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This Was America's Warmest Winter On Record (slate.com)
hondo77 writes: On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its official assessment of December, January, and February's temperatures across the United States, and the results are striking: Not a single state in the U.S. had a cooler than average winter. (NOAA treats Alaska and Hawaii separately, due to shorter weather data records there -- though both states were significantly warmer than normal this winter. Weather records for the contiguous United States go back to 1895.) NOAA blames the recent warm weather on a record-strength El Nino "and other climate patterns," most notably, global warming. As a whole, this winter in the lower 48 was about 4.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average: a sharp contrast to the previous back-to-back frigid polar vortex winters, especially in the Northeast.
Just saying. Take the global warming bs and shove it up your ass.
Global warming has nothing to do with how much snow is in your driveway, the snow in your driveway this year is "weather", not "climate". Measure it over the next decade, then get back to us.
Or the previous decade.
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Here's the rankings of warmest from the decade
2015 - 1st
2014 - 2nd
2013 - 4th
2012 - 8th
2011 - 11th
2010 -3rd
All 15 years this century are in the top 15 warmest years on record.
We had 30" of snow in 24 hours this winter. That's all the snow we received.
Why? Because we had temperatures in the 40s and 50s through all of December, including hitting 71 on the 24th. We've had 40s through large portions of January and February and February had 50s at the end of the month. Today our temperature was almost 70, tomorrow it will be above 70 and winter isn't yet over.
See how the game works?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
In all fairness, the story isn't really about global warming, either. It's about the weather in the United States. In recent summers, the US has been abnormally cool while the rest of the world has been hot. Overall, the Earth has been very warm, but the weather in the United States doesn't necessarily indicate as such. By the way, mid-latitude weather may not be the best indicator of global warming, especially during the winter.
The Arctic Oscillation has two phases, the positive phase being a strong polar vortex that traps the cold air in the Arctic, while the negative phase weakens the polar vortex and allows more cold air outbreaks in the mid-latitudes. The Arctic Oscillation is very much related to sudden stratospheric warming, which is often a precursor to the onset of mid-latitude cold air outbreaks. It makes sense that the stratosphere would have a role in weakening the polar vortex, which is actually a semi-permanent large-scale feature near the tropopause. In the positive phase of the Arctic Oscillation, the polar regions can be quite cold while the mid-latitude regions are warm.
Global warming means global warming, not regional warming. And there are reasons why the weather in the United States might be decoupled from other parts of the Earth. Even with global warming, a few regions of the Earth might actually cool. For example, if global warming slows the North Atlantic Drift current, the British Isles may cool because of global warming. My point is that scientists have to be precise in what they say, otherwise climate deniers (and trolls, in the case of the OP) will distort their message and attack them.
Steven Goddard doesn't have the best record on climate change issues.
He was very critical the National Snow and Ice Data Center's data on Arctic sea ice extent before being proved wrong and having to retract his claims.
He's also accused the National Climatic Data Center of fabricating global warming, saying their "adjustments" to the data are the only global warming signal. The adjustments actually exist because many of the monitoring stations have been relocated from urban areas into rural areas. That introduces a cool bias to the data that needs to be corrected for. The NCDC has been very transparent about this, but Goddard continues to persist in his claims of data manipulation. It's also worth noting that some other adjustments have lowered modern temperature records. For example, sea temperature measurements used to be taken by lowering a bucket from a ship into the water. Now, temperatures are measured as water cycles through the engine of a ship. Of course, the engines heat the water, so the bias must be removed. Conveniently, Goddard hasn't objected to this adjustment.
Radiosonde measurements certainly do show lower tropospheric warming, consistent with other instruments. Global warming typically refers to warming at the surface or through the lower troposphere.
You should be aware that even in global warming scenarios where the planet on average is several degrees warmer it'll still get cold enough for snow to fall out of the sky in most places where snow has historically been common. What you'll have a slight tendency to have less snow in many places due to temperature that's offset by a lot more water going into the atmosphere. Many places may see lots more snow.
In many high temperate regions you'll also see more frequent cold snaps. Global warming doesn't mean the climate gets warmer every day of every year; it means there are more total joules of thermal energy in the atmosphere. Since we're talking about a giant rotating ball of fluid which is exchanging heat with the surface and space what you get is much more complicated stuff happening.
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Well, here in the Netherlands, the number of days there was frost at day-time this winter could be counted on a single hand. I may have had central heating on for maybe two weeks in days in total ('80s concrete apartment, 60 sq.m, bottom corner, reasonably isolated, double glass on one side, no indirect heat from neighbours because that apartment is empty) the past half year. It certainly has been the mildest winter in human recollection here. Positive: I'll probably get returned a shit-load of money on my energy bill advances this year. There has been no snow to mention this year. In the northern part there has been one frosty period of a week or so and some nice snow... but not in the center and bottom 2/3ds of our country.
Spring flowers are in full bloom, bees are collecting honey, trees are budding... at the end of February/start of March... it's all quite strange...
A few decades ago we would have been able to ice-skate on natural ice for several weeks or even months each year... Marathons and '11 cities' full day races on frozen canals and rivers. One year even the Rhine (the largest river in the northwestern part of the European continent) froze over. In the last couple of years the number of days of skate-able ice may have been a few weeks, at the most. And this year it was only a few hours. So there were national championships ice skating on natural ice this year... the one day it was possible to skate on a thoroughly nurtured 'natural' ice track somewhere in the north-eastern part of our country...
Here in Phoenix we hit 90 degrees on Feb. 17th this year, which is the earliest 90-degree day on record (since 1895, at least). The average for that day is 71, so we're a bit above average. Last weekend things cooled off a little bit (i.e. approached the average) but the forecast shows that we're back into the high 80s approaching 90 again this week. Last year the first 90-degree day didn't happen until March 16, so we're about a month early. All of our reptiles and bugs are waking up early this year.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Speaking as someone who's live in New England for almost 60 years now, for most of my life there was one regular pattern you could count on each winter: bitter, very dry cold would settle in in late December, followed by a slight rise in temperature in early February that would bring the first real snow of the season. The snow would get heavier and wetter as winter drew to a close.
You need two things for snow: sub-freezing temperatures AND water in the air. The 5F - 20F temperatures we had in January were plenty cold enough for snow, but the air was bone dry. The January skies were a deep, startling blue, often without a single wisp of cloud to be seen. The lack of water was also a contributor to the cold. Days with snow are almost always warmer because the clouds trap heat that would radiate into space. It's desert nights out west where the temperatures plunge fifty degrees after sundown.
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That paper deals only with temperatures between 1958 and 1977, specifically a brief dip in 1960-1965 (and caused primarily by the Mount Agung volcanic eruption). Holding that up as "contradicting" the 150 year trend of global warming is ludicrous, and a prime example of cherry-picking.
Also describing it as a "global cooling scare" is far overstating the case. The paper merely notes the cooling of the time as a datapoint of interest. Perhaps you're confusing it with sensationalist media reports?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Obligatory XKCD cite: https://xkcd.com/1321/
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
is in a period of "sleeping" don't look for patterns to change. I'm a ham radio operator, and a bunch of us get together once a week for lunch and we can't remember the bands being this dead in a long time. No sunspots to think of that have been releasing CME's means our Earth hasn't been hit with a lot of heavy X or M class flares to "juice" up the upper atmosphere that we use to bounce signals off of. The visible solar disk right now is only tracking 4 spots, none of which are that big (well, the spots are bigger than Jupiter, but in relation to the sun, they are tiny), and they have mostly been pretty stable. There have been times this winter that the visible solar disk has been absent of any sun spots. When the sun "cools down", less solar radiation directed to the earth, causes the winds, ocean etc to change. Once it heats back up, it will change again. I remember several times in the 60's and early 70's, one or two winters, you couldn't keep the snow off the streets, then you'd have a couple where my dad could play golf in the winter, each weekend. I also remember when the "man made global warming" scare started in the 90's, when the glaciers in the Nordic area started melting, someone discovered a abandoned silver mine. Left behind were traces of "civilization". They dated it back to around the 14th-15th century I think. Regardless, it shows that many hundreds of years ago, long before the industrial revolution, that some say was the start of man destroying the planet, it was WARMER then, than now in that region. That alone would totally dispel the myth that man is causing man made global warming (not renamed climate change). The Earth warms, the Earth cools, it's called a cycle. "Man made" climate change is some what of a "religion" to those that want to control mankind, thinking that if enough uneducated people will believe the myth of man made global warming from their "religious" leaders, they will be able to have their utopian control over the planet.
The Polar Vortex was a local phenomenon, and while the Lower 48 was freezing its nuts off, Alaska was 18 degrees C warmer than usual.
You're confusing local weather events with the global temperature record. I wouldn't go yelling about bad science if I were you...
Earth's climate has never been particularly stable
The stability of the last 10,000 years birthed civilization : http://www.skepticalscience.co...