 1.1F per century, but with a R-squared of 0.0021 this trend line is hardly significant. The 2nd- and 3rd-order trend line fits have higher correlations and more impressive downturns in recent years, and the five-year running mean also shows a recent decline. However, the best fit is with my favorite non-linear trend line shown in the second graph.

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

By Steve Goddard Guest Post on Watts Up With That

Snow blankets New York City. Photo: Del Mundo, New York Daily News

Now that we have reached the end of the meteorological winter (December-February,) Rutgers University Global Snow Lab numbers (1967-2010) show that the just completed decade (2001-2010) had the snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters on record.  The just completed winter was also the second snowiest on record, exceeded only by 1978.  Average winter snow extent during the past decade was greater than 45,500,000 km2, beating out the 1960s by about 70,000 km2, and beating out the 1990s by nearly 1,000,000 km2.  The bar chart below (enlarged here) shows average winter snow extent for each decade going back to the late 1960s.

Here are a few interesting facts.

Average winter snow extent has increased since the 1990s, by nearly the area of Texas and California combined.

Three of the four snowiest winters in the Rutgers record occurred during the last decade – the top four winters are (in order) 1978, 2010, 2008, 2003
The third week of February, 2010 had the second highest weekly extent (52,170,000 m2) out of the 2,229 week record.

The bar graph below (enlarged here) shows winter data for each year in the Rutgers database, color coded by decade.  The yellow line shows the mean winter snow extent through the period.  Note that the past decade only had two winters below 45 million km2.  The 1990s had seven winters below the 45 million km2, the 1980s had five winters below 45 million km2, and the 1970s had four winters below 45 million km2.  This indicates that the past decade not only had the most snowfall, but it also had the most consistently high snowfall, year over year.

It appears that AGW claims of the demise of snowfall have been exaggerated.  And so far things are not looking very good for the climate model predictions of declining snowfall in the 21st century.

Many regions of the Northern Hemisphere have seen record snowfall this winter, including Washington D.C, Moscow, China, and Korea.  Dr. Hansen�s office at Columbia University has seen record snowfall, and Al Gore has ineptly described the record snow: “Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm,”

A decade long record across the entire Northern Hemisphere is not appropriately described as a “snowstorm.” See post and comments here.

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The Global Average Urban Heat Island Effect in 2000 Estimated from Station Temperatures, Population
By Dr. Roy Spencer

ABSTRACT
Global hourly surface temperature observations and 1 km resolution population density data for the year 2000 are used together to quantify the average urban heat island (UHI) effect. While the rate of warming with population increase is the greatest at the lowest population densities, some warming continues with population increases even for densely populated cities. Statistics like those presented here could be used to correct the surface temperature record for spurious warming caused by the UHI effect, providing better estimates of temperature trends.

METHOD
Using NOAA’s International Surface Hourly (ISH) weather data from around the world during 2000, I computed daily, monthly, and then 1-year average temperatures for each weather station. For a station to be used, a daily average temperature computation required the 4 synoptic temperature observations at 00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC; a monthly average required at least 20 good days per month; and a yearly average required all 12 months.

For each of those weather station locations I also stored the average population density from the 1 km gridded global population density data archived at the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC).

Enlarged here.

All station pairs within 150 km of each other had their 1-year average difference in temperature related to their difference in population. Averaging of these station pairs� results was done in 10 population bins each for Station1 and Station2, with bin boundaries at 0, 20, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, and 50000 persons per sq. km.

Because some stations are located next to large water bodies, I used an old USAF 1/6 deg lat/lon percent water coverage dataset to ensure that there was no more than a 20% difference in the percent water coverage between the two stations in each match-up. (I believe this water coverage dataset is no longer publicly available).

Elevation effects were estimated by regressing station pair temperature differences against station elevation differences, which yielded a cooling rate of 5.4 deg. C per km increase in station elevation. Then, all station temperatures were adjusted to sea level (0 km elevation) with this relationship.

After all screening, a total of 10,307 unique station pairs were accepted for analysis from 2000.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION
The following graph shows the average rate of warming with population density increase (vertical axis), as a function of the average populations of the station pairs. Each data point represents a population bin average for the intersection of a higher population station with its lower-population station mate.

Enlarged here.

Using the data in the above graph, we can now compute average cumulative warming from a population density of zero, the results of which are shown in the next graph. [Note that this step would be unnecessary if every populated station location had a zero-population station nearby. In that case, it would be much easier to compute the average warming associated with a population density increase.]

Enlarged here.

This graph shows that the most rapid rate of warming with population increase is at the lowest population densities. The non-linear relationship is not a new discovery, as it has been noted by previous researchers who found an approximate logarithmic dependence of warming on population.

Significantly, this means that monitoring long-term warming at more rural stations could have greater spurious warming than monitoring in the cities. For instance, a population increase from 0 to 20 people per sq. km gives a warming of +0.22 deg C, but for a densely populated location having 1,000 people per sq. km, it takes an additional 1,500 people (to 2,500 people per sq. km) to get the same 0.22 deg. C warming. (Of course, if one can find stations whose environment has not changed at all, that would be the preferred situation.)

Since this analysis used only 1 year of data, other years could be examined to see how robust the above relationship is. Also, since there are gridded population data for 1990, 2000, and 2010 (estimated), one could examine whether there is any indication of the temperature-population relationship changing over time.

This is the type of information which I can envision being used to adjust station temperatures throughout the historical record, even as stations come, go, and move. As mentioned above, the elevation adjustment for individual stations can be done fairly easily, and the population adjustments could then be done without having to inter-calibrate stations.

Such adjustments help to maximize the number of stations used in temperature trend analysis, rather than simply throwing the data out. Note that the philosophy here is not to provide the best adjustments for each station individually, but to do adjustments for spurious effects which, when averaged over all stations, will remove the effect when averaged over all stations. This ensures simplicity and reproducibility of the analysis. Read this and much more at Roy’s blog here.

By Lewis Page, The Register

Macdonald says that glaciers on land at the Equator means solid pack ice at sea in the tropics, too.

“Climate modeling has long predicted that if sea ice were ever to develop within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, the whole ocean would rapidly freeze over,” he says. “So our result implies quite strongly that ice would have been found at all latitudes during the Sturtian glaciation.”

Enlarged here.

Even on Snowball Earth, however, it’s thought that there must have been “refugia” where liquid surface water and at least occasional sunlight remained, as proto-animal life above the bacterial level is believed to have arisen and survived at around the time of the first, Sturtian snowballing. Macdonald considers that the big freeze may actually have stimulated early, primitive life to get its act together and begin the long process which has led to the present-day biosphere.

“The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic [other than microbial] groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation,” says the prof. “The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?”

“From an evolutionary perspective,” he adds, “it’s not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress.”

Macdonald and his colleagues aren’t sure what triggered the Sturtian snowball effect, but note that a lot of lava came to the earth’s surface at around that point, suggesting that the big chill could have been kicked off by volcanic dust darkening the skies.

The Harvard team publish their results this week in hefty boffinry mag Science.

Global warming may be normal at this point in glacial cycle
By Lewis Page, The Register

German and Russian scientists say that it is normal for an interglacial period like the one just ending to finish with one or more brief – in geological terms – spells of warming before the glaciers return.

According to boffins based at the Helmholtz-Zentrum f�r Umweltforschung (UFZ) and at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the Earth’s history thus far there have been eras where the glaciers covered much of Europe, lasting about 100,000 years. These are separated by warmer interglacial periods lasting around 10,000 years. We are currently at the end of an interglacial era called the Holocene.

The scientists, looking into the last interglacial period – the Eemian – which ended around 115,000 years ago, say they have found that that it ended with “significant climate fluctuations” before the rule of the glaciers returned.

The scientists got their results by examining ancient lake sediments exposed by modern open-cast mining in Russia and Germany. They believe that the end of the Eemian interglacial epoch saw “possibly at least two” warming events, according to a statement issued by the UFZ.

“The observed instability with the proven occurrence of short warming events during the transition from the last interglacial to the last glacial epoch could be, when viewed carefully, a general, naturally occurring characteristic of such transition phases,” concludes UFZ boffin Dr Tatjana Boettger.

Boettger and her fellow researchers say that the Eemian ice-free period wound up with sudden – in these terms – warming spells and serious changes in vegetation. Then the glaciers surged south, at their high tide 21,000 years ago reaching as far as Berlin.

This Weichselian Glacial era ended around 15,000 years ago, leading to the conditions which have been seen for all of human history with the ice caps confined to the polar regions. The UFZ says that this Holocene era reached its “highest point so far around 6000 years ago” and that we might now expect to see sudden warmings and changes as at the end of the Eemian – followed by a slow descent into another freezing glacial era.

“Detailed studies of these phenomena are important for understanding the current controversial discussed climate trend so that we can assess the human contribution to climate change with more certainty,” comments Dr Frank W Junge of the S�chsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Saxon Academy of Sciences, SAW) in Leipzig.

The profs’ paper Instability of climate and vegetation dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe during the final stage of the Last Interglacial (Eemian, Mikulino) and Early Glaciation can be read here (subscriber link).

By Joseph D’Aleo

In April 2009, we talked about Mt Redoubt’s eruption (and later Russia’s Sarychev) and the effect it might have on high latitude blocking and cooler summer and winter.

Climatologists may disagree on how much the recent global warming is natural or manmade but there is general agreement that volcanism constitutes a wildcard in climate, producing significant global scale cooling for at least a few years following a major eruption. However, there are some interesting seasonal and regional variations of the effects.

Oman et al (2005) and others have shown that though major volcanic eruptions seem to have their greatest cooling effect in the summer months, the location of the volcano determines whether the winters are colder or warmer over large parts of North America and Eurasia. According to their modeling, tropical region volcanoes like El Chichon and Pinatubo actually produce a warming in winter due to a tendency for a more positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO). In the positive phase of these large scale pressure oscillations, low pressure and cold air is trapped in high latitudes and the resulting more westerly jet stream winds drives milder maritime air into the continents.

The summer of 2009 had the most negative AO since 1950. Which explains the cold summer (especially July) (below, enlarged here).
.

Summers with a very negative AO above have a cold anomaly centered in the nation’s midsection (below, enlarged here).

Last summer saw that pattern (below, enlarged here).

The AO has stayed very negative this winter. In fact again the most negative of any winter since 2009/10. It has averaged almost 3.5 standard deviations negative. In both December and February, it has reached more then 5 STD (below, enlarged here).

Negative AO/NAO winters are cold and often snowy in the US and Europe (below, enlarged here).

The strongest blocking years have a warm polar stratosphere and mid troposphere. Certainly that has been the case this year. (below, enlarged here).

The most negative years when composited show widespread cold (below, enlarged here).

This winter has been cold especially in the central and southeast through February 16th (below, enlarged here).

And certainly also all across Asia into Europe (below, enlarged here).

It also has been an El Nino year, the case in about half the top ten most negative AO years. The Southern Oscillation Index has dropped on a daily basis to an amazing 8 STD negative in early February. For the first 19 days, it has been most negative February since 1870.

(Most negative SOI Februarys enlarged here).

The pattern show a good match this year to El Nino negative AO years (bottom right below, enlarged here).

See more here. Listen to this PODCAST (episodes on left #21) on November 10 on WeatherJazz which I did with fellow meteorologist Andre Bernier on long range forecasting and the upcoming winter where we predicted east coast storms and a negative AO/NAO based on natural factors.

By Al Gore

With all the climate deniers spreading lies about the climate crisis in the media, it’s vital we arm ourselves with the facts. Thankfully, Repower America put together a great fact sheet explaining the relationship between the climate crisis and extreme weather:

“Fact: Climate change causes more frequent and severe snowstorms
Record snowstorms need two things: temperatures below freezing, and very high humidity. On a planet warmer by a few degrees on average, the Northeast US will still have plenty of days below freezing; the big difference will be warmer seas producing higher levels of moisture in the air – and therefore more severe cold-season storms.”

“Fact: We can expect more extreme weather
Scientists tell us that climate change has already led to more extreme weather in the United States and we can expect stronger hurricanes, more wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, to name a few.”

“Fact: The world is warming at a quickening pace
Weather in one region over days or months should not be confused with climate or the patterns of weather over decades and centuries. And the science is clear here: the last decade was the hottest on record. And to put this year’s weather in perspective, January was warmer than average for the continental United States”

As usual the Goracle is clueless. He is wrong on all three points. For examples, this winter featured snowmagedden for the Mid-Atlantic states. The longest duration cold ever in Florida and the southeast including snowflakes in Miami and Naples and damage to the citrus. Yes with the January thaw which is strongest and most reliable in the coldest winters, the average for the US for the month was a little above, much of the central and southeast was much below normal. And here is what the winter since December 1 looks like so far.

You say one winter doesn’t count and that I am cherry picking. Remember the fact sheet picked one number one month. December was the 14th coldest of 115 years for the US and February will rank similarly. And we have had 3 cold winters in a row. The northern cold and records snows of the last two years were blamed on La Nina and we were promised global warming would return with a vengeance when El Nino came back. Well guess what? It did this past summer and was El Nino was moderate this winter and yet it was colder and even snowier, even in places like the Dakotas and Iowa where El Ninos are typically warm and snowless. Oh and as for the red in Canada that is the result of the 5 standard deviation negative AO which produces blocking high pressure. Temperatures are much warmer than normal in the blocking areas (0 to 10 below instead of 10 to 20 below F) but still cold. Fill in your own expletives.

BTW, thanks to Craig Woods This is thre breakdown of records to date month-by-month this winter. Even with the Urban Heat Island affect, this winter in the United States has seen many more (3X) record low minimums than record high maximum temperatures. (Hat Tip Boris Konon, WSI). Here are the numbers:

December
Record high maximums 264
Record low minimums 1,086

January
Record high maximums 342
Record low minimums 901

February (through 2/24)
Record high maximums 80
Record low minimums 240

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Bill O’Reilly hosts Bill Nye The Science Guy and AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi in Fox News Debate
By Anthony Watts, Watts up With That

Heh, this is entertaining.

While Bill Nye argues for “in whose best interest is denial?” and brings up the ridiculous CO2 on Venus argument, Joe Bastardi runs circles around him with technical graphs and explanations on forcing factors and their magnitudes.

Warmists scream “weather is not climate!”. We need to shout back “Venus is not Earth!” since the Venusian atmosphere is entirely different in compositions and forcings, and we understand it far less than Earth’s. Icecap note: as commenters said also 26 million miles closer to the sun and days 150 of our days long and has an atmosphere that is denser and deeper with surface pressures 90 times earth producing compressional warming. In the Venusian atmosphere at the same pressure as earth’s, temperatures are comprable to earth. Of course Nye did not mention Mars, where even though its atmosphere is mainly C02, the air is colder because the atmosphere is thin and pressures lower and of course Mars is farther away. See comments for much more.

Meanwhile, Bill O”Reilly seems more concerned about making his commercial break on time than saving the planet.

Nye needs a better argument, as Fox News viewers can see past the appeal to emotion. Bastardi while far more technically competent than Nye, needs to focus on explaining a bit about natural cycles, since few viewers would know what the “PDO” is.

A caveat for both men, doing live TV debate by the seat of your pants is tough. You can’t see each other, and you are communicating via earpiece audio. Live TV is never easy, live via satellite interlinks is even tougher.

Watch the segment => here.

Icecap Note: Agreed TV interviews are no walk in the park. When on tape you have no control over what they use. When you are live, often, as Anthony said, you are unable to see the other parties or the interviewer (I did one interview for a major cable network at a local station from what was no more than a closet with a camera and lighting and no monitor). Often the host keeps interrupting or allows your opponent to go on a monologue (especially with the college professors) with too little chance for you to reply. Sometimes when they give you a few questions to prepare for, they come in from left field with another often oddball question frustrating you because you had in your mind exactly how you were going to reply). Nye proved hand held graphics usually don’t work. The only one that did was the SPPI temperature plot which showed the cooling for a blend of the station data sets and satellite data sets since 2001. Nye followed that with an unintelligible statement to the effect if you leave out 1998, you get a warming. Well I thought 1998 was before 2001. How foolish of me.

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A worldwide fervor over climate change orthodoxy
By Christopher Essex, Toronto Sun

Can you hear me? You’ve been incognizant, but it’s over and you’re going to be OK. Take deep breaths and relax until your vision clears. The world is not going to end because of climate change, at least not in the near future. You are a most fortunate individual. You have been a participant in the biggest inter-dimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909! No wait, that’s Ghostbusters.

Let me put it differently: There has never been anything quite like this – ever. The entire world has been embroiled in a persistent, free-floating global fervor (and a really nasty one, too) allegedly based on fervor-less, dispassionate science.

Recently, there was a huge explosion in the climate change orthodoxy factory that was set off by objective evidence we have been deceived and manipulated. The evidence was the leaked e-mails of the University of East Anglia�s Climate Research Unit (CRU), which are now subject to several official investigations, forcing the head of the CRU to step aside. The e-mails tell a lurid tale of unbecoming, unwarranted, organized and fierce hostility to skeptical climatic researchers, as well as data tampering, anti-scientific secrecy, manipulations of scientific journals, and distortions of peer review that make George Orwell look like a prophet.

This could be dismissed as an isolated case if the CRU were some marginal backwater. But what was produced there was central to the scientific case, such as it was, mounted by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The CRU was global warming central! That makes the recent admission by its deposed head to the BBC stunning. He said there was actually no statistically significant global warming for 15 years. That’s contrary to more than a decade of overheated, hysterical rhetoric and news stories, ultimately based in large part on the CRU’s now-discredited positions.

Of course the counter spin was desperate and pathetic: The e-mails were illegally obtained; it was a plot by skeptics/deniers funded by corporations, facilitated by foreign governments; OK, it’s bad, but even putting CRU data aside there’s still “overwhelming” evidence.

This was blown away in the subsequent explosion of pent-up complaints about faulty science that have been hushed up for years by silencing skeptics and likening them to criminals. With new eyes paying attention to the complaints, what was old seemed new.

For example, one IPCC myth was even debunked before it was adopted. In the first, 2002, edition of my book, Taken By Storm, with Ross McKitrick we showed the Himalayan glaciers were not at risk due to global warming. Yet this invention, attributed to the World Wildlife Federation, still appeared, five years afterward, in the 2007 IPCC report. The IPCC author responsible subsequently admitted he put it in to scare people. Finally in 2009, seven years afterward, the head of the IPCC had to answer embarrassing questions about it.

Rule number one: Don’t believe anything you read or hear in the news about ice. Count on it to be a tart up of a pre-tarted position.

So many of these seemingly “new” one-sided “errors” have burst out that unanticipated developments ensued: India threatened to pull out of the IPCC, Greenpeace called for the head of the IPCC’s head, while IPCC stalwarts rushed to distance themselves from the IPCC.

It’s been like watching the conclusion of a classic Bond movie where an enormous explosion consumes Dr. No’s fortress. The serious damage of the great fervor was not from these noisy secondary cultural explosions. It was from the sustained, immoral attacks on scientific skepticism and skeptical scientists. The attacks began the moment science became subordinate to policy.

That is corruption of science, and we will all eventually suffer if it is not consciously stopped. Read more here.

Dr. Christopher Essex is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming

By Joseph D’Aleo

The mainstream mediasphere and the alarmist blogosphere has been ignoring or dismissing the dominos of global warming collapsing as the fraudulent machinations of the IPCC are exposed, NOAA and NASA and CRU data manipulation is revealed and their heroes Michael Mann and Phil Jones are being investigated, and this incredible winter unfolds in many areas of the United States and Europe and Asia. 

China has had the coldest weather since 1971. Europe and Russia.experienced brutaldeadly cold and heavy snows. Snow and cold surprised delegates to the UN Copenhagen global warming conference and followed Obama and congress back to DC.

Florida and parts of the southeast had the longest stretch of cold weather in history. Florida citrus areas had the worst damage since 1989. Washington saw a heavy snowstorm in December and now a record breaking storm in early February. Another one is on the way and will likely affect other cities further north.

In recent years snows have fallen in unusual places like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Buenos Aires, southern Brazil. Johannesburg, South Africa, southern Australia, the Mediterranean Coast and Greece. All-time record snows fell in many locales across the western and northern United States from Washington State and Oregon and Colorado to Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont and Maine. All-time records were also set in southern Canada.

Snow returned to the UK reminiscent of the Dickens winters the last few years.

Washington was oblivious to the wild weather, so nature has brought the wild weather to their backyard. This storm may bring 3 feet of snow to a few spots around the nation’s capitol, perhaps to estates of some of the nation’s political leaders or media brainiacs. It and following storms will ensure DC will have the All-TIME SNOWIEST WINTER ever going back to 1871. Expect the enviro wackos and their media lapdogs to come out and claim the storm and cold winter is the result of global warming.

The winter was not a surprise to many of the private industry forecasters, unencumbered by the global warming albatross. We expected the winter to be a harsh one (see here). The reasons we felt so was a developing stratospheric warming in the polar regions of the northern hemisphere favored in east QBO low solar years and east QBO low solar El Ninos and also in winters following high latitude volcanoes (Redoubt and Sarychev). It started in late November peaked in December then faded in mid January. Sometimes in years when it occurs early, it recurs later (2000-2001, 1995-1996, 1977-78).

The stratospheric warming leads to a negative arctic oscillation (exceeding 5 standard deviations in December and again in February) which pushed cold air to middle latitudes while surface temperatures in the higher latitude are cold but above normal under the warm ridging aloft.  This kind of pattern happened in the 1960s and 1970s and indeed the winter is very much like 1965/66, 1968/69, and 1977/78.

Enlarged here.

See how well through February 3rd, the upper level pattern has fit the expected pattern based on these natural factors.

Enlarged here.

Also we are back in the cold Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phase which favors the colder El Ninos of the late 1950s to late 1970s (and again 2002/03.

Expect another storm this upcoming week with perhaps more snow for DC and this time further north, where less has fallen so far this season.
The SOI hit an amazing 8 STD negative last week. The water is especially warm in the central tropical Pacific. A cold pool northwest of Hawaii also favors a cold central and east. That argues for an active southern storm track. The warm central Pacific and cold east also favors the same pattern as the East QBO low solar El Ninos, cold PDO.

Once again natural oscillations provide a better indication of weather AND climate then the CO2, aerosol forcing dominated tinkertoy climate models.

Looking ahead, these stratospheric warming events last 4 to 6 weeks so since it began in late January, expect it to continue at least several more weeks. Cold air and snow returns to Europe too after the same January thaw we experienced here in the states before winters return. See full PDF here, Updates to come after the storms the next week.

By Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth

While climate skeptics have gleefully pointed to the past decade’s lack of temperature rise as proof that global warming is not happening as predicted, climate change activists have claimed that this is just “cherry picking” the data. They point to their complex and error prone general circulation models that, after significant re-factoring, are now predicting a stretch of stable temperatures followed by a resurgent global warming onslaught. In a recent paper, a new type of model, based on a test for structural breaks in surface temperature time series, is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. This statistical model predicts no temperature rise until 2050 but the more interesting prediction is what happens between 2050 and 2100.

David R.B. Stockwell and Anthony Cox, in a paper submitted to the International Journal of Forecasting entitled “Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts,” have applied advanced statistical analysis to both Australian temperature and rainfall trends and global temperature records from the Hadley Center’s HadCRU3GL dataset. The technique they used is called the Chow test, invented by economist Gregory Chow in the early 1960s. The Chow test is a statistical test of whether the coefficients in two linear regressions on different data sets are equal. In econometrics, the Chow test is commonly used in time series analysis to test for the presence of a structural break.

A structural break appears when an unexpected shift in a time series occurs. Such sudden jumps in a series of measurements can lead to huge forecasting errors and unreliability of a model in general. Stockwell and Cox are the first researchers I know of to apply this econometric technique to temperature and rainfall data (a description of computing the Chow test statistic is available here). They explain their approach in the paper’s abstract:

A Chow test for structural breaks in the surface temperature series is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. Quirk (2009) proposed that the increase in Australian temperature from 1910 to the present was largely confined to a regime-shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) between 1976 and 1979. The test finds a step change in both Australian and global temperature trends in 1978 (HadCRU3GL), and in Australian rainfall in 1982 with flat temperatures before and after. Easterling & Wehner (2009) claimed that singling out the apparent flatness in global temperature since 1997 is ‘cherry picking’ to reinforce an arbitrary point of view. On the contrary, we find evidence for a significant change in the temperature series around 1997, corroborated with evidence of a coincident oceanographic regime-shift. We use the trends between these significant change points to generate a forecast of future global temperature under specific assumptions.

The climatic effects of fluctuations in oceanic regimes are most often studied using singular spectrum analysis (SSA) or variations on principle components analysis (PCA). In other words, by decomposing rainfall and temperature into periodic components. Such approaches can capture short period phenomena like the effects of El Nino , and the potential impact of longer term phenomena such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) on variations in global temperature. These phenomena take place over a period of years or decades. For finding and testing less frequent regime-shifts different techniques are called for. According to the authors: “An F-statistic known as the Chow test (Chow, 1960) based on the reduction in the residual sum of squares through adoption of a structural break, relative to an unbroken simple linear regression, is a straightforward approach to modeling regime-shifts with structural breaks.” All the statistical details aside, the point here is that a sequence of data that contains sudden shifts or jumps is hard to model accurately using standard methods.

The Chow test since 1978 finds another significant breakpoint in 1997, when an increasing trend up to 1997 (0.13 plus/minus 0.02C per decade) changes to a practically flat trend thereafter (-0.02 plus or minus 0.05C per decade). Contrary to claims that the 10 year trend since 1998 is arbitrary, structural change methods indicate that 1997 was a statistically defensible beginning of a new, and apparently stable climate regime. Again, according to the authors: “The significance of the dates around 1978 and 1997 to climatic regimeshifts is not in dispute, as they are associated with a range of oceanic, atmospheric and climatic events, whereby thermocline depth anomalies associated with PDO phase shift and ENSO were transmitted globally via ocean currents, winds, Rossby and Kelvin waves .”

Perhaps most interesting is the application of this analysis to the prediction of future climate change, something GCM climate modelers have been attempting for the past 30 years with little success. Figure 3 from the paper illustrates the prediction for temperatures to 2100 following from our structural break model, the assumptions of continuous underlying warming, regime-shift from 1978 to 1997, and no additional major regime-shift. The projections formed by the presumed global warming trend to 1978 and the trend in the current regime predicts constant temperatures for fifty years to around 2050. This is similar to the period of flat temperatures from 1930-80.

Icecap Note: A good analysis. Actually, properly adjusted, the trends from the1940 to late 1970s and since 2001 were down. How far down we go between now and 2050 depends on whether we will be like the PDO- phase from 1947 to 1977 or the early 1800s due to a Dalton like Minimum. A Maunder like Minimum seems unlikely unless the projections of Livingston and Penn for the disappearance of spots after 2014 occurs. The following chart (enlarged here) from Don Easterbrook captures these scenarios.

 

Washington Times Editorial

Discredited climate theories make strange bedfellows. In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said there was “overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” In his most recent message to the world, Osama bin Laden said that climate change “is not an intellectual luxury but an actual fact.” It’s nice to see these two leaders can agree on something.

The hitch is that the man-caused catastrophic global warming theory is dead, and it needs to be buried. Evidence had been mounting for years that there were problems with the global warming model; most telling was that the globe refused to warm up. Carbon emissions continued apace, but the world began cooling. This is why true believers abandoned the “global warming” brand name and tried to shift the debate to the more ambiguous label “climate change,” which is something the rest of us like to refer to as “weather.”

The dam broke with Climategate when hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit revealed that global warming advocates had for years attempted to hide conflicting data and silence their professional critics. British authorities have determined that the university broke freedom-of-information laws by denying information to scientists seeking to check claims that global warming was caused by human activity.

Evidence is emerging that the data had been rigged all along. Russian analysts noted that British temperature calculations excluded data from 40 percent of Russian territory, much of which showed no increase in temperature in the past 50 years. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also cherry-picked data, cutting Canadian data sources from 600 to 35 and relying on only one monitor for all of Canada above the Arctic Circle. This was done even though Canada operates 1,400 weather stations, 100 of which are in the Arctic.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is having its own scandal regarding a finding in its Nobel Peace Prize-winning 2007 report that glaciers in India were rapidly disappearing. It is now revealed that this dramatic claim was based not on years of patient observation and research but anecdotes from a hiking magazine and a student’s master’s thesis. IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri knew about the erroneous information before December’s Copenhagen climate summit but maintained the falsehood. He even denounced a report from India that showed the glaciers were in far less jeopardy as “unsubstantiated research.” Last month, Mr. Pachauri published a sexually explicit novel, further diminishing his professional reputation.

Climate scientists have to come to grips with some highly inconvenient truths. World temperatures continue to decline as carbon emissions increase. Chilly Scotland is facing its coldest winter in a century. Arctic sea ice is not vanishing. Polar bears are experiencing a baby boom. Water vapor appears to play as important a role in the climate as carbon emissions. Sunspot activity may be more important than both combined. Meanwhile, climate change fanatics seek to blame capitalism and productivity for global warming, global cooling, too much snow, not enough snow, hurricanes, tornadoes and even the Haiti earthquake.

The simplistic and increasingly discredited theory of carbon-based, man-caused global warming needs to be discarded, and the scientists who sought to squelch skeptics and artificially inflate their own reputations must be disciplined. Alas, Mr. Obama and Mr. bin Laden need to update their talking points. See more here.

By Colleen Boyle, Collegian Staff Writer

A panel of Penn State faculty and staff concluded the inquiry of Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann this weekend and is slated to release its “Climategate” findings later in the week, university officials said.

The end of the two-month inquiry marks a major point in the worldwide climate debate. Penn State’s inquiry began after hundreds of illegally obtained e-mails were leaked last November from a private server in the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, containing comments critics say suggest Mann and his colleagues may have distorted climate change evidence.

The inquiry’s findings will determine if the university will further investigate Mann’s work. Penn State President Graham Spanier addressed the inquiry and the panel’s work during the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 22. “I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.

But conservative groups are already mobilizing to respond to the university’s findings. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—a Penn State student group working to “advance the principles of individual and economic freedom, limited government and traditional values”—has taken an interest in the Mann inquiry.  On Feb. 12, YAF will host a demonstration in front of the HUB to protest what the group feels is a violation of academic integrity, YAF member Samuel Settle said. The 9-12 Project of Central PA, a conservative group, will join the demonstration. Settle (sophomore-political science and history) said the university’s handling of the inquiry unsettles him. “What the university has done is they’ve taken three Penn State employees and assigned them to deciding whether or not Mann violated university policy,” he said. “That’s an awful lot of power in the hands of three with no external oversight.”
See post here.

The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens – yes dozens – of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the “consensus” of 2500 of the world’s climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.

We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.

Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus “science” on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :

Dr North next uncovered “Amazongate”. The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups – why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?

It’s too easy to simply claim “bias.” Media outlets don’t pass up juicy stories that could potentially increase their readership and revenue for ideological purposes (except the New York Times – and even they could spin all of this to show skeptics to be using flawed arguments like the liberal Guardian is doing in England).

Perhaps its time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can’t get any traction here. Blogs like Watts up with That and Climate Depot are keeping us informed of the latest from England but we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and – outside of Fox News – the cable nets.

As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people – who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his “green” plans – are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate. Until the media starts to give this story the coverage it deserves, that state of affairs will not change.

See post here.