Maldives

"a very surprising result"

It is increasingly difficult to take the mainstream media seriously. Today's example is from the Washington Post (timed to coincide with the Peru conference, of course).

Fall snow cover in Northern Hemisphere was most extensive on record, even with temperatures at high mark

At least they admit this is a "surprising result." No, a "very" surprising result. Here's how the article starts: 

In 46 years of records, more snow covered the Northern Hemisphere this fall than any other time. It is a very surprising result, especially when you consider temperatures have tracked warmest on record over the same period.

Data from Rutgers University Global Snow Lab show the fall Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent exceeded 22 million square kilometers, exceeding the previous greatest fall extent recorded in 1976.

The rest of the article tries to make the point that "record high temperatures" in 2014 have led to increased snow because warmer air holds more moisture! How many readers of the Washington Post are ignorant enough to believe that?

Notice how the snow coverage grows as the planet supposedly gets warmer. Except the albedo effect (more snow = more reflection of the sun's energy) is supposed to cool off the planet. Declining ice was supposed to be a death spiral; i.e., lack of ice in the Arctic meant the ocean would absorb more heat, year after year, until the ice was all gone. 

Instead, the "death spiral" seems to be death by snow!

Here is a reader comment that sums it up:

FORWARNED

11:55 AM MST

Key point the media always glosses over: When the government says it's the warmest year "on record," they aren't referring to actual historical records. They are referring to "adjusted" historical records. NOAA has been revising historical data lower by far more than the latest "record."  
If you look at actual historical data, 2014 is far from the hottest year on record. That's how we can have record sea ice (including growing Arctic ice extent) and record snow cover even though this is supposedly the hottest year ever.  
It's true that warmer air can hold more moisture, but "global warming" isn't changing the laws of physics. At the freezing temperatures necessary for snow and ice, moisture content doesn't change.


NOTE: I also came across Tony's comments:

Wildly Corrupt Government Climate Science

Posted on December 5, 2014by stevengoddard

It has been obvious since about April that government agencies had been instructed to make 2014 the hottest year ever. But this headline in the Washington Post summed up the fraud in spectacular fashion.

Fall snow cover in Northern Hemisphere was most extensive on record, even with temperatures at high mark – The Washington Post

The record snow extent this autumn was due to record intrusions of cold air to low latitudes in North America and Asia. Obviously not compatible with record heat.

But it gets must worse. Last winter also had well above average snow cover.

Antarctica had record sea ice cover this year.

iphone.anomaly.antarctic.png (512×412)

The amount of sea ice on Earth is above normal.

iphone.anomaly.global.png (512×412)

Arctic sea ice extent is at a 10 year high

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/old_icecover.uk.php

The Greenland ice sheet has gained a record amount of ice this Autumn.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

Satellite temperatures are far more accurate than surface temperatures, and they show that temperatures are not warming, and are nowhere near a record.

Wood for Trees: Interactive Graphs

The surface temperature record which the claims are based on has huge geographical gaps of no data, shown in gray. They have an error of at least half a degree, yet make claims of record heat at 0.01 degrees. Junk science and fraud at its absolute worst.

It is not a coincidence that these wildly fake claims of record heat came out just as Obama and the UN are doing their big push to take control of the world’s energy supply through “climate” regulations.

And even with all their endless data tampering, GISS is still below zero emissions scenario C.

These claims of record heat by NASA and NCDC are not even remotely credible. They are in defiance of all corroborating science, and are complete utter nonsense.

One aspect of the climate change debate that most surprises my students is the fact that historical temperatures have been adjusted downward, which if course makes current temperatures appear higher by comparison. That's why we have so many records reported in the media.

In this case, we see the comparison between British measurements of global temperatures. The older one, Hadcrut3, shows lower historical temperatures than the newer one, Hadcrut4. The Met Office claims 2014 is the hottest year on record, but their adjustments to historical temperatures are ten times the amount of the so-called record. IOW, if they didn't adjust historical temperatures downward, we'd be nowhere near a record high year in 2014.

This entry was originally posted on NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

Records & Adjustments

DECEMBER 4, 2014

By Paul Homewood  

While the Met Office tell us that that global temperatures for 2014 are running 0.01C above the previous record (with an error margin of 0.1C!), we should remember how much their temperature data has changed over the last few years.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT3-gl.dat

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/time_series/HadCRUT.4.3.0.0.monthly_ns_avg.txt

[The latest update of the old V3 is only up to May 2014]

In their Hadcrut V3, 1998 was 0.07C warmer than 2010, but is now shown as 0.02C cooler, a turnaround of 0.09C. Current year numbers, at least up to May, have been similarly inflated.

So, the adjustment is nearly ten times the amount by which the old record is claimed to have been beaten by!

CO2 theory questioned at MIT

There is a very odd study out of MIT, summarized thus:
Researchers show that a canonical view of global warming tells only half the story

Outgoing longwave radiation from CERES Instrument on NASA Aqua Satellite for March 18, 2011, near Vernal Equinox of 2011

Courtesy of NASA

I'm not sure what to make of this. Basically, they say that rising CO2 will not block more longwave radiation from leaving the atmosphere, but that the Earth will heat up because the atmosphere will absorb more incoming shortwave radiation.

Here's what the article says:

They found the answer by drawing on both computer simulations and a simple energy-balance model. As longwave radiation gets trapped by CO2, the Earth starts to warm, impacting various parts of the climate system. Sea ice and snow cover melt, turning brilliant white reflectors of sunlight into darker spots. The atmosphere grows moister because warmer air can hold more water vapor, which absorbs more shortwave radiation. Both of these feedbacks lessen the amount of shortwave radiation that bounces back into space, and the planet warms rapidly at the surface.

But in reality, we are seeing more and more sea ice and snow cover, which completely contradicts the basic predictions of the CO2/global warming theory. My initial reaction to this MIT study is that it shows the CO2 effect is already pretty well saturated; i.e., additional concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will not block more longwave radiation, which means it will have no impact on global warming (which is also what the data shows for the last 18 years). This also means that we will not have the death spiral of sea ice that the alarmists long predicted. Instead, the global sea ice will continue to expand, and the Arctic will continue the current trend toward more sea ice until it reaches the peak of the cycle in a few decades. Then it will cycle downward again, like it has since around 1978.

Tony Heller thinks this: The takeaway from the article is that the authors believe that Mann-made global warming is nonsense, but can’t say it for political reasons.

Maybe he's right, but I suspect the researchers were just repeating the "consensus" view that, despite the actual facts, the Arctic sea ice will continue to melt and the late summer sun at the north pole will somehow heat the exposed water enough to change the planet.

I'm laughing writing this, the theory is so absurd.

:)

Global sea ice

Today I read a typically bizarre article by Seth Borenstein of the AP. He's famous for promoting the idea that global warming will produce more snow because warmer air can hold more water, ignoring the facts that it can't snow when the temperatures are above freezing (i.e., no matter how warm the planet gets, the cold air necessary for snow can't hold more water), and that colder winters have more snow and more big snow storms.

At any rate, in his most recent article, Borenstein mentions the current international climate conference underway in Lima, Peru. To set the stage, he lists a series of misleading, outdated, and falsified "facts" to promote his thesis that "the numbers are stark." In typical fashion, he claims that Greenland lost 3.35 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2011, that Antarctica lost 1.56 trillion tons of ice over that same period, and, of course, that the Arctic sea ice average is off around 600,000 square miles, on average.

Yet in reality, global sea ice has increased 700,000 square kilometers over the past decade and is rising.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.global.anom.1979-2008

This reality is the opposite of Borenstein's claims, as well as the predictions of climate scientists.

In addition, the snow extent in North America has been rising since the 1960s, also contrary to the climate models and scientists' predictions.

http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/table_area.php?ui_set=1&ui_sort=0

Finally, regarding Greenland, the actual data show increasing accumulated surface mass balance.

http://beta.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-mass-budget/

There is a good discussion of Greenland at Tony Heller's blog. See the discussion in the comments, too.

We continue to see the real world contradict both the predictions and the theories of the alarmists such as Seth Borenstein. The only question now is at what point these alarmists will recognize how foolish they look. Will they ever adjust their theories to reality?