Moderated Global Warming Discussion

[Buckaroo]

Drop in a buzz-phrase why don't you. They always impress, especially after such a display of confusion and heartfelt error.

I planted that one in r-j's head a few pages back, unfortunately. Sorry about that. It's pretty clear he had never heard the term before then.

 

[macdoc]

Rossby waves were new to me not long ago and while I understand their function in energy transfer I'm not sure if they are engaged with the NAO and PDO decadal cyclic events .....would seem to me not ....that they are a handy term encompassing the vertical and horizontal flows generated by temperature gradients and the earth's rotation.....both air and ocean.

I'm open to further enlightenment.

 

[Buckaroo]

Rossby waves were new to me not long ago and while I understand their function in energy transfer I'm not sure if they are engaged with the NAO and PDO decadal cyclic events .....would seem to me not ....that they are a handy term encompassing the vertical and horizontal flows generated by temperature gradients and the earth's rotation.....both air and ocean.

I'm open to further enlightenment.

After r-j had disingenuously called for "real science" to support CapelDodger's point about jet streams I posted this paper:

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/seminars/pdfs/FrancisVavrus2012.pdf

... which led r-j to claim it had nothing to do with jetstreams at all. This is where he learned the term, after I called him out.

The meanders of the jet stream that influence the position of cold air masses are Rossby waves, which is why they are germane if you're talking about local cold events.

 

[tsig]

Haven't had this good a chew toy in a while.

Yep, there's a fight breaking out at the bat rack, everyone wants a cut at this.

 

[tsig]

You seem to have grasped that the temperature gradient is what creates the jetsreams and determines their strength. The rest of it you've got almost completely to cock.

Jetstreams determine the storm track. When they move away from the poles they bring the storms with them.

What we get is weaker jetstreams, which meander more (as I previously pointed out). It isn't strong jetstreams which push air from the poles, it is weak jetstreams meandering from the poles and allowing cold air to come south. This is why European summer weather is famously unpredictable, since they depend on the unpredictable meanderings of the weaker summer jetstream. Last summer, for instance, saw the jetstream flowing south across Scotland and the North Sea and directing storms from the Atlantic across England and mainland Europe. Meanwhile blocking highs kept forming over Scandinavia. The result was England's second wettest year (by a smdigin) including its driest spring (when the jetstream was arcing way north), with lower-than-average annual rainfall for North and East Scotland.

Now you slip back to the unique power of cold air masses, when in fact it is the temperature gradient between cold and warm air-masses that lead (via the resultant pressure gradient) to jetstreams.

The averaged latitude of jetstreams varies with the season because the effective equator (where the Sun is overhead at noon) varies. It remains at about the same relative position on the arc from effective equator to pole. That arc is smaller in summer, so the jetstream latitude is closer to the pole. In winter, naturally, the reverse is the case. It's nothing to do with the special power of cold to push things around.

Drop in a buzz-phrase why don't you. They always impress, especially after such a display of confusion and heartfelt error.
I'm not surprised at all, a Science forum does attract all sorts who haven't a clue what they don't know about a subject. This, you'll not be surprised to hear, includes you.

Think of a subject you're actually conversant with and imagine someone so ignorant of it they're convinced they know it all, and certainly know it better than the experts, such as yourself. At that point you might turn your thoughts inward and perhaps wonder, if only for a moment.

From your link to NASA, by the way, I now realise that by "winters are getting colder" you mean European winters are getting colder (not immediately obvious) but the graph is of annual mean, not specifically winter. We've had a string of cloudy (hence relatively cold) summers recently. As a source for your claim I'm afraid it's insufficient.

Cnadian winters have definitely been getting warmer, there was a study done on it recently. Someone may have a reference to it?

The less they know about a subject the more willing they are to expound on it.

 

[tsig]

I planted that one in r-j's head a few pages back, unfortunately. Sorry about that. It's pretty clear he had never heard the term before then.

I've noticed that also, someone uses a word or phrase then a few posts later the woo picks it up and misuses it repeatedly this shows there is no thought involved in their posting merely repeating what they heard elsewhere.

 

[r-j]

R-j, putting aside for the moment that your claim that winters are getting colder is demonstrably false

The ignorance is amusing. I repeated what many scientists said, which I provided links to, both reports and articles, none of which said the entire world was getting colder, much less what you have twisted it into. They said winters are getting colder. They are not saying the entire world is getting colder. Learn the difference. You are never going to win this one. It's your opinion against the entire world of data and science.

That feeling of numbness in your toes, even inside your thickest boots, is not lying to you. It’s been very cold so far this winter in most of the U.S. and many places at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Washington, D.C., London and Seoul have already shoveled themselves out from major snowfalls. And over the course of 2009, average temperatures across some parts of the U.S. were cooler than the average temperature for a baseline period of 1951-1980.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/coldweather-2009.html

At first (2006) it was explained away as natural variation.

Temperatures for December and January were consistently 1.8 F ( 1 C) lower than the average of 41 F (5 C)and 37 F (3C) respectively and more snow fell in London this week than since the 1960s.
But despite this extreme weather, scientists say that the current cold snap does not mean that climate change is going into reverse. In fact, the surprise with which we have greeted the extreme conditions only reinforces how our climate has changed over the years.
A study by the Met Office which went back 350 years shows that such extreme weather now only occurs every 20 years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/w...stent-with-global-warming-say-scientists.html
After it happened again, and again, and yet again

The winter of 2005-6 was the coldest in 50 years in Japan and eastern Eurasia, reported Meiji Honda, a senior scientist with the Climate Diagnosis Group at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. Honda’s studies show that the air over the Arctic was quite warm in the fall of 2005, which altered normal wind patterns, pushing the jet stream further south and bringing arctic cold to much of Eurasia and Japan. He also documented the same mechanism for the colder winters of 2007-8 and 2009-10, he told participants.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/20...ovember-and-hottest-year-on-record/?mobile=nc

There you see the effort to explain the colder winters. There is no doubt the winters were becoming colder, that isn't even in dispute. Don't make the mistake of thinking this means every winter will be colder, that isn't what they are talking about at all.

January 6, 2010 (AP) -- Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida's orange groves and beaches. Whatever happened to global warming? Such weather doesn't seem to fit with warnings from scientists that the Earth is warming because of greenhouse gases. But experts say the cold snap doesn't disprove global warming at all - it's just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

http://phys.org/news182026415.html#jCp

Here is the link (again) where sea ice is proposed as a reason for the cold winters. (note the use of the term Rossby wave, which I introduced early on)

Back to the cold air in Europe: is it possible that reduced Arctic sea ice is affecting weather patterns? Because Hudson Bay (and Baffin Bay, west of Greenland) are at significantly lower latitudes than most of the Arctic Ocean, global warming may cause them to remain ice free into early winter after the Arctic Ocean has become frozen insulating the atmosphere from the ocean. The fixed location of the Hudson-Baffin heat source could plausibly affect weather patterns, in a deterministic way — Europe being half a Rossby wavelength downstream, thus producing a cold European anomaly in the trans-Atlantic seesaw. Several ideas about possible effects of the loss of Arctic sea ice on weather patterns are discussed in papers referenced by Overland, Wang and Walsh.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2010november/

Last June, during the International Polar Year conference, James Overland suggested that there are more cold and snowy winters to come. He argued that the exceptionally cold snowy 2009-2010 winter in Europe had a connection with the loss of sea-ice in the Arctic. The cold winters were associated with a persistent ‘blocking event’, bringing in cold air over Europe from the north and the east.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/12/cold-winter-in-a-world-of-warming/

Arctic sea ice is continuing its seemingly interminable decline, and it looks like the loss could be contributing to the recent spate of cold winters over northern Europe and North America

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21521-melting-sea-ice-could-trigger-colder-winters.html

Now you can still try and say the winters are not colder, but as I said, it is making you look bad.

"The study adds weight to growing belief that Arctic sea ice is driving an increase of cold winters," says Adam Scaife of the UK Met Office. His team has also found evidence to support such a link.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21521-melting-sea-ice-could-trigger-colder-winters.html
It's right there. No, they are not saying the world is cooling, they are saying that the winters have become colder, in the Americas, Europe, China, Russia, that kind of thing. For the entire northern hemisphere to be colder is impossible. It's over the land masses.

And it's theorized that warming is causing the cooling, as in colder winters. Don't live in denial.

 

[lomiller]

The ignorance is amusing. I repeated what many scientists said, which I provided links to, both reports and articles, none of which said the entire world was getting colder, much less what you have twisted it into. They said winters are getting colder.

No, they don't. Most discuss specific cold events or periods where a region suffers a persistent cold pattern that set any type of record. None suggest any type of cooling trend only greater variability we already expected.

Here is the link (again) where sea ice is proposed as a reason for the cold winters. (note the use of the term Rossby wave, which I introduced early on)

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2010november/

Your link says:

Figure 1(a) shows January-November 2010 surface temperature anomalies (relative to 1951-80) in the preliminary Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis. This is the warmest January-November in the GISS analysis, which covers 131 years.

and shows this graphic of European winters not getting colder

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2010november/fig3.pdf

 

[Buckaroo]

Blah, blah, blah

Do you REALLY think these links say what you claim they do? OK, I'm done, because:

Here is the link (again) where sea ice is proposed as a reason for the cold winters. (note the use of the term Rossby wave, which I introduced early on)

You introduced? OK, no more snark, I'm going to be totally serious here. If you honestly believe that this is how the term came into the conversation then you are literally, not figuratively, delusional (and please know that I'm not saying this as an insult), so I'm no longer comfortable with this conversation. I hope you're just yanking my chain for the lulz, but if not, I urge you to seek help, if you haven't already. I won't be responding to your posts any further, so enjoy the rest of the thread.

 

[macdoc]

One or two cold winters do not indicate "winters are becoming colder".....they are not.
Canada alone is demonstrating that as will other areas.

Local regions affected by the stalled highs might experience a prolonged cold snap and even record lows....it in no way means "winters are becoming colder".

Stop with the nonsense.....or perhaps you are ESL??

 

[r-j]

Look at the trend which includes the last three winters for Europe. It matches the same thing seen in most of the US, China, Russia and Alaska. Colder winters.

Alaska? Before you start making things up again

As the rest of the world contends with unusually warm temperatures and scorching drought, Alaska has been bucking the trend since 2000 by reporting some of the coldest winters on record.

http://www.livescience.com/25907-alaska-climate-pdo.html

I looked at the official records, it's true.

While not everywhere is colder (that would mean something seriously has gone wrong), large areas of the NH are experiencing colder winters (trend), and this is exactly why so many people are working on figuring out why.

The ironic thing? It might just be global warming, and it could be the most deadly aspect of it.

Of course you can look at the data to see for yourself(anyone can, it's online), and stop being ignorant. If I was skeptical of something, I certainly would check. It's why I know what they are saying is true. Colder winters.

 

[a_unique_person]

Look at the trend which includes the last three winters for Europe. It matches the same thing seen in most of the US, China, Russia and Alaska. Colder winters.

Alaska? Before you start making things up again
http://www.livescience.com/25907-alaska-climate-pdo.html

I looked at the official records, it's true.

Yes, if you read it, it explains what is happening and why. The article acknowledges quite clearly that AGW is real, and that this is an anomaly. That global temperatures are rising does not mean that every place around what is a reasonably sized plant is going to move in lock step. But I thought were talking about Florida. How did we suddenly switch to Alaska?

 

[VanillaCone]

Global warming is the fatal pile-up at the intersection of skepticism and Libertarianism.

Kinda makes you wonder if Libertarianism is really compatible with rational thinking.

The place where I used to work was run by a Libertarian family, and they used to dispatch this dude to our office once a year to try to indoctrinate us into the Libertarian way of thinking. He was like their ideological spokesperson or something. The company brainwasher.

I got into a heated debate with this guy over the subject of global warming, and the experience left me with a realization that Libertarians are compelled to deny the reality of manmade global warming. They MUST deny its existence in order to protect their stated ideology.

I asked the guy what Libertarians think about a person who burns tires in his backyard. He said that's fine - it's the tire-burner's right to do as he pleases on his own property.

Then I asked, "What if the acrid smoke from this guy's activities wafts over into his neighbor's yard and stinks up the place?" He said, in that case, it's appropriate for government to step in and make sure there is no nasty smoke disturbing the neighbors on their own property.

I then said, "What if the smoke is heating up the atmosphere and threatening everyone else's quality of life on the planet?" His response was that smoke cannot heat up the atmosphere.

"But what if the smoke DID heat up the atmosphere?" I asked. He got fidgety and then started berating me for being a liberal. He simply COULD NOT ACKNOWLEDGE the possibility of what I had proposed.

So my question is: How can Libertarianism be consistent with skepticism if it requires the brain to shut down when presented with certain possibilities, such as the possibility that manmade global warming is real and harmful?

 

[Pixel42]

While not everywhere is colder (that would mean something seriously has gone wrong), large areas of the NH are experiencing colder winters (trend), and this is exactly why so many people are working on figuring out why.

No-one here has denied that some areas have experienced unusually cold weather during winter in some recent years. This was known by most posters here before you arrived in this thread, and the work of investigating the reasons why was already being followed with interest.

The fact that some areas are experiencing spells of unusually cold weather during winter does not mean that winters are getting colder overall, even in those areas, let alone globally. The latter was what you originally appeared to be claiming, but even the former is a debatable claim.

The apparent contradiction of global warming causing localised cold spells has been seized on by many deniers as evidence it's all nonsense, and the sarcastic tone of your first posts on this thread certainly suggested that was your position. If that wasn't what you were intending to suggest, you need to clarify what your position really is.

 

[VanillaCone]

No-one here has denied that some areas have experienced unusually cold weather during winter in some recent years. This was known by most posters here before you arrived in this thread, and the work of investigating the reasons why was already being followed with interest.

The fact that some areas are experiencing spells of unusually cold weather during winter does not mean that winters are getting colder overall, even in those areas, let alone globally. The latter was what you originally appeared to be claiming, but even the former is a debatable claim.

The apparent contradiction of global warming causing localised cold spells has been seized on by many deniers as evidence it's all nonsense, and the sarcastic tone of your first posts on this thread certainly suggested that was your position. If that wasn't what you were intending to suggest, you need to clarify what your position really is.

If you think about it, it's not really so mysterious that global warming could affect the jetstream in such a manner that certain regions kept warm by airflows coming from equatorial areas would no longer be as warm. Compare Britain's average winter temperature to that of Canadian territories located along the same parallel and you will see the jetstream's significant effects at work. Britain's temps are far more mild. But that could change as a result of global warming.

 

[Dancing David]

Look at the trend which includes the last three winters for Europe. It matches the same thing seen in most of the US, China, Russia and Alaska. Colder winters.

Alaska? Before you start making things up again
http://www.livescience.com/25907-alaska-climate-pdo.html

I looked at the official records, it's true.

While not everywhere is colder (that would mean something seriously has gone wrong), large areas of the NH are experiencing colder winters (trend), and this is exactly why so many people are working on figuring out why.

The ironic thing? It might just be global warming, and it could be the most deadly aspect of it.

Of course you can look at the data to see for yourself(anyone can, it's online), and stop being ignorant. If I was skeptical of something, I certainly would check. It's why I know what they are saying is true. Colder winters.

Two to three, not much of a trend yet. How about 30-100?

http://www.il-acad-sci.org/transactions_pdf_files/97.12.pdf


In fact the data trends are all over the place,
http://www.isws.illinois.edu/data/climatedb/

I was looking at the data for Urbana, my old home town because it has records going back to 1901

And you really have to run statistical analysis to get the trends, if you just compare 7 year periods, like 1901-1908 and 2005-2012 you will notice a lot of variation in those seven years. With certain trends as noticeable, such as the Jul high and mean rising and the Jan low and mean rising.

But really that is not as meaningful as if you run the analysis on all years and would plot the trends, then you would be abole to look at actual trends. Seven years slots are prone to sample bias.

Which is why they satate this in the paper

An examination of monthly and seasonal trends reveals that most of the changes found in the annual temperature in Illinois are driven by changes in winter temperature. In turn, most of changes in winter temperature are the result of very large changes in January and February temperatures. For February, the period before 1940 showed a rapid warming of 1°C per decade, followed by a 0.5°C per decade cooling through 1970. Finally, the last 32 years of the record have seen a warming of 1.2°C per decade. The results for winter, and especially for January and February, are supported in the snowfall records as well.
The results show that temperatures have changed on a decadal time scale in recent Illinois history.
As defined in the introduction, the changes of the 20th century mean temperature record behaved more like climate variability than climate change because the temperatures shifts were not sustained over “several decades or longer” as defined by the American Meteorological Society

Now the sad part of this is that climate change deniers (not you) focus on the neutral language to deny the over all global trends.

 

[macdoc]

Look at the trend which includes the last three winters for Europe. It matches the same thing seen in most of the US, China, Russia and Alaska. Colder winters.

that is not a TREND - and for the umpteenth time that is localized.
These are small regional anomalies that are a direct result of the warming Arctic Ocean.
This is getting tiresome from you. Stalled highs in winter cause localized cold periods.

THIS is a trend 10 millon square km over 65 years.

As Canada Heats Up, Officials Scramble to Keep Up | Planetizen
www.planetizen.com/node/60376Jan 24, 2013 – In the past 65 years, Canada's national average winter temperature has risen 3.2 degrees," reports Anna Mehler Paperny. She adds, "Rain ..

THIS is a trend

Report Summary:
While the U.S. as a whole has seen a warming trend that has raised annual average temperatures by 1.3°F over the past 100 years, warming varies seasonally, and it’s winter that has seen the fastest warming.
An analysis of data from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network of weather stations shows that the coldest states are warming the fastest, and across the country winter warming since 1970 has been more than fourand-a-half times faster per decade than over the past 100 years. Winter nights across the country have warmed about 30 percent faster than nights over the whole year. Some states cooled or failed to join the warming trend over the past 100 years, but since 1970, every state has shown winter-warming.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/21/us-temperature-trends_n_2735036.html

Alaska and other locales sit where the stalled highs occur now they have moved away from the Arctic. So it's cold weather for those locales.
Deal with it.

This is a trend.....the world is getting warmer....

Last month was among the top 10 warmest Februaries for the planet since record keeping began in 1880, U.S. weather officials announced today (March 14).

February 2013 tied with 2003 as the 9th warmest February of the past 133 years, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA). They calculated last month's globally-averaged temperature at 54.93 degrees Fahrenheit (12.67 degrees Celsius), or 1.03 degrees F (0.57 degrees C), above the 20th century average of 53.9 degrees F (12.1 degrees C).

This means February 2013 was the 336th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average February, in terms of temperature, was in 1985.

 

[lomiller]

Look at the trend which includes the last three winters for Europe. It matches the same thing seen in most of the US, China, Russia and Alaska. Colder winters.

Three years isn't a trend, and you already linked to a document showing there was nothing unusual about recent winters in Europe.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2010november/fig3.pdf

All you are doing is linking to articles about cold events in winter, and not even record cold events at that. This doesn't show winters are getting colder. There are supposed to be cold events in winter, that's why it's winter.

 

[lomiller]

Global warming is the fatal pile-up at the intersection of skepticism and Libertarianism.

Kinda makes you wonder if Libertarianism is really compatible with rational thinking.

Libertarians fashion themselves as idealists. Idealism tends to make someone try to deal with the world as they want it to be rather than the way it really is.

 

[DSo]

If you think about it, it's not really so mysterious that global warming could affect the jetstream in such a manner that certain regions kept warm by airflows coming from equatorial areas would no longer be as warm. Compare Britain's average winter temperature to that of Canadian territories located along the same parallel and you will see the jetstream's significant effects at work. Britain's temps are far more mild. But that could change as a result of global warming.

Do you mean Gulfstream and waterflows?