## North American snow models miss the mark – observed trend opposite of the predictions Posted on February 19, 2010 by Anthony Watts 

### While some other bloggers and journalists insist th at recent winter snows are proof of global warming effects, they miss the fact that models have been predicting less snow in the norther hemisphere. See this 2005 pee r reviewed paper: Frei, A. and G. Gong, 2005. Decadal to Century Scal e Trends in North American Snow Extent in Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Cir culation Models. Geophysical Research Letters, 32:L18502, doi: 10.1029/2005GL023394
. It says exactly the opposite of what some are sayin g now. – Anthony

===================================== Guest post by Steven Goddard A 2005 Columbia University study titled “WILL CLIMATE CHANGE AFFECT SNOW COVER OVER NORTH AMERICA?” ran nine climate models used by the IPCC, and all nine predicted that North American winter snow cover would decline significantly, starting in abou t 1990. In this study, current and future decadal trends in winter North American SCE (NA-SCE) are investigated, using nine general circulation models (GCMs) of the global atmosphere-ocean system participating in the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC-AR4)... all nine models exhibit a clear and statistically s ignificant decreasing trend in 21st century NASCE

Some of the models predicted a significant decline in winter snow cover between 1990 and 2010. Watts Up With That? 

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### Climate Model predictions of Snow Cover Decline

As we know, winter snow cover has actually increase d about 5% since it bottomed in 1989, and is now close to a record maximum
.

Below is another interesting graph. It shows the n umber of top 100 snow extent weeks by decade. I to ok the top 100 weekly snow extents (out of 2227) from the Rutger s record and sorted them by decade. The past decad e has been at least as snowy as the 1970s.

The past decade has had the most weeks in the top 1 00 since 1966. 

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### NASA Earth Observatory Images

Above are images from NASA showing snow extent from 2001 to 2004. Below is an image from 2010, showin g snow cover in all 48 states.

NOAA Image - February 12, 2010

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- mark/IT Capacity Planning

Free paper on IT Capacity Planning- how to Do More with Less www.teamquest.com 

### UPDATE: Here is a new graph of north American winter trend produced by Steve at the request of commenters:

So far, the climate models have the wrong polarity on their predictions of winter snow cover changes.
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### 216 Responses to North American snow models miss the mark – observed trend opposite of the predictions James Crisp says: February 19, 2010 at 7:36 am Is that snow in Mexico? I’m no expert but I’m guess ing that is quite rare?

Robert Wille says: February 19, 2010 at 7:38 am It’s good to see Steven posting again. I missed his posts while he was gone.

adrian smits says: February 19, 2010 at 7:41 am There is the most powerful repudiation of agw. You can actually see how cold it is getting!

Lazarus Long says: 

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- mark/February 19, 2010 at 7:42 am So has anyone ever taken historic climate data, plu gged it into these “models”, and compared them to, you know, reality?

DeWitt Payne says: February 19, 2010 at 7:44 am Once again it is shown that climate models have no skill at regional forecasting. This sort of thing i sn’t science, it’s pure speculation. Reputable journals should stop publish ing these papers.

Henry chance says: February 19, 2010 at 7:44 am I have several conclusions when models are wrong. T hey in this case seem to leave out variables and ma ke certain assumptions. It is a shame they are using models an d ignoring actual temperatures and precipitation. Test the models and find they are wrong, then we do n’t accept their conclusions.

Trey says: February 19, 2010 at 7:46 am Will they revisit the data and post the new finding s? Unlikely. Has anybody asked the authors, “what s ay you?”

hippie longstocking says: February 19, 2010 at 7:46 am I am shocked and bewildered! Computer models create d to generate a specific output using questionable logic and programming didn’t match reality? I am quite surpri sed. It truly is worse than we thought...

TerryBixler says: February 19, 2010 at 7:46 am Fortunately the ink was dry and the predictions wer e recorded. The words that the snow was exactly as ‘we’ said turn out to be the current convenient advantage of hindsight mi xed with the hope of short memory of the public. Thank you Steven Goddard for the clear as always po st.

kwik says: February 19, 2010 at 7:52 am A proof that they change what they say along the wa y. It should be more, it shold be less.

P Gosselin says: 

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- mark/February 19, 2010 at 7:52 am Oh another hockey stick that proves AGW! Don’t you know? More snow means it’s getting warmer . Yes snow way down south in Florida and Houston me ans – WARMER!

Charles. U. Farley says: February 19, 2010 at 7:56 am Just another case of being wrong on so many of thei r “predictions”. Maybe theyd benefit from a gypsy costume and a crys tal ball to aid them? Cross my palm with carbon....

Phillip Bratby says: February 19, 2010 at 7:56 am It’s what you expect when your models have an in-bu ilt bias and no validation.

P Gosselin says: February 19, 2010 at 7:56 am All that extra mointure going up there in the air l ike that, and spillin into Florida, Houston, Rome a nd hell even Baghdad. Damn it must be getting really hot out there! So Pu t on your aluminium foil suits ...or frrrrrrryyyyyyyy in the hot sizzling snnnnnnooo ooowwwww...

kenboldt says: February 19, 2010 at 7:57 am O/T but I have noticed in the IJIS site with sea ic e extent, that there has been a significant jump up ward over the past couple weeks. Shockingly, there has been no press announce ments about it by the warmists, even though, when i t was below 2007 levels in January, they were all over it.

Jim F says: February 19, 2010 at 8:01 am How to back up your argument. This site is fun: “...A complete list of things caused by global warmin g....” http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

Gabriel says: February 19, 2010 at 8:02 am 

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- mark/Hmm... I find it interesting... those pushing the AGW a genda claim that the extra snow is an expected outc ome supporting AGW due to increased water vapour in the air. Howev er, this study clearly shows that the AGW predictio ns for the US was clearly LESS snow. So far, then, reality is falsify ing the predictions, meaning the models have clear problems. If an AGW supporter would still like to claim that the extra winter snow is an expected outcome, can they please point to scientific studies showing that was clearly the expectation fo r the US? You cannot predict one thing based on you r AGW science, then when the outcome is the opposite, then claim that * that* scenario is also consistent. Such makes AGW u nfalsifiable and hence unscientific.

P Gosselin says: February 19, 2010 at 8:02 am Seriously, like in my last posts, it looks like Arc tic sea ice is going to hit the 14M mark. I didn’t expect it this year. Oh! but it’s paper thin – don’t you know! The last polar bear is likely gonna drown this summer! Sorry, but I just watched 3 min of that nutjob Rahm storf, and this is what happens when you do. The gu y just has a way of spreading his madness.

Bob Tatz says: February 19, 2010 at 8:02 am Do you know if there are any plots from the data on : http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/nsa/ that show the daily “Area Covered By Snow” data by year? The coverage for US seems to be running 10-15% high er consistently this year (which agrees with your p ost). The data is accessible... I just don’t want to reinvent the wheel if a plot is available. Thanks, Bob

John R. Judge says: February 19, 2010 at 8:05 am When the pundits and politicians say that the curre nt snow storms are not “proof”, they are correct. W hen they say that they are not “evidence”, as many of them do, they are bl owing smoke. Rising graphs may have ups and downs. They don’t have 100+ year records.

exNOAAman says: February 19, 2010 at 8:07 am Re: the last map/image... Snowcover on all 48 states, but also; All of Canada , except one tiny green spot at Vancouver. (Which i s, of course, normal for them). Silly, I know, but I can’t resist poking fun at the IOC and their ilk. 

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- mark/ShrNfr says: February 19, 2010 at 8:18 am Yeah, but the IPCC has always been a snow job.

Rob says: February 19, 2010 at 8:22 am You`re using ths data upside down.

Oliver K. Manuel says: February 19, 2010 at 8:23 am Thanks, Steven Goddard, for keeping the spotlight o f public attention focused on errors in the compute r models that were predicting less snow. Decades of filth and abuse of science by the Nation al Academy of Sciences and all the research agencie s whose budgets require NAS review (NASA, DOE, NOAA, etc) are conce aled beneath the climategate iceberg, so you can ex pect negative comments from those with a vested interest in the f low of federal reserch funds. Hang in there Steve! Oliver K. Manuel Emeritus Professor of Nuclear & Space Sciences Former NASA PI for Apollo

William Sears says: February 19, 2010 at 8:27 am It was Langmuir who said that it is a characteristi c of pathological science to give ad hoc answers, i nvented on the spur of the moment, to any and all criticisms. See Number Watch for a listing of all Langmuir’s conclusions.

Marcus says: February 19, 2010 at 8:31 am surprise, surprise

Trevor says: February 19, 2010 at 8:34 am If the alarmists can come up with a theory, one tha t makes sense, that says global warming SHOULD resu lt in more snow cover, that’s fine. But here’s my problem. If you c an come up with a theory that says global warming s hould result in MORE snow cover (as they now have) AND a theory that say s that global warming should result in LESS snow co ver (which they have in the past), then whatever happens to snow co ver, it can be blamed on global warming. A similar paradox exists for hurricanes (one theory says that global warming sho uld result in more and more severe hurricanes, and another says global 

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- mark/warming (at least that of the anthropogenic persuas ion) should result in less and less severe hurrican es) and Antarctic ice cover. And I’m sure, for other climate variables, i f the facts contradicted what the AGW theory says, they could just come up with another theory to explain why the data says so mething different from what the previous theory sai d, but still be consistent with the notion of AGW. The problem here is, no matter what happens with sn ow, ice cover, glaciers, rainfall, hurricanes, air temperatures, ocean currents, ocean temperatures, sea levels, and anyth ing else that has anything to do with climate, SOME BODY is going to come up with a theory, one that makes sense on some level, to explain how it is caused by anthropogeni c global warming. And so, no matter what happens, AGW can NEVER be di sproven, unless, maybe, everything stayed exactly t he same for about 30 years straight. Of course, that will never happen, but even if it did, I’m sure some alarmist would come up with a theory about how a complete lack of climate change was evidence of climate change. So, I guess what I’m saying is, I challenge the glo bal warming alarmists to specify any and all circum stances, with respect to levels and/or changes in any set of climate variabl es, over any time span, that they would accept as e vidence that either a) global warming is not occurring, or b) global warmi ng is not caused by mankind. If they cannot specify any such set of circumstances, then we know that it is impossible t o ever change their minds, and we can restrict this discussion to one of REAL science.

JohnH says: February 19, 2010 at 8:35 am In 2002 a MET office spokeman predicted UK children would in future see snow as a once a lifetime even t. Hence 2009 and 2010 UK major snowfalls have had the right effect on AGW beliefs ;) . And the next lot is due to fall Sunday.

Mr B says: February 19, 2010 at 8:36 am The 1970 data is interesting in comparison to 2000; considering that 1970 was the great global cooling scare. I wonder if the sky was falling, media wise, with each snow storm b ack then?

marchesarosa says: February 19, 2010 at 8:37 am I believed you the first time, Steve!

Mike86 says: February 19, 2010 at 8:38 am Some of IA is scheduled to get up to 4′′ of addition al warming today and over the weekend. This season’ s been fun, setting the historic snow coverage record in IA and all, but I think we’re all getting a little tired of it.

sdcougar says: February 19, 2010 at 8:39 am 

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- mark/I wish readers here would forward stories like this to PBS and ask WHY the NEWSHOUR is so one-sided on AGW. The PBS Ombudsman is here: http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/feedback.html In the run-up to Copenhagen, the PBS NewsHour state d “”this huge team of scientists from all over the globe issued these unanimous warnings about the really extreme danger to the planet.”

bil says: February 19, 2010 at 8:40 am And I look out of my office window in rural Hampshi re and see snow and hail failing from the sky. So g lad it is a thing of the past.

Physics Major says: February 19, 2010 at 8:45 am So anyone who claims that increased snow extent is consistent with CO2 induced global warming is what? A liar maybe?

JonesII says: February 19, 2010 at 8:45 am Modelling is pseudo-scientists child games. Not mat ured men and women replace thinking and empirical t esting by playing, THIS IS PLAYING, it is like day-dreaming, it ́s onani stic. It reveals an astounding decline in the ameri can culture. This is your private and yours only apocalypse, your long a waited armageddon. But you can reborn out from the ashes like a phoenix, you can remake yourselves by radically pul ling out all those evil weeds growing everywhere in your society.

Michael Jankowski says: February 19, 2010 at 8:46 am Dewitt, Gavin readily admits “regional” forecasting has lit tle skill...but it is supposed to have skill at conti nental scales and higher. This is “continental.” ;)

Juraj V. says: February 19, 2010 at 8:53 am Excellent stuff. Warmists sometimes try to say that “models actually expected Antarctic ice to grow”, while looking into IPCC, exact opposite is found.

John F. Hultquist says: February 19, 2010 at 8:53 am 

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- mark/The underlying assumption of the models would seem to be an inverse relationship between ppm CO2 and s now cover. Your first chart’s orange line, if inverted, would seem to track the expected rise in concentration of this naughty gas in the atmosphere. Because I think this assumption is wron g I am not surprised that the models are out of wha ck. Areas that are snow covered or very cold are not ex periencing plant growth. No plant growth means a la ck of photosynthesis and the processing of carbon dioxide. Earlier sprin gs should lead to reduction of atmospheric carbon d ioxide and later springs should lead to increases from home heating and industrial processes. It seems to me the direct ion of causation is more direct in this sense than in the struggle to s how CO2 impacts the onset of spring.

Jim Steele says: February 19, 2010 at 8:54 am This meme that our models predicted more snowfall i s such BS spin. I also looked at a few articles to see published predictions. In a Nature 2005 review paper in the a bstract they state “In a warmer world, less winter precipitation falls as snow and the melting of winter snow occurs earl ier in spring” http://meteora.ucsd.edu/cap/pdffiles/barnett_warmsn ow.pdf The bulk of the paper is creating alarm about how t he lack of snowfall reduces water supply. These guy s are like day-traders just riding whatever trend is there, and then blami ng it on CO2. THey have a model to cover all things . Its Snake oil. Pathetic science.

Chad Woodburn says: February 19, 2010 at 9:01 am If increases in snow can serve as evidence and proo f for AGW, then so can increases in the extent of g laciers (since the snow is the major source of glacial volume). That way, w hether the glaciers grow or shrink, AGW alarmists c an use them as proof of global warming. This is why we must get the alarmists to explicitly state the conditions under which their theory can be falsified. And if they were doing real science, they would volunteer and i nclude those conditions in their own studies. I say “real science” because real science involves testing hypotheses, and the t ests by definition must differentiate the significa nce of the potential outcomes.

Frank K. says: February 19, 2010 at 9:03 am Here’s a link to the original paper: http://www.geo.hunter.cuny.edu/people/fac/frei/frei _gong_2005_grl.pdf The money quote (please see Fig. 1 in the paper): “Mean simulated NA-SCE values range between 0.55 and 0.95, compared to observed values of ~0.75 (for perspective, Greenland represents ~0.10 of Nor th America) (Figure 1). Only two models have mean valu es within ±0.05 of observed values; only two models ov erestimate NA-SCE; and all other models underestimate NASCE. 

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- mark/Neither model that overestimates NA-SCE accounts for fractional snow coverage in grid boxes. There i s no apparent relationship between model spatial resolut ion and mean NA-SCE (not shown).” “Figure 1 indicates that models disagree with each other, and with observations, on the timing of deca dal scale NA-SCE variations. None of the model simulations capture the observed temporal pattern or anything similar . While some models at least approximately capture the magn itude of decadal scale variations in NA-SCE, others show little or no decadal scale variability.” heh.

rich n says: February 19, 2010 at 9:03 am If we get anymore global warming we’ll end up with a snowball Earth. Save the whales!

B. Smith says: February 19, 2010 at 9:05 am Must be all the dirty coal particulates and polluta nts reflecting energy back into space! Thank the Almighty for all those sooty coal-burning Indian and Chinese industries! Ever since I saw the NASA sat pics clearly showing heavy banding of CO2 (especially in the northern he misphere) around the globe, as opposed to a blanket layering as I unders tood was being claimed, I’ve wondered of the implic ations. I am not an atmospheric scientist so forgive me if the followin g questions seem too basic. 1) Do the various climate models use an evenly-dist ributed blanket of CO2 for their calculations, or d o at least some of them use the uneven concentrations clearly shown by the sat photos? 2) What are the PPM’s of the areas of concentration as opposed to areas that are clearly devoid of exc ess CO2? It defies logic to accept that the concentrated bands of CO2 would have the same parts per million of CO2 as areas tha t show no concentration of CO2. 3) Intuitively, these CO2 concentrations could have some effect on weather patterns in those areas of concentration. These bands of concentrated CO2 should also positively af fect the land-based flora of the massed regions as it’s “settled science” that plants love CO2. Am I off on my thinking here? Any help from the cognoscenti is truly appreciated!

Doug says: February 19, 2010 at 9:07 am James Crisp (07:36:51) :

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- mark/I would be rare in the lowlands, but there are moun tains down there, even some glaciers. I’m sure the glaciers will be gone bt 2035.

Jeff in Virginia Beach says: February 19, 2010 at 9:09 am Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I remember it they were not only predicting less snow due to AGW, they were counting on that in the models as one of the drivers for the hi gh ends of their temperature predictions for the ye ar 2100. Less snow = lower albedo = faster warming making ev en less snow and melting poles, which makes for eve n faster warminga vicious circle or, if you prefer, a snowball effe ct. So, at what point does the failed prediction of dim inishing snow coverage alter the predicted temp ran ge for the year 2100?

Stephan says: February 19, 2010 at 9:12 am This is EXACTLY the kind of argument that is needed and that is why all the old graphs etc must be sav ed so there is no doubt about it. This posting would be a tremendous embarrassment to those who said just last week that this recent USA and Europe and Asia etc.. snow was proof of global warm ing. They said EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE.

John Diffenthal says: February 19, 2010 at 9:14 am The reality is that if anyone normal had build a mo del or series of models for a client organisation w hich was so dismal in its forecast accuracy, the client (and with good reason ) would probably ask for its money back. Maybe the way to attack this is through a taxpayers alliance!

joe says: February 19, 2010 at 9:16 am But Global Warming predicts everything. How dare yo u question God sir, err I mean the holy Global Warm ing theory!

Predicador says: February 19, 2010 at 9:17 am James Crisp (07:36:51) : Is that snow in Mexico? I’m no expert but I’m guess ing that is quite rare? In the mountains, that’s normal. There’s even one s mall ski resort in Mexico – Monterreal
. Further south, in the mountains of Equador, one (or rather, two) can even have a snowball fight over t he equator. “The snows of Kilimanjaro” also are located just so me 330 km from the equator. 

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- mark/Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 9:19 am The graph in the article shows winter snow extent f or the entire Northern Hemisphere. Here is one show ing North America only, same upwards trend – contrary to the climate models. https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg? key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHVPSU5kRzhSSW5UUW5iR2lMN3JLMXc&oi d=1&v=1266599839925

Layne Blanchard says: February 19, 2010 at 9:20 am After a new temp history is constructed from the ef forts at surfacestations.org and the E M Smith anal ysis, will we see we’re right where we were in 1977 ? ...why UAH doesn’t reflect this I couldn’t say. I exp ected a calibration issue until Roy’s last post.

Ecotretas says: February 19, 2010 at 9:21 am Some interesting historical documents are available here: http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim_v1/robinson_pu bs/refereed/Frei_Robinson_and_Hughes_1999.pdf http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim_v1/robinson_pu bs/refereed/Hughes_Frei_and_Robinson_1996.pdf A similar document for Frei and Gong is available a t http://www.easternsnow.org/proceedings/2006/frei_et _al_2.pdf Ecotretas

Alan the Brit says: February 19, 2010 at 9:23 am Is there not a danger in the programming of these m odels? The danger being that you observe what is pe rceived as a trend in reality, put it into the puter, & out pops a trend like the one apparently observed, then claim that t he model are validated? Perhaps it’s just me then.

Ahab says: February 19, 2010 at 9:25 am Well done. The authors of the paper were aware that their model do not work well. Form the abstract: “20th century simulations are poorly correlated wit h observations” An easy win.

RockyRoad says: February 19, 2010 at 9:28 am You’re saying “the climate models have the wrong po larity on their predictions of winter snow cover ch anges”?? 

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- mark/That’s easy to fix: Just reverse polarity on the ba tteries and everything will be just fine. Duh.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 9:29 am I expecting Tamino to produce some statistical magi c, showing that the 20 year upwards trend and recor d maximum correlate well with the models. “Lies, damn lies, and statistics” - Mark Twain

Jim, too. says: February 19, 2010 at 9:32 am I don’t know if the ice extent has so much taken an upward jaunt that interests me, as much as the slo pe since the first of the year has not begun to roll over yet. Another two we eks of average cold Arctic temps (quite possible du e to the high snow extent?) and the ice extent could be be the second highest since 2003. Add that to the information pos ted earlier that the multi-year ice is gaining strongly and we could hav e some decent, persistent summer ice cover.

Smokey says: February 19, 2010 at 9:33 am William Sears (08:27:34) : “It was Langmuir who said that it is a characterist ic of pathological science to give ad hoc answers, invented on the spur of the moment, to any and all criticisms.” Yes, that is a clear characteristic of catastrophic AGW promoters. More on Langmuir: Symptoms of Pathological Science: 1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity , and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independen t of the intensity of the cause. 2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability; or, many measurement s are necessary because of the very low statistical signi ficance of the results. 3. Claims of great accuracy. 4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience. 5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment. 6. Ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somew here near 50% and then falls gradually to oblivion. [ source ] We can see these symptoms of pathological science t hroughout the "science" of AGW — which is not scien ce at all, since it fails the scientific method. We are at #5 – 6 now. 

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- mark/Catastrophic AGW is in reality a rent-seeking mecha nism being promoted by various entities, with the u ltimate goal of separating enormous amounts of money from taxpayers , and to aggregate national political power to gove rnment, particularly to the UN. No politician or political movement could hope to r eap the financial benefits of the "carbon" scare by appealing to the electorate for such large tax increases in a straig htforward manner, and in general people do not trus t the opaque, unaccountable, and completely corrupt UN to be a wo rld government; something it was never intended to be. Therefore, various entities have invented the myth that a tiny trace gas will likely destroy the world through melting ice caps, rapidly rising sea levels, and other disasters thou ght up on the spur of the moment [while reading Lan gmuir's list, keep in mind the CO2 scare]. It is a disgrace that some scientists and universit ies have sold out their integrity for grant money a nd status. They must know that their self-serving behavior would ultimately r esult in a literal army of new government bureaucra ts, and the forfeiting of national sovereignty to an international criminal b ody whose own blue helmeted soldiers rape and pilla ge, without repercussions, in areas they were sent to stop rape and pillage, and that Sec-Gen Kofi Annan and hundr eds of UN functionaries have accepted vouchers redeemable for many millions of barrels of oil from Saddam Hussei n in the Oil-ForFood scam. [MEMRI had a lengthy list of individual oil voucher recipients, but it has since been taken down.] And the repeatedly proposed implementation of the U N's "World Tax" of .7% of GDP, to be paid into the unaccountable and unauditable UN [a tax which would cost U.S. taxpaye rs alone over $100 billion a year in onerous new ta xes, and which would quicky ratchet up from the original .7%] has been p romoted for many years by Ban Ki Moon's predecessor , Kofi Annan. Moon now proposes the same world tax, but now it would o stensibly be for mitigation of "climate change." In reality, it is loot. Loot which would only be confiscated from the industrial ized G-8 countries, passed through the opaque UN, a nd what remained would be doled out to developing countries – which include China, Russia, and the rest. And it is all planned as a back door tax, with no consent of the citizens to be allowed, similar to the EU Referendum. The free world owes an enormous debt of gratitude t o whoever leaked the Climategate emails prior to CO P-15. That action temporarily stalled the move toward the confiscatio n of much of the wealth and freedom of the West. But the war to make the world's citizens serfs of t he UN and subject to the World Court is far from ov er. And those Quisling scientists like Michael Mann and the rest of the AG W promoters, who have tried to sell us out for thei r own personal aggrandizement, must be held to account for attempt ing to sell out their own country for money and sta tus.

harrywr2 says: February 19, 2010 at 9:33 am Physics Major (08:45:16) : “So anyone who claims that increased snow extent is consistent with CO2 induced global warming is what ?” One needs two things for snow, moist air and temper atures below 32F. Warmer oceans provide moist air. Score 1 for Global Warming Crowd. It would appear that more moist air is creating mor e snow, which has a cooling effect. Score 1 for the skeptics side. The big disagreements in the ‘Climate Debate’ have been over how nature will react to compensate. I.E. WIth more CO2 emissions will trees grow faster ? Will we get more or less snow, which will have a cooling or heating effect. What happens to clouds? 

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- mark/The doomsdayer’s all assume natures reactions will compound the problem. The Skeptics say natures reac tions will mitigate the problem.

DR says: February 19, 2010 at 9:35 am All that is needed is to find a climate model predi cting more snow. Problem solved.

Jimbo says: February 19, 2010 at 9:36 am Why doesn’t a journalist ask them what they think h as caused the discrepancy between the models and ob servations? The Hockey Team and the other Climate Bandits must sooner or later realise that AGW is close to being falsified if not already.

Hank Hancock says: February 19, 2010 at 9:39 am Believers have recently been spouting the position that AGW theory predicts more snow as the earth war ms. That was curious to me because before we got more snow, the mantra was AGW would bring snowless winters. Steven Goddard’s presentation underscores several things I’ve been n oticing lately: 1) The AGW models predict less snow. Believers pred ict more snow because that’s what is observed. 2) The believers, in total ignorance of their own t heories, jump on any weather event, human tragedy, or animal story, irrespective of what it is, and say the models pred icted it, it is further proof of global warming, an d its occurrence is unprecedented. 3) Believers follow a double standard. They demand peer reviewed science from skeptics, summarily reje cting anything that isn’t peer reviewed and published. They in turn use journalist commentaries, tour guide eye witness ac counting, and pamphlets from advocacy groups in AR4 as proof and evidence of the validity of of their position that global warming is real and it is occurring today. 4) The demarcation between weather and climate is v ery much dependent on one question. Can the event i n any way be twisted to support the alarmist position? If the an swer is yes, it is climate. If no, it is weather. Thank you Steven Goddard for yet another revealing post.

Person of Choler says: February 19, 2010 at 9:41 am Looking at the Northern Hemisphere graph above, one wonders how the modelers will hide the incline.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 9:42 am 

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- mark/harrywr2, Don’t confuse snow depth with snow extent. More moi sture in the air might produce heavier snow in Gree nland, but certainly not Florida.

P Gosselin says: February 19, 2010 at 9:48 am Yeah, but the data is raw, and thus needs to be adj usted.

Veronica says: February 19, 2010 at 9:52 am Hank Hancock. This is how religion works, by re-int erpreting the situation to suit one’s model of the world e.g. My daughter has cancer – pray for her and God will heal her. God did not heal her – we don’t have enough faith. My daughter is worse – God is testing those he love s. My daughter died – God wants her to grace heaven. God is good and has taught us so much through suffe ring. Anything but change your view on whether God exists
.

Daniel says: February 19, 2010 at 9:54 am Watts Up With That? Stockholm has never been so col d since 1829!!!! That means Global Warming isn’t it? ;)

richard says: February 19, 2010 at 9:54 am It’s great to see that the sceptic side are startin g to run their own models, based on the data that t he scientists went to great lengths not to disclose. I suspect it’s this replication of their results (a nd discrepancy with real-world observations) that t hey really wanted to avoid.

JonesII says: February 19, 2010 at 9:57 am Just look at this: http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html A ring of warm waters north of the equator, from th e pacific to the atlantic, reaching north africa...an d, as earth rotates from west to east, all that atlantic humidity will feed US snow. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow... 

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- mark/Leif Svalgaard says: February 19, 2010 at 9:58 am There is little doubt that the models got it wrong [but who around here doubted that anyway :-) ]. Tha t said, we have to also be aware of not overstating [or conveniently hiding things] our case. Take for example Steve’s plot sh owing ‘top 100...’: [I hope it shows, otherwise look above] It shows that the 1960s and the 1990s were not very snowy. For the 1960s, that can be explained by Ste ve’s failure to multiply the count by ~2.5 [to account for the data only sta rting late 1966]. The difference between 1990s and 2000s is due to the reliance on ‘extreme cases’. If one sticks to the W inter Averages [as Steve has argued are the best - show falls in the winter, right?], the average winter snow cover per decade l ooks quite different from Steve’s ‘top-100′ chart: or http://www.leif.org/research/Average-Winter-Snow-NH .png if image not showing. I show two columns for each decade, depending on if a decade is from xxx0 through xxx9 or from xxx1 th rough xxz0 [also showing how sensitive this is to when things are pi cked]. So, there are great opportunities for careful selec tions to emphasize [or deemphasize as one wants] th ings.

Murray Carpenter says: February 19, 2010 at 9:59 am After a slow start it looks like N/H sea ice extent is putting in something of a sprint at the end. http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_ima ges/N_stddev_timeseries.png

Leif Svalgaard says: February 19, 2010 at 10:01 am Question: Willis, how did you manage to include an image in y our comment?

JonesII says: February 19, 2010 at 10:06 am Veronica (09:52:57) :Every prayer can be summirized as follows: Please God, make 2+2 not being equal to 4 ...and God can’t make it because it would destroy its creation.

Antonio San says: February 19, 2010 at 10:08 am [snip - while I often disagree with Tamino, I won't have you say such disparaging things - Anthony]

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 10:12 am “While some other bloggers and journalists insist t hat recent winter snows are proof of global warming effects,” 

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- mark/It’d be nice to have a link for that straw man. I t hink most people would say that they are not incons istent with global warming, not that they are proof of global warming. “they miss the fact that models have been predictin g less snow in the norther hemisphere.” Over the course of the 21st century. Maybe. Look at the caveats from the paper cited: “Significant between-model variability is found, wi th most models underestimating mean NA-SCE. 20th ce ntury simulations are poorly correlated with observations, and, while individual ensemble members capture the magnitude of decadal scale variability, the variability of the signal is dampe ned in the ensemble mean, indicating that decadal-s cale NA-SCE variability is associated predominantly with internal model variab ility rather than external forcing.” – Frei, A., and G. Gong (2005), Decadal to century scale trends in North American snow extent in coupl ed atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, Geophys. Res. Lett., 32 , L18502, doi:10.1029/2005GL023394. They aren’t exactly overflowing with confidence abo ut he predictive power of their models for snow, ar e they? Also note the title, “Decadal to century scale trends.” Ultimatel y they say: “Two 21st century emission scenarios with realistic (moderate or significant) greenhouse gas emission rates produce decreasing NA-SCE trends, while one unrealistic sce nario with fixed concentrations produces little or no NA-SCE trend. These results suggest that snow cover may be a sens itive indicator of climate change, and that North A merican snow extent will probably decrease in response to greenhouse ga s emissions, although the magnitude of the response may be nonlinear.” So, at some point in the 21st century you can expec t winter snow extent to decrease, as opposed to hav e no significant trend, as now. Current conditions seem to be anticipated well by o ne of the paper which cites the paper above: “The sensitivity analysis suggested a potentially c omplex elevation response of SCD and SWEmax to incr easing temperature and precipitation in mountain regions as a result o f nonlinear interactions between the duration of th e snow season and snow accumulation rates.” ” These findings were echoed by the climate models that showed earlier and more widespread decreases i n SCD than annual maximum snow water equivalent (SWEmax)” – Brown, Ross D., and Philip W. Mote (2009), The Re sponse of Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover to a Chang ing Climate*, J Clim, 22(8), 2124. We are, of course, seeing significant decreases in SCD with no significant change in SWEmax. So that p aper holds up quite well. Anyone know if one of these papers is more re presentative of the current state of the science?
REPLY: It’s not a strawman. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962 294,00.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/articl e/2010/01/28/AR2010012800041.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/earth/11c limate.html And I have a question. Since you are using a public email address of an educational institution, do th ey approve of your posting opinions here? See our policy page. – Antho ny

Steve Goddard says: 

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- mark/February 19, 2010 at 10:17 am Leif, Your graphs don’t change anything and you seem to h ave forgotten that there are several weeks left in 2010 which will probably score in the top 100. Why all the nitpicking? If you see something fundam entally wrong with the conclusions, fine. I’m not s eeing that in your posts.

Lazarus Long says: February 19, 2010 at 10:22 am “Save the whales!” Too late. I already have the whole set.

Johnc says: February 19, 2010 at 10:25 am 2 Questions 1) Why do you plot Dec-Feb when the model and paper only referred to January NA-SCE ? 2) Why does your plot start in 1989 when the Rutger s data goes back to 1967?

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 10:30 am Robert, The trend for winter snow in the Northern Hemispher e since 1999 is +220,000 km2/yr with rsq = 3.13 – c ulminating in the second greatest extent on record last week. Your claim that there is no 21st century trend is p atently absurd.

Mike McMillan says: February 19, 2010 at 10:31 am I’d guess that we have snow cover in all 50 states. Mauna Kea observatory is up at 4200 meters, so tha t should bring Hawaii in, too. The models don’t seem to catch the 30 year half cyc les of warming and cooling. Probably because the mo delers aren’t old enough to remember the last half cycle.

Steve Goddard says: 

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- mark/February 19, 2010 at 10:42 am Johnc, I’ve answered the same question about three dozen t imes now. 1989 was the year when the trend started upwards. Prior to that, snow extent was declining. It makes no sense to do a linear fit across two legs of a cyclical pa ttern. Want January? Even better. Trend = 102,000 km2/year rsq = 3.12 https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg? key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdHFzTFVnTlVrYnV0bEpxLWt5aXE2UEE&oi d=3&v=1266604809333

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 10:43 am johnc, Also the models forecast a decline starting about 2 0 years ago.

rbateman says: February 19, 2010 at 10:47 am John R. Judge (08:05:38) : When the pundits and politicians say that the curre nt snow storms are not “proof”, they are correct. W hen they say that they are not “evidence”, as many of them do, they a re blowing smoke. Rising graphs may have ups and do wns. They don’t have 100+ year records. I believe there are 100+ year records for individua l sites, but they are not in the form that is curre ntly being discussed. You will find historical records in places where ordina ry people kept track of 1st snow, last snow, last s now on ground, etc. The sad thing about the models is that they cannot account for increases, i.e. – they are uni-directio nal.

Leif Svalgaard says: February 19, 2010 at 10:51 am Steve Goddard (10:17:55) : Your graphs don’t change anything and you seem to h ave forgotten that there are several weeks left in 2010 which will probably score in the top 100. My graphs show how careful one has to be. You did n ot comment on the smallness of the 1960s on your gr aph. Did you multiply by 2.5 to compensate for the decade only h aving data a quarter of the decade? If not, your gr aph is sloppy work. The winter Dec-Feb 2010 does not have ‘several’ wee ks to go. The Rudgers data go though week 7 of 2010
.

L Nettles says: February 19, 2010 at 10:54 am In a frivolous note the 02/12/10 snow map, misses t he snow that covered South Carolina the afternoon a nd evening of 02/12/09. By midnight most of the coastal region ha d snow on the ground. 

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- mark/Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 11:00 am Leif, Do you have a fundamental objection to the conclusi ons? Your analysis is flawed. If the first week in March is in the top 100, it goes in the graph. The graph represents weeks – not months. Second, I included the entire Rutgers record in tha t graph. It would be sloppy to extrapolate data whi ch does not exist. And at no time did I make any inference comparing vs. the 1960s. The comparison is vs, the 1970s – which is a complete record.

B. Smith says: February 19, 2010 at 11:09 am Leif Svalgaard (10:51:17) : Steve Goddard (10:17:55) : Your graphs don’t change anything and you seem to h ave forgotten that there are several weeks left in 2010 which will probably score in the top 100. My graphs show how careful one has to be. You did n ot comment on the smallness of the 1960s on your gr aph. Did you multiply by 2.5 to compensate for the decade only h aving data a quarter of the decade? If not, your gr aph is sloppy work. The winter Dec-Feb 2010 does not have ’several’ wee ks to go. The Rudgers data go though week 7 of 2010
.

___________________________________________________ _______________ There are several weeks of winter left. Obviously, there will be no remaining Winter 2010 data, for Ru tgers or anyone else, to show until those weeks have passed into Spring. Unl ess of course, you use one of those vaunted models that predict weather and climate with such accuracy! :D

Corey says: February 19, 2010 at 11:18 am Frei, A. and G. Gong, 2005. Decadal to Century Scal e Trends in North American Snow Extent in Coupled A tmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models. Geophysical Research Le tters, 32:L18502, doi: 10.1029/2005GL023394 The full paper: http://www.geo.hunter.cuny.edu/people/fac/frei/frei _gong_2005_revised.pdf

Mike Edwards says: February 19, 2010 at 11:19 am Of course, more snow across the USA does not necess arily mean that the world as a whole is getting col der. Roy Spencer has an interesting global temperature p lot for January on his site here: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_ LT_2010_01_grid1.jpg and the message seems to be that northern mid latit udes have been cooler than usual this year while ot her places have been warmer – in some cases like Greenland and Northern Canada a LOT warmer (of course warmer still means t hose places are below freezing so no lack of snow there either). 

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- mark/Roy suggests that this pattern may be associated wi th the current El Nino.

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 11:20 am ” Steve Goddard (10:30:29) : Robert, The trend for winter snow in the Northern Hemispher e since 1999 is +220,000 km2/yr with rsq = 3.13 – c ulminating in the second greatest extent on record last week. Your claim that there is no 21st century trend is p atently absurd.” It’s your source, Mr. Goddard. I just went there an d looked at the snow figures you were citing. You are also misunderstanding the research if you t hink “change in the 21st” and “trend throughout the 21st century” mean the same thing. The climate is not changing linearl y. We can expect more change at the end than at the beginning. The models themselves are extremely limited, as the pap er acknowledges, which is why they confined themsel ves to talking to predicting the long-term trend (with many caveats.) Your position is analogous to a person who goes to an action movie after being told fifty people will be shot, and leaves after five minutes because no one has been shot yet. You are ignoring the significant decline in snow my almost every other measure (spring and summer exte nt, average extent, duration of snow cover) and are focused like a lase r beam on a non-significant trend. 1999 was the low est winter snow extent in the 15 years from 1985-1999. You’re cherry-picki ng your start date. An RSQ function is not a test o f statistical significance as far as I know (feel free to educate me). What’s the p-value for your supposed positive trend? @Anthony: My institution gives us an email for shar ed personal and professional use. I am not commenti ng on my institution’s time, or using their facilities, or i n consultation with them. To avoid confusion, I’ve switched to another e-mail account.

patrick healy says: February 19, 2010 at 11:23 am very interesting post. i suppose it is only a matter of time until some on e says ‘ ah yes – but snow is not climate’ slightly off topic but – does anyone know where i c ould get monthly rainfall levels for med. north afr ica area. it appears to have been raining for most of this ye ar in southern spain, portugal, algeria, morocco et c. in view of the recent IPCC scandal of ’50% decline in food production’ in this area due to projected A GW lack of rain, it would be of interest to see what is really happening.

Tenuc says: February 19, 2010 at 11:26 am Another great post Steve, although I believed you t he first time around. :-) 

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- mark/Your thread is all about proving that the GCM’s use d by the IPCC were completely wrong, and this you a chieved. I don’t think that statistics and trends are important. Just eye- balling the numbers shows that snow levels have ret urned to what we experienced 30-40years ago. This was not predicted by the GCM’s. Bearing in mind that the much of the alarmist twadd le from the IPCC relies on model predictions, what you’ve done by falsifying their prediction is a significant nail i n the CAGW coffin. Oliver K. Manuel (08:23:26) : “Decades of filth and abuse of science by the Natio nal Academy of Sciences and all the research agenci es whose budgets require NAS review (NASA, DOE, NOAA, etc) are conce aled beneath the climategate iceberg, so you can ex pect negative comments from those with a vested interest in the f low of federal reserch funds. This is what happens when government and big busine ss control the purse string. I’m afraid that this C AGW cancer has also spread to many other main-stream areas of science a nd currently little progress is being made. Science which has no useful predictive power is in need of new paradigms. OT – don’t know if you so this recent NASA article about the discovery of Fe in the suns corona seen d uring several eclipse?

Tenuc says: February 19, 2010 at 11:26 am Another great post Steve, although I believed you t he first time around. :-) Your thread is all about proving that the GCM’s use d by the IPCC were completely wrong, and this you a chieved. I don’t think that statistics and trends are important. Just eye- balling the numbers shows that snow levels have ret urned to what we experienced 30-40years ago. This was not predicted by the GCM’s. Bearing in mind that the much of the alarmist twadd le from the IPCC relies on model predictions, what you’ve done by falsifying their prediction is a significant nail i n the CAGW coffin. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2 010/aas-eclipse.html Oliver K. Manuel (08:23:26) : “Decades of filth and abuse of science by the Natio nal Academy of Sciences and all the research agenci es whose budgets require NAS review (NASA, DOE, NOAA, etc) are conce aled beneath the climategate iceberg, so you can ex pect negative comments from those with a vested interest in the f low of federal reserch funds. This is what happens when government and big busine ss control the purse string. I’m afraid that this C AGW cancer has also spread to many other main-stream areas of science a nd currently little progress is being made. Science which has no useful predictive power is in need of new paradigms. OT – don’t know if you so this recent NASA article about the discovery of Fe in the suns corona seen d uring several eclipse?

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 11:29 am @Anthony: “REPLY: It’s not a strawman. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1962 294,00.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/articl e/2010/01/28/AR2010012800041.html 

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- mark/http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/earth/11c limate.html ” I’m afraid none of those links feature ““bloggers a nd journalists [that] insist that recent winter sno ws are proof of global warming effects.” They include many statements to t he effect that winter is not climate, and several r eferences to the idea that more intense storms may be more common in a wa rming world. Nobody said the recent winter storms w ere proof of global warming. Still looks like a straw man to me.
REPLY : Still looks like you only see what you want to me . – A

marky48 says: February 19, 2010 at 11:30 am Tamino agrees. Obviously there’s a censorship issue here as well. The horror! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. I am the wizard who doesn’t have a college degree. “Ordinarily, with 22 data points you’d only need th e t-value to exceed plus or minus 2.09 to reach 95% confidence. But when cherry-picking the strongest trend from any point t o the end, for a set of 44 data points, the necessa ry t-value for 95% confidence is much larger, 3.75. Goddard’s value, 2 .91, isn’t even close, it doesn’t even reach signif icance at 90% confidence. Goddard’s trend is not statistically significant an d his emphasis on the recent extreme snow cover is nothing more than a weather report.”

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 11:31 am Mike Edwards, The plot is for the Northern Hemisphere, not the US A. http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/ dec-feb_snow_ext.png Robert, If you want statistics, how about doing a correlati on of GCM predictions vs. actual for the first deca de of the 21st century? The only reason I did rsq() was because other peopl e wanted it. The graph is clearly in disagreement with the GCM f orecasts. Some web sites love using statistics to o bfuscate. I have zero respect for those people.

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 11:32 am Should be “weather is not climate.” Although winter is not climate either, I suppose.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 11:37 am 

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- mark/Robert, The change is in the wrong direction. If snow exten t change accelerates as you predict, then we will b e in for another ice age.

Mark_K says: February 19, 2010 at 11:38 am Physics Major (08:45:16) : So anyone who claims that increased snow extent is consistent with CO2 induced global warming is what? A liar maybe? Keep in mind that in AGWSpeak, “consistent with” in this context means not utterly impossible. 25-Sigm a events would probably be considered consistent with AGW models.

rbateman says: February 19, 2010 at 11:40 am From accuweather.com: Jan 19th (today) “A train of storms is on the tracks in the Pacific Ocean, and it appears people in California and the Southwest will be waiting a long time for the caboose to pass. The onslaught will begin this weekend as two modera te storms roll ashore. In a singular sense, the storms will not have the p ower and the outcome of the storms in January. Howe ver, enough rain will fall to lead to urban flooding problems, mudslides and perhaps a few washouts. Enough snow is in store to again grace the Sierra a nd other ranges in the Southwest with heavy snow an d fresh powder.” The train is loaded, it’s on it’s way in. Anyone wa nt to wager what will happen when that train passes the Rockies?

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 11:40 am Robert, One more thing. I am not “ignoring” anything. It ha s scarcely been 24 hours since I discussed the decl ine in summer snow extent. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/18/why-is-winter -snow-extent-interesting/ Did you forget that already?

Leo G says: February 19, 2010 at 11:43 am Dr. Svalgaard, it appears to me that your graphs co uld/may represent natural climate. Bit more snow fo r awhile, bit less for awhile. Now if the next decade is a bit more, then can we say we have a natural trend? Or would this t ake about 10 more decades of data? If so, unless cloning gets perfect ed soon, I guess I’ll never know if this snow cover is natural or GW! 

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Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 11:50 am Leo G, Climate is absolutely not linear. If it were, earth would either be like Venus or Pluto. This obsession with trying to identify very long-te rm linear trends makes no sense when discussing cyc lical behaviour.

joe says: February 19, 2010 at 11:56 am “The climate is not changing linearly. We can expec t more change at the end than at the beginning. The models themselves are extremely limited, as the paper acknowledges, w hich is why they confined themselves to talking to predicting the longterm trend (with many caveats.)” Never heard that before(not), you can predict long term climate but not progression to the doomsday gl obal warming. Ok NOW I believe you. :p In other words, you have no clue. But your high sal ary depends on it, so here you are. So whats it like to be a mental brown noser, is the pay good?

Brian D Finch says: February 19, 2010 at 11:57 am So, in 2005 nine computer models predicted that sno w cover would decline significantly, starting in 19 90, FIFTEEN YEARS previous to the publication of the study. Why did t hey need computer models to predict for these fifte en years? Why did they not just use data from actual observation?

Spadecat says: February 19, 2010 at 12:01 pm By the divinations of Science, the eco-zealots port end apocalyptic catastrophe; by the divinations of Science, the skeptic assures all is copacetic. Surely the divination of entrails can do equally as well. For those who worship Science, these must be troubl ing times.

Leif Svalgaard says: February 19, 2010 at 12:03 pm Steve Goddard (11:00:12) : And at no time did I make any inference comparing v s. the 1960s. That is not the point. You show the 1960s, that is your explicit inference. For a correct analysis you have three choices: 1) not showing 1960s because they are partial only 2) showing 1960s, but in a different color [say] to denote that the data is partial 

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- mark/3) normalizing the 1960s by multiplying the count b y the total number of weeks in a decade divided by the number of weeks with data. Choice 3 is the usual choice [sometimes combined wi th 2]. I suggest that you simply do this and refres h the Figure in the post.

Leo G says: February 19, 2010 at 12:04 pm Interesting from Dr. Spencer’s map (Thanx Mike Edwa rds). Reading ancedotal evidence from the Kiwi’s and Auzz ies, it appears that on country is having a cool su mmer (N.Z.) whilst the other is having a hot summer. I find this interesti ng because they are not really “far” apart in miles . So obviously, there must be some other geographic reason – Aus having a larg e “desert”, N.Z. being very mountainous and having the coast close to mast of its land mass? etc. Looking at Dr. Spencer’s chart here is what my eyes pick out: For Aus – about 50% is 1*C higher – about 25% is 2*C higher _ about 25% is no change
N.Z. – about 25% 1*C higher – about 25% 1*C lower – about 50% normal

Doug in Dunedin says: February 19, 2010 at 12:08 pm Climate Modelling As I understand it, the proponents of Catastrophic Anthropological Global Warming rely upon the releas e of so called greenhouse gasses (mainly co2) that are mainly deri ved from fossil fuels and released into the atmosph ere by man as the cause of global warming. While the release of such gasses is true and the amount considerable, it is n one the less, an infinitesimally small proportion of the total emiss ion of co2 so released. They have never been able t o separate the natural GHGs from the man made contribution let alone prove that this has had any significant effect upon clim ate. They seem to be rushing around finding all sorts of events to use as proof of their theory but which a t best have only very tenuous and unproven linkages to this theory. On the other hand Dr. Miskolczi has proven, as far as I can ascertain, that Co2 emissions are irreleva nt in regard to earth’s climate. Dr. Miskolczi first published his work in the Quart erly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Servic es in 2004, Volume 108, No 4. He published further statistical proof i n the same Journal in 2007, Volume 111, No. 1. Sinc e he first published his results, not one peer review has come back disprovi ng his theory, or his Constant. To date, as far as I am aware, not one scientist has come forward to disprove Miskolczi’s theory that the Earth’s climate is at equilibrium, and that Carbon Dioxide cannot be released in amounts great enough to upset that equilibrium. If it is true that his work has not been challenged then all I can say is that the AGW had better get their act together or shut up. 

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- mark/All their modelling efforts to show that earth’s te mperatures are rising and are caused by increased a mounts of co2 are no better that the soothsayer’s crystal ball.

keith in Hastings UK says: February 19, 2010 at 12:11 pm I think it healthy to consider Robert’s comments, e ven tho’ I don’t much “like” them, so, Robert, plea se keep commenting so far as I’m concerned. The big question, which only time will tell, is whe ther or not snow amounts will keep rising. Or stay the same, or begin to fall and keep so. However, IMHO, altho’the models may have indicated only a general trend, I think it quite right to put up an amber light when a decade of observations seems to diverge from the general model forecast line.

jorgekafkazar says: February 19, 2010 at 12:13 pm Jimbo (09:36:39) : “Why doesn’t a journalist ask th em what they think has caused the discrepancy betwe en the models and observations?” Journalist? What is this ‘journalist’ of which you speak? I think there are a few left, here and there, but i t’s like scientist, an endangered species, almost a null set.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 12:14 pm Brian D Finch, “Actual data” is the last thing that some people wa nt to use. It would put them out of business. A CU professor forecast the demise of Aspen skiing based on GCMs, during their all-time snowiest winte r.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 12:16 pm Leif, Agreed – the 1960 bar should not be included in the graph.

David Bailey says: February 19, 2010 at 12:17 pm One of the most striking things about ‘climate scie ntists’ is how unscientific they seem to be! They d on’t seem to pay even lip service to the idea that a theory should be falsifi able – so cold weather is evidence of global warmin g, just as warm weather would be. 

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- mark/One might paraphrase their position as, any unusual weather is evidence that we should spend a trillio n dollars or face a global catastrophe!

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 12:17 pm “If you want statistics, how about doing a correlat ion of GCM predictions vs. actual for the first dec ade of the 21st century?” It would seem to me that the desire to change the s ubject to others’ shortcomings does not reflect a l ot of confidence on your part in how this discussion is going. “The only reason I did rsq() was because other peop le wanted it.” It’s great that you did that; thank you. The reason I brought it up is because we were discussing whet her the trend was statistically significant. I know a few ways to mea sure that (not being a statistics expert) and for a ll I knew, RSQ was a method of doing so I didn’t know. “The graph is clearly in disagreement with the GCM forecasts.” Some of them. On the other hand it seems to agree w ell with the models used in the Journal of Climate paper from 2009. And the spring and summer snow cover are declining, as predicted. I think it’s too early to judge the long -term trend. I mean, how would you react to the claim that numbers like thes e, 1999-present, showed long-term warming would occ ur in the 21st century? “Some web sites love using statistics to obfuscate. I have zero respect for those people.” Statistical significance is an important concept. A s Einstein put it “Everything should be made as sim ple as possible, but not simpler.” joe (11:56:30) : “In other words, you have no clue. But your high salary depends on it, so here you ar e.” Now I have a high salary that depends on AGW. Fasci nating. Each data I post here, I learn surprising t hings about my background and circumstances.

Leo G says: February 19, 2010 at 12:18 pm {Steve Goddard (11:50:41) : Leo G, Climate is absolutely not linear. If it were, earth would either be like Venus or Pluto. This obsession with trying to identify very long-te rm linear trends makes no sense when discussing cyc lical behaviour.} Steve, was more a play on how even with a thirty ye ar trend, as in temp rise from 75-95, I feel that I will not be here (in body at least) to ever know who had it right! My feeling is that we need many more years to get a handle on all of the things that effect the climat e. But I do think that CO2 does slow down the escape of kinetic energy from th e troposphere. I just wish that the argument was fr amed more in a positive note. You know, if you add insulation to y our walls and ceiling, your payback is about 3-5 ye ars, then that money that is being saved is after tax “free” money. 

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- mark/I don’t know about others, but the less I have to p ay to my utilities, the oil companies, etc, and the more I can put away for my kids education, a better/earlier retirement, etc . the happier I am. For the record, I burn wood for about 70% of our ho me heating! Which were I lve you can usually get fo r free! Down with the man! up with the little guy!

nc says: February 19, 2010 at 12:20 pm We have a problem in British Columbia as the winter has been quite mild do to el Nino. Yes we have sno w cover but not much. The provincial government here has blessed us with a carbon tax on gasoline and will be raised t his year. There has been reports in media and implied by the David Suzu ki foundation that our mild winter is proof of AGW ignoring what is happening over the rest of the world. Our mayor in Prince George is factouring in AGW cal culating the city snow removal budget. Oh I never mentioned that Gorden Campbell, the prov incial premier considers himself buds with Arnold S chwarzenegger, governer of California. So it can be seen what we a re up against. At the Olympics they have a few hydrogen powered bu ses at a cost of 58 million with the hydrogen truck ed in from Quebec! Also snow was trucked and helicoptered in. So much for the green Olympics.

jorgekafkazar says: February 19, 2010 at 12:21 pm harrywr2 (09:33:50) : “One needs two things for sno w, moist air and temperatures below 32F. Warmer oce ans provide moist air. Score 1 for Global Warming Crowd. “It would appear that more moist air is creating mo re snow, which has a cooling effect. Score 1 for th e skeptics side.” No, the moist air condenses into liquid water, dele ting the previous score for the Warmist Willie team . Then the rain turns into snow, sleet, and hail. Score 1 for the Skeptic s. Final score: Skeptics 1, Warmist Willies 0.

Bart Nielsen says: February 19, 2010 at 12:26 pm Jim F (08:01:04) : How to back up your argument. This site is fun: “...A complete list of things caused by global warmin g....” http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm I followed the link. This is really great! 

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- mark/rbateman says: February 19, 2010 at 12:39 pm keith in Hastings UK (12:11:32) : Amber light went red. Pulled over for driving forecasts on a suspended mo del. Changing climate forecast lanes while failing to us e the turn signal. Driving forecasts the wrong way. Speeding peer-review in a residential zone. Tampering with climate court records. “You in a heap a’ lot of trouble, bwah.” – Sheriff in 70′s commercial. It’s Friday.

James Chamberlain says: February 19, 2010 at 12:49 pm Now folks, that over there.... that is a troll. You c an look at it and listen to it all that you want. B ut for God’s sake and the rest of our sanity, DO NOT feed it!

jose says: February 19, 2010 at 12:53 pm In this sort of analysis, it would be best to look at trends in months where temperature changes of th e magnitude being proposed (let’s say 1.5-4C, for arguments sake), wo uld make a difference on snow-covered extent. Janua ry is clearly not one of these months in most of the northern hemisphere. Why not show trends in all months instead of just J anuary? How about March ( http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php ?ui_set=1&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=3 ) or April ( http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php ?ui_set=1&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=4)? Oh wait...

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 12:58 pm “One of the most striking things about ‘climate sci entists’ is how unscientific they seem to be! They don’t seem to pay even lip service to the idea that a theory should be falsifi able – so cold weather is evidence of global warmin g, just as warm weather would be.” I would say 4-5 years averaging what years averaged from 1951-1980, absent some clear explanation like a giant volcano eruption, would seriously call the theory of global warming into question (if there is no warming tren d, this ought to be happening half the time). The last time that happen ed? 1974-1979. AGW is perfectly falsifiable — it’s simply that the world, so far, shows no interest in falsifying it.

Mike Bryant says: 

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- mark/February 19, 2010 at 1:03 pm Ok, I’ve never heard of a mental brownnoser, but it does fit... some other neat words from the thesaurus : adulator, backscratcher, backslapper, bootlicker, d oormat, fan, fawner, flatterer, flunky, groupie, gr oveler, handshaker, hanger-on, lackey, minion, parasite, politician, pu ppet, slave Just place “mental” before each of these words... I particularly like “mental minion”.... CAGW does mak e strange bedfellows...

Jim Steele says: February 19, 2010 at 1:04 pm Just got back from the California Academy of Scienc e. Their Climate Change exhibit talked about less s now also. To quote” we could lose the very snowfields that gives us so much”. Maybe they will change the exhibits dependin g on how much snow fall here is each year.

DeWitt Payne says: February 19, 2010 at 1:12 pm Re: Michael Jankowski (Feb 19 08:46) , North America is less than 5% of the total surface area of the planet. Gavin is dreaming if he thinks that climate models have any skill at that level of detail.

Bruce Cobb says: February 19, 2010 at 1:15 pm From a 13 January 2005 article on the GreenPeace site: “Ski slopes everywhere, International — Snow machin es aren’t going to cut it, and we all know that slu sh sucks. Research in Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, S witzerland, France and Scotland all say the same th ing: global warming will affect the winter tourism industry. So far, th e nothern hemisphere ski season is suggesting that skiers and snowboarders need to start getting active if they want their spo rt to survive. According to the National Climactic Data Center in the US, the global combined average land and sea te mperatures were the warmest on record for September – November 2004. Th at’s bad news for winter sport. A UN report states the obvious: “Climate change is a severe threat to snow related sports such as skiing, snowboarding and cross-count ry skiing”. The “threat to the ski industry” meme was also used as an excuse for joining RGGI (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) here in the Northeast, so it’s hilarious that they’re no w trying to claim that AGW is responsible for all t his snow. They really do try very hard to have their carrot cake and eat it too.

Tenuc says: February 19, 2010 at 1:17 pm Steve, I found the last couple of sentences from th e link you posted very interesting, especially the bit I ‘bolded’:- Decadal to century scale trends in North American s now extent in coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models 

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- mark/Allan Frei: Department of Geography, Hunter College , Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences, City University of New York, New York, New York, USA Gavin Gong: Department of Earth and Environmental E ngineering, Columbia University, New York, New York , USA

“ Two 21st century emission scenarios with realistic (moderate or significant) greenhouse gas emission rates produce decreasing NA-SCE (North American sno w cover extent) trends, while one unrealistic scenario with fixed concentrations produces little or no NA-SCE trend. These results suggest that snow cover may be a sens itive indicator of climate change, and that North A merican snow extent will probably decrease in response to greenhouse ga s emissions, although the magnitude of the response may be nonlinear. So perhaps CO2 is not to blame?

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 1:25 pm “Pittsburgh Nearing Snowiest Month on Record” http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?partner=f orecastfox&traveler=0&article=9 Tamino should shovel their 40′′ of snow and demonstr ate that it is statistically insignificant. He seem s to be proficient with a shovel.

MikeC says: February 19, 2010 at 1:37 pm This should be no surprise... a warming world means a moister atmosphere which means more snow

Johnhayte says: February 19, 2010 at 1:47 pm After reading this article and reading Tamino’s rep ly, not to mention Leif’s cogent observations, it s eems to me that Steve’s analysis is misleading in terms of tracking a genui ne statistical trend. Whether its for or against AG W, we should not believe something just because we want to. And please no ub uiquitous, “but Tamino is just a holy priest of the AGW order therefore believe nothing he says” reply. Whatever his motiva tions, his understanding of statistical analysis is obviously greater than most.

Steve Keohane says: February 19, 2010 at 1:54 pm rbateman (11:40:42) : the train started by a few hours before you posted a few miles north of Carbondale. 2′′ last night, an d 5 more so far today. The NWS was calling for 5-10′′ in the high mountains by noon 2/20. We should get a l ot more than that with 20+ hours to go, and I’m at only 6600′.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 1:56 pm 

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- mark/Tenuc, Looks to me like they are blaming everything on CO2 . What they are saying is that no change in CO2 mea ns no snow cover change.

Steve Keohane says: February 19, 2010 at 2:01 pm Question... If a warmer world equals more moisture & precipitat ion, what does a drier atmosphere mean? http://i38.tinypic.com/30bedtg.jpg

Brian D Finch says: February 19, 2010 at 2:02 pm Steve Goddard (12:14:42) : “Actual data” is the last thing that some people wa nt to use. It would put them out of business. Yes, but for these fifteen years, they used their m odels to predict the past – which they seem to have got wrong. Well, perhaps Alice could explain it.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 2:02 pm johnhayte, In Alice in Wonderland, up is down and down is up. The climate models predicted down, the climate resp onded with up, and Tamino is the Mad Hatter.

rbateman says: February 19, 2010 at 2:05 pm Steve Keohane (13:54:41) : If you are north of me (NW Calif.) then your snow l evels are below the 4000-5000′ averages we have bee n getting. Which is on the cold side for El Nino’s. The only other example in my lifetime was 1982-83.

JimAsh says: February 19, 2010 at 2:10 pm “This should be no surprise... a warming world means a moister atmosphere which means more snow” 

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- mark/In Florida. Of course. Its simple.

rbateman says: February 19, 2010 at 2:16 pm Robert (12:58:35) : AGW is perfectly falsifiable — it’s simply that the world, so far, shows no interest in falsifying it. Which world, Robert, the make-it-up-as-you-go-along hearsay world or the real one? Previous to this last warm cycle, it was not unusua l for late May-June snow-melts in the Midwest and o ther places to cause havoc on crops and the Mississippi overflowing. Seems to me the world now returns to a not-so-pleas ant cooler cycle, where erratic patterns dominate. In neither case was the end-of-the-world in the car ds. I for one am glad the ‘we must act quickly and take drastic countermeasures’ proposals got eyed suspic iously. AGW was wrong.

Mike Edwards says: February 19, 2010 at 2:16 pm Steve Goddard, OK, the plot is for the whole Northern Hemisphere – but my point is that this has occurred at the same time that the measured global temperature is significantly raised
. It’s an El Nino winter – see Roy Spencer’s Global A verage Temperature graph here, also based on the sa tellite data: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatu res/ It looks like it’s the warmest since that super El Nino of 1998. Could it be that raised temperatures actually cause more snowfall? ;-) Actually, I doubt that it is anywhere near as simpl e as that. Comparing your snow extent graph with Ro y Spencer’s global temperature graph by eye shows no obvious correlati ons.

UnfrozenCavemanMD says: February 19, 2010 at 2:24 pm Steve, in your dec-feb_snow_ext.png graph, how did you compute the 2010 data point? There are still 2 weeks of February data to go, and presumably they will lower the aver age, because at this time of year snow cover is dec reasing by 1 million km^2 per week, on average. I would not include 2010 in the graph, but if I wan ted to include that point, I would average in two w eeks that were 1 and 2 million km^2 less than the last value, respectively , and then label it as “(projected)”. 

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- mark/Tom_R says: February 19, 2010 at 2:25 pm >> Robert (12:58:35) : I would say 4-5 years averaging what years averaged from 1951-1980, absent some clear explanation like a giant volcano eruption, would seriously call the theory of global warming into question (if there is no warming tren d, this ought to be happening half the time). The last time that happen ed? 1974-1979. AGW is perfectly falsifiable — it’s simply that the world, so far, shows no interest in falsifying it. << We have no accurate global temperatures (you are re ferring to temperature I presume) before 1979. Woul d you accept an average of raw LOCAL temperatures from just those s ites where there is no local heating?

Antonio San says: February 19, 2010 at 2:26 pm Anthony you are right: Tamino implies it well enoug h himself for all to see.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 2:42 pm Mike Edwards, The key factors in the UAH anomaly were a warm sout h Pacific and a strong positive anomaly at 14,000 f eet over the Hudson Bay, due to the negative AO. GISS does not show a l arge spike for January. The places with anomalous snowfall also had anomalo us cold.

Tom P says: February 19, 2010 at 2:55 pm Steven, The observed data to compare to the models are the January snow extents in North America: http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php ?ui_set=1&ui_region=nam&ui_month=1 The title of the post is “North American snow model s miss the mark – observed trend opposite of the pr edictions.” There is no significant observed trend.

kadaka says: February 19, 2010 at 2:56 pm RockyRoad (09:28:31) : You’re saying “the climate models have the wrong po larity on their predictions of winter snow cover ch anges”?? That’s easy to fix: Just reverse polarity on the ba tteries and everything will be just fine. 

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- mark/Duh. Then the diodes and other semiconductors blow up or otherwise self-destruct, leaving you with a worthl ess lump. Which doesn’t change the relative value of the clim ate models, but may make for some smoke and an adre naline surge.

Jim F says: February 19, 2010 at 3:04 pm @MikeC (13:37:35) : “...This should be no surprise... a warming world means a moister atmosphere which mea ns more snow....” That’s just plain silly. Snow forms at 32  and below. The reason we’re having these record-br eaking snows is because moist air, courtesy El Nino, is slamming into air masses at well below 32  . If the atmosphere is warming, how is this cold ai r – the driver of snow – to exist and be so prevalent – i.e . covering huge chunks of a given hemisphere? In a warming world, snow should become more rare, more restricted to certain portions of a given hemisphere. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, in a global sense. Now as to current conditions, the moving an d collision of cold air masses and wet air masses is the province of weathe r. However, the extent and vigor of this snowy weat her don’t inspire my confidence in a dramatically warming globe. In fact , I suggest we adopt the 400 ways to say “snow” use d by the Inuit into the English language.

tornadomark says: February 19, 2010 at 3:07 pm Climate IS Weather!

keith in hastings UK says: February 19, 2010 at 3:13 pm To; rbateman (12:39:23 Good one. I was being kind, and trying to be scepti cal even about scepticism. Personally, I would turn on every red light for the AGW limo. Mind you, ‘cos of green tax we don’t drive much – UK petrol (gas) is at equivalent $7 pe r US gallon and set to go higher. Plus surcharges on new low gas mileage/h igh CO2 cars, and higher p.a. road tax too ... $600 p .a. or so. Coming soon to the US of A, I guess, courtesey of AGW...

Richard Holle says: February 19, 2010 at 3:23 pm With the dismal failure of the AGW climate models d ue to their concentration on the wrong driving forc es of the weather and climate, I thought you might like to look at what a model derived from the “Natural Variability Patter ns” could do at predicting the next 4 years of daily weather for th e continental USA. It has several differences from the “Business as us ual” NOAA NWS forecast models, in that it uses all raw data from any stations found, considers the periodic influences f rom the Moon, and is based on past patterns of glob al circulation, to produce a “Natural Analog Weather Forecast” that wo rks better than “their models.” 

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- mark/I put this forecast together back in 2007, posted i t to web site in December of 2007, has remained the re unchanged since, still has maps posted until beginning of January of 2014. http://www.aerology.com/national.aspx I post it here again to expose an idea to those who say models don’t work, they do if they consider al l of the important influences driving the weather and hence the long t erm patterns, the climate. The patterns it produces do not have a solar activi ty level component figured into the method, so the decrease in solar activity from the reference periods, shows the decrease in t emperatures, that could then be insinuated as due t o the solar changes, notable as the more southern movement of the Jet st reams, although the daily timing of the arrival of the fronts stays sound, and the precipitation patterns stay about the same as forecast, there is a shift to more snow than rai n, as noted in the Southeast USA. Feel free to look at the daily maps from the past t wo years, or for the next 4 years. I am currently g etting a lot of hits from the AGW team servers in England, it seems they are lear ning something. I thought you might like to keep up with the curren t forward edge of research in this area.

Kondealer says: February 19, 2010 at 3:32 pm Interesting non-response/fog/snow-job from Gavin. Gavin, can you help me out here? A numbr of commentators have stated that increased snow cover (in the U.S.) is consistent with climate change. But Frei, A. and G. Gong, (2005). Decadal to Centur y Scale Trends in North American Snow Extent in Cou pled AtmosphereOcean General Circulation Models. Geophysical Resea rch Letters, 32:L18502, doi: 10.1029/2005GL023394. using nine general circulation models (GCMs) of the global atmosphere-ocean system show that all nine models exhibit a clear and statistically significant decreasing tren d in 21st century. Who is correct here? [Response: Frei and Gong are using a single index f or snow-cover across North America, but the situati on is somewhat spatially and temporally heterogeneous. I haven't l ooked into this much myself but you can get a sense from the graphs available on the GISS website (for instance, 20C3M+ SRES A1B ensemble). Choose 'Snow Cover %', choose a month (Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar) and a period (1980-2010 say) and plo t the trend. You get decreases in the northern US, and slight increases in the southern US depending on month. Thus I'd say th e picture is likely to be a little confused over sh ort time periods with a lot of weather-related noise. Intensity of precipit ation is forecast to increase pretty much uniformly , and so that might be a contributing factor to the southern US trends, but that is just speculation at this point. The bigger issue is that single years are not climate change, regardless of the sign of t he anomaly. - gavin]

KLA says: February 19, 2010 at 3:35 pm OT, I see a lot of people here denigrating the hockey s tick. But it is real. Here’s how I see it will be c reated for AR5: As the temperatures continue to fall, replace the t emperature record (in degrees) with the number of A GW “deniers” to “hide the decline”. Splice the statistics of “number of A GW deniers” on the temperature record beginning in Fall 2009. Grafting two data sets together, like tree-ring width in mm and temperature in degrees, seems standard and legi timate practice in climate science after all. This would easily and un deniably produce a hockey stick graph. 

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- mark/Austin says: February 19, 2010 at 3:39 pm Latest medium range models are showing a 5-10 inche s of snow across Texas early next week. NWS is putt ing up an advisory tonight.

Johnhayte says: February 19, 2010 at 3:42 pm steve said: “In Alice in Wonderland, up is down and down is up. The climate models predicted down, the climate resp onded with up, and Tamino is the Mad Hatter.” uh, ok. Putting aside the potential influence of me rcury poisoning, his points about your statistical analysis seem valid.

Ric Werme says: February 19, 2010 at 3:48 pm Steve Goddard (10:17:55) : > Your graphs don’t change anything and you seem to have forgotten that there are several weeks left i n 2010 which will probably score in the top 100. Your graph’s columns clearly shows the rightmost co lumn starts in 2000. So it ended at the end of 2009
. >Why all the nitpicking? If you see something funda mentally wrong with the conclusions, fine. I’m not seeing that in your posts. This is not nitpicking. It’s peer review pointing o ut flaws in your paper. I think Leif wouldn’t mind if you replaced your graph with Leif’s and describe it accurately. I regret I didn’t see “weekly snow extents (out of 2227)” and do the math. Instead of bar graphs, I’d prefer graphs of the center points of 1, 5, and 10 year averages. They w ould have the same data points in yours and Leif’s graphs (except your 1960s datum of course) and nearly 30X more.

Alan S says: February 19, 2010 at 3:57 pm Robert (12:17:45) : Robert; perhaps you would be slightly more credible if you stopped lying and obfuscating? Hansen’s predictions were utter BS, you seem a brig ht fellow so why the lies? 

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- mark/Claude Harvey says: February 19, 2010 at 4:10 pm In business, a predictive model that never yields a ccurate results is promptly junked. In government, the loons repeatedly try to fix the problem by spending enormous sums of tax payer money making the model bigger and bigger. Got news for you, boys and girls! If the “outas” of a little one can’ t even come close to the mark, you have a problem w ith your “inzas” and your “around-and-aroundas”. Making the thing bigger is n ot going to help solve your basic problem, even tho ugh it will give you bragging rights among your loony peers.

rbateman says: February 19, 2010 at 4:15 pm Could it be that raised temperatures actually cause more snowfall? ;-) A warmer storm will carry more moisture than a cold Arctic blast. Where the two mix you get some real dumpers. Comparing this El Nino only back as far as 1998 fai ls to take in the whole spectrum of strength or rel ative warmth of El Nino’s. 2009-2010 is lukewarm so far. Unfortunately for the those East of the Rockies, they get the added plea sure of Canadian Air instrusions. Not being a meteorologist, I’ll take a swing at thi s one: 1.) string of lukewarm storms approaches West Coast
. 2.) Current jet stream loops around High in Oregon/ Wash. and runs warm air all the way up to the Yukon /BC border. 3.) 1st storm slams into high, breaking it. 4.) Meanwhile longer loop of warm air has reached W estern Canada. 5.) 2nd storm slams into California plowing on east ward. 6.) Warm air in BC/Yukon displaces fridgid air and sends it south. 7.) 2nd storm reaches Rockies at same time blast of Canadian air crosses US border East of Rockies. 8.) 2nd storm meets Canadian air and dumps at inter section of fronts. 9.) Warmists blame overheating world for another sn owstorm as a parade of them adds insult to injury, pointing to warm Canadian anomaly left by a lukewarm stream of air f rom modeate El Nino. 10.) Nobody has paid the slightest bit of never-min d to the 3,000 mile high squished loop of Jet Strea m that started all this in motion yesterday. How’d I do?

Pascvaks says: February 19, 2010 at 4:29 pm For What It’s Worth - - An Observation on the Tone of Recent Blog Comment s... People are a sensitive lot every day of the week. O n Fridays especially. Sometimes, without warning, s ometimes with, they find themselves beset with various career, economic , political, medical, family, travel, and/or person al “issues”. For these reasons they’re a little less friendly and courteou s than they normally are in public or on the Web. M any times, changes in the weather can also result in this condition; temperat ure, air pressure, humidity, rain, snow, ice, etc., can all singly or collectively tick people off and make them boil. Wh en these times happen, when you start to show that inner-you, the part of “you” normally hided from everyone, or when you sta rt to slip –even just a little– get some fresh air. Go out and smell the roses. No roses? Pretend. But go out and take a deep breat h of fresh air. Or Two. 

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- mark/PS: There seemed to be an unusual edge in the discu ssion lately.

mitchel44 says: February 19, 2010 at 4:30 pm tracking in the snow? http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Q_4mbCuV7QE/S3w5sHYE7LI/A AAAAAAAHkE/O25lUbY4yKQ/s1600-h/snow_tracking.png seems about right.

Tim Channon says: February 19, 2010 at 4:34 pm The results of a look at the NA snow cover data are on the link on my name. Doesn’t look like a great deal is going on but I ca n of course be wrong.

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 4:44 pm ” Alan S (15:57:51) : Robert (12:17:45) : Robert; perhaps you would be slightly more credible if you stopped lying and obfuscating? Hansen’s predictions were utter BS, you seem a brig ht fellow so why the lies?” You’re wrong. Given that you introduce no argument and no evidence of any kind, I suspect you know it.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 4:44 pm johnhayte, So you are suggesting that these trends are actuall y downwards and match the models? http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/ dec-feb_snow_ext.png http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/ north_american_winter_dec-feb_snow_extent_1989-2010 .png Tamino is piling it up pretty thick this time.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 4:47 pm johnhayte, 

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- mark/Mark Twain said “There are three kinds of lies, lie s, damned lies, and statistics.”

Robert says: February 19, 2010 at 4:49 pm “We have no accurate global temperatures (you are r eferring to temperature I presume) before 1979.” We have an instrument record that goes back a hundr ed a thirty years. On what basis would you argue we ought to throw it out? The satellite data (to which I assume you are referring, agrees well with the ground measurements when the two instruments are pointed in the same place.

starzmom says: February 19, 2010 at 4:55 pm We are expecting another 5-6′′ of global warming her e in the Kansas City area this weekend. I know, I k now, weather isn’t climate, but quite frankly, I’m getting tired of he aring that about the warming climate, when the wint ers keep getting colder and snowier.

Oliver K. Manuel says: February 19, 2010 at 5:25 pm Quote: starzmom (16:55:10) : “We are expecting another 5-6′′ of global warming he re in the Kansas City area this weekend. I know, I know, weather isn’t climate, but quite frankly, I’m getting tired of he aring that about the warming climate, when the wint ers keep getting colder and snowier.” Welcome to double-speak! Didn’t you notice when we passed through 1984 about a quarter century ago? Seriously, keep those snow flakes as a personal gif t from Al Gore. We’ve already had more than our fai r share of Al’s generosity here in Missouri ! With kind regards, Oliver K. Manuel in The Show-Me State

Richard M says: February 19, 2010 at 5:25 pm Robert (12:58:35) : AGW is perfectly falsifiable — it’s simply that the world, so far, shows no interest in falsifying it. Well there’s always the lack of any statistical war ming trend for the last 15 years. Of course, warmer s usually stutter and say but there is a positive trend. Now, we have a positive trend and the warmers say but there’s no statistical increase in the trend. 

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- mark/I wonder if they even realize how this sounds? The main problem is the uncertainty in AGW is immen se. Once the warmers admit that we can start to get somewhere.

rbateman says: February 19, 2010 at 5:29 pm Robert (16:49:54) : An instrument record that has been heavily damaged by monkeyfingering and “the dog ate my B-91′s”.

Roger Knights says: February 19, 2010 at 6:00 pm Stephan (09:12:51) : This is EXACTLY the kind of argument that is needed and that is why all the old graphs etc must be sav ed so there is no doubt about it. The fact that our side doesn’t have these “less sno w” predictions at our fingertips is an important in dication that we are not well-funded and well-coordinated, nor that some car bonist consigliere has our ear. If our side weren’t mostly a grass-ro ots effort, we would have a long-term, thorough, well-o rganized database of “opposition research” material to employ. The most important would be an extensive collection of thous ands of warmist predictions waiting to be shot down
. Leif Svalgaard (09:58:24) : We have to also be aware of not overstating [or con veniently hiding things] our case. That sentence, or words to that effect, should be t he epigraph in every thread on this site. But, just because snowfall hasn’t increased enough to falsify the models’ predictions , not to mention the CO2 hypothesis, it still has some “weight” as evidence. Just as a declining snowfall trend would have some weight in the other side of the scale. We’re entitl ed to mutter a softspoken “nyah, nyah.”

Piers Corbyn says: February 19, 2010 at 6:15 pm Superb reportage. It is important to nail the Global Warmers failed p redictions one by one and not let them switch stori es or rewrite what they might have meant. Undeniably they always predicted milder winters for USA and everywhere but here beware ‘at least’ – th ey bleat – ‘the West coast of USA is mild and the winter Olympics in Van couver are very mild’. This again illustrates the need to get to the roots of everything the GWers or their apologists say; a nd ask could whatever is observed be explained by more CO2? The point about the cold and snowy winter in most o f the USA is that like all weather it depends on a pressure pattern. In this case on a persistent ridge over the Rockies and THA T also caused the mild west coast. THIS weather pre ssure and weather pattern of ice and snow in most USA and the consequ ent mild sliver on the west was predicted in the lo ng range by solar activity (the Solar Weather Technique of long range forecasting), and NOTHING to do with CO2, see: http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No9.pdf 

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- mark/The GWers have 4 problems: Their science has failed; Their ‘evidence’ is false or fiction; Their predictions have all failed and They can predict nothing. Piers Corbyn, http://www.WeatherAction.com

Roger Knights says: February 19, 2010 at 7:05 pm PS: Another clue that our side is not well-funded o r well-coordinated (as charged) is our side’s failu re, until Glaciergate, to comb through the IPCC’s Assessment Reports looking for flaws and nits. Such opposition research is so valuable a tactic (as is now being shown) that no political or PR consultant would have failed to insist on it.

Richard Holle says: February 19, 2010 at 7:05 pm Piers Corbyn do you see any Lunar declinational pat terns in the use of your forecasting method? The pattern I find most use full is 240 cycles of t he Lunar declination atmospheric tides in the atmos phere, which is just one 27.32 day cycle short of the Saros cycle period. I have not used any solar activity adjustments, and still it shows a good correlation, and possible in sight into the effects seen by solar cycle influences. copied this snippet below, from the link at top of this entry.. Richard Mackey (04:34:31) : To help better understand the phenomena now clearly visible in that magnificent video, I’ve extracted some relevant segments from my Journal of Energy and Environment paper (VOLUME 20 No. 1 2009) The lunar nodal cycle and climate The 18.6 year lunar nodal cycle (LNC) tidal periodi city has a pervasive role in climate change. It is the period of a full rotation of the Moon’s orbital plane around the ecliptic, th e geometric plane of the Earth’s orbit around the S un. It is the clearest tidal signal in the thousands of time series analysed. The LNC encodes information about the Moon, Earth, Sun geometry that relates to tidal extremes, at lea st at high latitudes. It defines how the angle of the Moon’s orbit to the Earth’s equatorial plane combines with, or partial ly cancels out, the tilt in the Earth’s axis. From the perspective of an observ er on the Earth, during the LNC the Moon moves alon g a northern latitude about ten degrees from a position about 18.5 degree s north of the equator to one that is 28.5 degrees, which it reaches after 18.6 years. The regular sequence of eclipses is a result of the regular, highly predictable rotation of the plane of the Moon’s orbit round the Earth. It has been known since ancient times th at eclipses occurred in regular predictable cycles of a little more than 18 years. This period is known as the Saros cycle.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 7:13 pm 

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- mark/Thanks Piers!

Max Hugoson says: February 19, 2010 at 8:01 pm Why does Lief engage in the technique “off axis gra phing” method like everyone else, to exaggerate poi nts? A vertical axis on the left, going to ZERO with TWO HASH MARKS to indicate the “off access” is better procedure for “scientific” work. But then if Lief is an economist, he is forgiven.

Ed Murphy says: February 19, 2010 at 9:35 pm Awesome, Piers Corbyn! I’d love to know if/how close groups of significant volcano eruptions are factored into predictions by you? http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/largeeruptions.cfm

jose says: February 19, 2010 at 9:36 pm Piers, Steven; Show the whole story. Let’s see monthly plots of sn ow covered area, for all months, and for the entire period of record, and let the data speak for themselves. This is not an e xample of a failed prediction, nor is it superb rep ortage. It is simply a fail.

Steve Goddard says: February 19, 2010 at 10:04 pm jose, You imply that the climate models are correct, whic h means that you believe that snow cover has been d ecreasing over the last 10-20 years. Good luck with that concept.

Ed Murphy says: February 19, 2010 at 11:57 pm Interesting... http://icecap.us/images/uploads/AOSOI.pdf In April 2009, we talked about Mt Redoubt’s eruptio n (and later Russia’s Sarychev) and the effect it m ight have on high latitude blocking and cooler summer and winter. 

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- mark/Oman et al (2005) and others have shown that though major volcanic eruptions seem to have their greate st cooling effect in the summer months, the location of the volcano dete rmines whether the winters are colder or warmer ove r large parts of North America and Eurasia. According to their model ing, 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 pr essure oscillations, low pressure and cold air is t rapped in high latitudes and the resulting more westerly jet stream winds drives milder maritime air into the continents. It goes on to explain how volcanic eruption locatio n makes for colder and snowier NH winters... You migh t like this Steve.

JAN says: February 20, 2010 at 12:56 am kadaka (14:56:11) : RockyRoad (09:28:31) : “You’re saying “the climate models have the wrong p olarity on their predictions of winter snow cover c hanges”?? That’s easy to fix: Just reverse polarity on the ba tteries and everything will be just fine. Duh. Then the diodes and other semiconductors blow up or otherwise self-destruct, leaving you with a worthl ess lump. Which doesn’t change the relative value of the clim ate models, but may make for some smoke and an adre naline surge.” May I suggest the easiest trick to fix this problem is to invert the graph and use it as is, upside do wn. IIRC this is a method with some precedent in climate “science.” Oh, mann.

Rabe says: February 20, 2010 at 1:59 am @ Leif Svalgaard (10:01:13) re Will’s graphics: I was curious also and looked into the page source for that matter. Quite simple if you have an URL.

Rhys Jaggar says: February 20, 2010 at 2:07 am The North America Winter snow extent graph: how is that defined? Maximum during the winter? Some sort of mean through the period? Makes a difference in how you intepret what it mean
.....

will says: 

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- mark/February 20, 2010 at 3:42 am Robert (11:29:43) : It’s not a strawman. do you really think that “several references to the idea that more intense s torms may be more common in a warming world” is different in meaning to: “recent winter storms.. proof of global warming.” then if you do, a career in law, with its subtle nu ances of distinguishing one word from another, is f or you. I would think most people would see these arguments as identical. AR4 referred to more warm events and fewer cold eve nts. I think they were wrong.

will says: February 20, 2010 at 3:54 am Robert (16:49:54) : “We have an instrument record t hat goes back a hundred a thirty years. ” Yes we do Robert – and what does it show? I quote: “The Central England Temperature (CET) record, star ting in 1659 and maintained by the UK Met Office, i s the longest unbroken temperature record in the world. Temperature data is averaged for a number of weathe r stations regarded as being representative of Cent ral England rather than measuring temperature at one arbitrary geograp hical point identified as the centre of England. A Scottish Chemist, Wilson Flood, has collected and analysed the 351 year CET record. “Summers in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than those in the first ha lf and it could be argued that this was a global wa rming signal. However, the average CET summer temperature in the 18th cent ury was 15.46 degC while that for the 20th century was 15.35 degC. Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming , comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the 20th century were cooler than those of two cent uries previously.” and the second oldest continuous record? Prague’s Clementinum hosts the world’s second oldes t continuously working weather station. The records go back to 1770 and haven’t been interrupted or modified since 1775
. Luboš Motl Pilsen undertook a statistical analysis with the conclusion that ” you can’t see any unexce ptional behavior in the late 20th century. “

Chris Wright says: February 20, 2010 at 4:49 am 

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- mark/There’s a large and increasing list of AGW predicti ons that are turning out as to be as wrong as it’s almost possible to be. In any normal science this would pretty well have dest royed AGW as a serious theory. But hey, (as Steve M likes to say) this is climate science.... To Piers Corbyn, Very nice to hear from you. Keep up the good work! Chris

Steve Goddard says: February 20, 2010 at 5:30 am Ric Werme, When people publicly nitpick about minor details, t hey create the impression that they disagree with t he conclusions. Read the comments about Leif on Tamino’s site for refere nce. Everyone over there is convinced that Leif is saying that there is no upwards trend in snow cover. Peer review normally occurs before publication and behind the scenes, and takes months or years. Do yo u see the climate science community publicly airing minor disagreemen ts? Leif’s graph is more accurate along the X-axis, but is less accurate along the (more important) Y-axis . 2000 had three top 100 years, and I surmised that 2010 still had three mis sing top 100 years – based on the past week and the weather forecasts. So by munging 2010 into the 2000 decade I probably cam e up with the correct height of the bar, whereas Le if’s was too low. In the absence of complete 2010 data, there was no com pletely clean way to make the graph. And by includi ng the partial 1960s data I accounted for all 100 weeks. There are good reasons why I constructed the graph the way I did. It is not misleading about the trend since the 1970s, which was the point. If you or Leif disagree with the poi nt or the conclusions, fire away – but don’t nitpic k about minor points in this forum, please. Do that in private.

wayne says: February 20, 2010 at 6:20 am marky48 (11:30:39) : Thanks for the tool.

Arthur Glass says: February 20, 2010 at 6:32 am It seems to this groping layman that while heating increases evaporation, thus injecting more water va por into the atmosphere, precipitation, in whatever form, requir es cooling. Or maybe I don’t know my dry bulb from my wet bulb?

David says: February 20, 2010 at 7:24 am jose (21:36:59) : 

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- mark/“Show the whole story. Let’s see monthly plots of s now covered area, for all months, and for the entir e period of record, and let the data speak for themselves. This is not an e xample of a failed prediction, nor is it superb rep ortage. It is simply a fail.} Help me out Jose. I thought the model predictions w ere for northern hemisphere winter snow cover, pred icting a decreasing trend, and that the data showed the opposite sign a nd an increasing trend over the same period. It looks to me like the models “fail”, not the arti cle. Please feel free to explain what I missed, and link to your own graph.

Steve Keohane says: February 20, 2010 at 8:14 am rbateman (14:05:47) : Steve Keohane (13:54:41) : I’m at about 39°N28′, but in western Colorado. They have upped the forecast ante from 5-10′′ on 2/19 to 36′′ as of this morning. I-70 is closed both directions at Vail Pas s, there are avalanches on the highway, and CDOT is setting off more so they d on’t happen naturally. I have another new foot to c lear this morning, which better get done so I don’t have two to move l ater.

windansea says: February 20, 2010 at 8:49 am And the spring and summer snow cover are declining, as predicted. since 1995 spring and summer snow cover appear to b e rising http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j237/hausfath/Pic ture41.png

Ric Werme says: February 20, 2010 at 10:20 am Leif Svalgaard (10:01:13) : > Question: > Willis, how did you manage to include an image in your comment? Willis didn’t post in this thread, I think you’re r eferring to http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/18/why-is-winter -snow-extent-interesting/#comment-322340
. I looked at the source, and there’s nothing special there: <p><img src=”http://homepage.mac.com/williseschenba ch/.Pictures/Northern_Hemisphere_Snow_Area.jpg” alt =”Snow area” /></p> My guess is that Willis has special privileges that allow him to make guest posts and perhaps that inc ludes the ability to use <img>. (I think this will post as I intended. Apologies if WordPress thinks differently than I do.)

Steve E says: February 20, 2010 at 11:30 am Perhaps someone should inform Obama. He’s saying sn ow in Dallas is due to global warming. 

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- mark/http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2010/02/breaking-obam a-blames-record-dallas.html

davidmhoffer says: February 20, 2010 at 6:17 pm Steve Goddard; mods if this thread is dead please post as appropri ate or perhaps e-mail Steve? If you are studying NA snowfall extent I may have s tumbled across a proxy that you might be interested in. I live in Winnipeg which has pretty harsh winters. Snow that lands in November doesn’t melt until spring. Melting periods in spring are pretty short, so when there is a lot of snow, we get serio us flooding. The major river in the area is the Red River which has a catchment area 500 km long and combined with the As siniboia about 30,000 km^2. I would think that peak flow rates would be pretty much proportional to total winter s nowfall in the catchment area. There’s some pretty decent data available about annual peak flow rate back to 1892: http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/floods/redriver/historical_e .php estimated flow rates of major flood years back to 1 826: http://cgc.rncan.gc.ca/floods/redriver/table1_e.php and a reconstruction identifying major flood years going back 400 years: http://www.gov.mb.ca/stem/mrd/geo/pflood/p_pdfs/geo scientificcontributions.pdf The flow rate data stops at 2000, but I can advise that we had flooding in 2009, though not as massive as in 1997. In brief, lotsa snow lately but I don’t see a trend that jump s out at me vs temp, or co2. sunspots perhaps?

UnfrozenCavemanMD says: February 20, 2010 at 7:19 pm Steve Goddard (05:30:31) wrote: > ... > When people publicly nitpick about minor details, they create the > impression that they disagree with the conclusion s. > ... That is simply not the case. Nobody is more strongl y opposed to the insanity that is the AGW scam than I am. It is precisely for that reason that we need to be above reproach w hen presenting data. The crowd-sourced “peer-review ” that you have been receiving here is a strength of the grass-root s process. Your article makes a convincing case tha t the decrease in Winter snow cover predicted by the AGW models has been pro ven dead wrong, and that the decrease in Summer sno w might be better explained by soot than by warming. That shou ld be enough. Leif and I disagree with your conclusion that recen t Winters have defined a new upward snow trend that is distinct from the range of variation seen in the last 43 years, and I have defended my disagreement with objective measu res of the data. That doesn’t mean we are haters on the side of AGW. You can see my relevant graphs at my blog (click on my nickname) or by going here (I wish I could post pictures like Willis did): http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_w7fygMMfkv0/S4BTB0ztPhI/A AAAAAAAADM/apFyaERXqyc/s1600-h/NHSnowCover2.png http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_w7fygMMfkv0/S3_tV3TrijI/A AAAAAAAADE/zUmKqB8S7Hk/s1600- h/NHWeeklySnowCover2.png 

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- mark/You still haven’t said how you computed the Winter 2010 snow data point with 1-2 weeks of February rem aining. This time of year the NH snow decreases at an average rate of 1 million km^2 per week, so the remaining weeks will almost certainly bring the average for the season down. Best Regards, -Peter

Steve Goddard says: February 20, 2010 at 10:24 pm caveman, No one said the trend was outside the range of the last 43 years. Those are your words. What I said is that there was an upwards trend for the last 20 years. Period.

Steve Goddard says: February 20, 2010 at 10:37 pm davidmhoffer, That is very interesting and useful information, th anks.

Leo G says: February 21, 2010 at 12:30 am Pierce – {and the winter Olympics in Vancouver are very mild’} Just our way of making our guests feel welcome. Wat ching the games on the tube has been nothing if not phenomenal with the beautiful blue skies as a backdrop, and gorgeou s evergreens standing guard. If you look closely at the shots from in town, you can see the Japanese Cherries already starting to bloom. Magnificent! And people actually able to watch comfortably, not having to be zipped up in parkas so thick that they can’t really move (alla the movie ” A Christmas Story). Also the golf courses are not so busy right now!

Crispin in Waterloo says: February 21, 2010 at 12:35 am MikeC (13:37:35) : “This should be no surprise... a warming world means a moister atmosphere which means more snow” +++++++ I don’t mean to pick on you Mike, but there are sev eral repetitions of this ‘moister means more snow’ in these posts and occasionally on other threads. One of the fallacies promoted by AGW proponents is ‘Because the atmosphere is warmer it will evaporate more water and therefore rain more because the air will be wetter. ’ What follows also applies to ‘cloudiness’. 

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- mark/I want to caution that wetness is relative. The air above the moister air will also be warmer, and the air above that and so on because the warming is ‘global’. In order to have p recipitation air has to cool to the dew point. The temperature is irrelevant. If it is warmer rather than cooler, it won’t rain ( or snow) any more than it does now because it will cool less by the same amount that it is warmer elsewhere. Although the absolute humidity of the air will be h igher when it is warmer, the relative humidity is v ery likely to stay exactly the same – it has to do with the amount of ocean su rface, primarily. It will rapidly move to an equili brium (on global average) in a day or two. A 2 degree Kelvin rise in temperat ure (0.6%) will pick that much more moisture and ho ld onto it, raising the baseline. Just being warmer will not detectably yield more pr ecipitation because the dew point will also rise, a s will the temperature to which things cool. The snowfall (instead of rainfall) pattern in the U S this year is the result of lower temperatures, no t Global Warming as there hasn’t been any for years. It is not because of Glo bal Cooling either, because there hasn’t been much of that. It is an El Nino event combined with a longer term deepening (North- South) of the jet streams. This deepening was beaut ifully demonstrated last year when the Northern States of the US were r ained on (massively) because of the ‘Omega’ wind pa ttern which stalled on its Eastbound track. Again this NH winter the de epening was evident several times. Yes I know there are other processes and atmospheri c limitations and possible drying of the upper atmo sphere from increased storm height, larger ocean surface area w hich will cause other effects... My main point is tha t it won’t rain or snow a lot more if it is warmer. In order for that to ha ppen, the warmer air would have to be over the ocea n and it would have to /not/ be warmer over land – extremely unlikely. And if there were to happen the warming would not b e global. Warmer/cooler world: substantially the same precipi tation.

davidmhoffer says: February 21, 2010 at 6:12 am Steve Goddard (22:37:40) : davidmhoffer, That is very interesting and useful information, th anks> If you do anything serious with it I would apprecia te knowing about it. I’ve “lived” through a lot of that data so would be pretty interested. 1997 was an exciting year, the “ lake” surface that formed exceeded the lake surface of one of the Great Lakes, and the flooding in 1826 was supposedly much larger. There’s also an 800 year tree ring chronol ogy to reconstruct precipitation records for the same area that doesn’ t show the flood year spikes at all (tree rings don ’t record info in the winter, who knew!) that I can find again if you wan t. In any event, additional questions or results from your work, please feel free to email me david.hoffer@mts.net

Steve Goddard says: February 21, 2010 at 8:22 am As a further sign that all the snow is due to globa l warming, Europe just came within a couple of degre es of breaking their alltime record lowest temperature. http://www.accuweather.com/mt-news-blogs.asp? partner=forecastfox&blog=Andrews&pgurl=/mtweb/conte nt/Andrews/archives/2010/02/nearly_an_alltime_recor d_low_in_europ

Steve Goddard says: 

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- mark/February 21, 2010 at 9:21 am Given that the earth is neither covered with ice no r ice free, it is axiomatic that if you measure sno wfall trends over a long enough period of time, the slope is necessarily clo se to zero. That in no way indicates that there are not periods of time when snowfall increases or decreases. Clim ate is neither linear nor monotonic. This obsession with trying to fit long p eriods of climate data to straight lines is irratio nal. Longer is not necessarily better. Sometimes it is better to use s cientific judgement rather than jumping into meanin gless statistical analysis.

keith in hastings UK says: February 21, 2010 at 9:36 am to:Crispin in Waterloo (00:35:39) Thank you, you put into words what has been bgging me about the “warmer = more moister = more precipit ation = more snow in winter” AGW remix argument. RH, of course! More argument down the pub (bar)....

davidmhoffer says: February 21, 2010 at 9:46 am Steve Goddard (08:22:11) : As a further sign that all the snow is due to globa l warming, Europe just came within a couple of degr ees of breaking their alltime record lowest temperature> Steve, Steve, Steve, We’ve already had it explained to us that Europe wa s warm for a couple of centuries but it was “local” . So I imagine this is just “local” too, Europe as a continent doesn’t par ticipate in global climate. BTW found that Red River Basin tree ring study, pag e 13. Don’t tell Briffa or Mann that the oak trees in my back yard have called his larch trees liars, they’ll try and core them or something. The study doesn’t purport to be a temperature proxy, they even show that temperature has a slight negative af fect. But if you DID look at it as temperature, Bri ffa et al would have some explaining to do. The curve doesn’t look like the l ong term European curve, but we’re way inland here, so ocean current don’t affect us the same way. That said, lots of growth a few hundred years ago that exceeds current. I chec ked to see if the major floods showed up, and they did not, further evidenc e that all kinds of important things happen in the winter that tree rings don’t measure. http://www.gov.mb.ca/stem/mrd/geo/pflood/p_pdfs/cli maticextremesinsmb.pdf threw a quick post up on my blog if you just want t o do a quick compare: http://knowledgedrift.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/red- river-and-red-oak-speak-out-larch-trees-lied/

Dr A Burns says: February 21, 2010 at 12:24 pm Tamino suggests: “If we look at monthly snow cover anomaly for all m onths of the year covered by the Rutgers data we se e a long-term decline of 37,000 km^2/year, which is statistically signifi cant:” http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/cherry-snow/ #more-2308 

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- mark/He suggests that January shows no decline and that Goddard has omitted data prior to 1989. Any comments please ?

Steve Goddard says: February 21, 2010 at 4:58 pm Dr. A Burns, The article is about model predictions of winter snow cover. Winter is the season when snow cover is maximum. Pl ease reread and try again.

Andrew P says: February 21, 2010 at 11:58 pm I don’t know how you can compare reality to predict ed without discussing the stated error bar ranges o f the predictions. Given the annual and decadal variability in winter snow cover I would estimate that any GCM derived 20 -yr prediction would be something like -.01 +/- .15 million sq km/yr in which case the model prediction is not invalidated. The effect of climate change over 20 years is so minimal it is drowned ou t by natural variation. I assume that studies predi cting winter extent contained formal error estimates due to natural var iation, and would be interested to see if the obser ved trend falls outside of those predicted error ranges.

Steve Goddard says: February 22, 2010 at 6:08 am Andrew P, This winter has been a near record setting winter f or snow cover. Is that confirmation of a model whic h predicts declining snow cover? The winter of 2008 saw the third greate st snow extent ever recorded. Is that consistent wi th models that predict declining snow cover?

Andrew P says: February 22, 2010 at 9:36 am In science, predictions are never confirmed they ar e only invalidated. I do not know if these model pr edictions have been invalidated because I do not know what their stated error range is for a 20-yr prediction. As I said b efore, because on a 20-yr timescale natural variation would drown out almost any climate signal, my guess is that the observed t rend is not outside the error ranges. But without knowing the error ranges for these models, none of us know. Any regular WUWT reader should be familiar with the se types of calculations. Several authors here and people cited here have shown that GCM temperature predictions are on the edge of being invalidated. That is, the observe d 12-yr temperature trend falls just inside the lower bound error range given by models. Were we to see a return to recent ’08-09 temperatures following this El Nino, they would be statistically invalidated outside of a 95% confidence interval, as the work of some like Lucia have shown. You haven’t performed such an ana lysis.

Roger Knights says: 

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- mark/February 22, 2010 at 9:54 am Steve Goddard (22:24:30) :
caveman, No one said the trend was outside the range of the last 43 years. Those are your words. What I said is that there was an upwards trend for the last 20 years. P eriod. Yeah, but that still gives the warmists a nit to pi ck, by claiming that your trend doesn’t meet 95% si gnificance level. It would be better to make a more modest claim that leaves t hem with no comeback. For instance, by quoting the exact words of some of their predictions, and then showing how they hav e failed to come true. That’s enough. Anything more offers them an opportunity to raise a diversion that clouds the es sential issue.

Steve Goddard says: February 22, 2010 at 11:14 am Andrew P, Statistical analysis would be interesting if were p redicting a trend into the future. I am not making any predictions, so the statistics are meaningless and an unwanted distract ion. It is quite clear that the negative projections of the GCMs have been incorrect so far. It requires no statistical analysis to see that snow extent has not been declining the last tw enty years.

Andrew P says: February 22, 2010 at 1:15 pm If the current 20-yr observational trend is within the range of error predicted by the models then the y are not incorrect. If I predicted 6-12′′ of snow tomorrow and we got 11 .5 would you say I was wrong because we didn’t get exactly 9?

Steve Goddard says: February 23, 2010 at 5:51 am Andrew P, Climate models predicted declining winter snow exte nt. Snow extent has increased. If the error bar is great enough to absorb the opposite polarity, then it isn’t much of a fore cast, is it?

Andrew P says: February 23, 2010 at 3:20 pm No, it probably was never intended to be much use a t forecasting on 20-yr timescales. I’m sure the err or range for the trendline decreases rapidly for longer time periods in which natural variability would play a smaller role than climate change. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend has been so positive for the last 20 years it falls ou tside the error ranges or just inside them. I was just commenting that we can’t kn ow but I would be curious if you could find a sourc e which tried to quantify the error range. You also have to be caref ul because the 20-yr trend MIGHT be outside the err or range but the 30-yr 

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- mark/Watts Up With That? trend is not. Basically your conclusions cannot be very strong or interesting unless you show the mode ls are invalidated by having an observed trend line outside of the error ranges for the models which would be pretty large f or a 20 year period.

Chris says: March 8, 2010 at 11:34 am Insane...global warming is such a misuse of the chara cterization of what is going on. Climate change mea ns that there is more energy in the atmosphere (at least, this time aroun d) and that the global and regional weather pattern s are going to become more erratic and extreme. A temperature change of 2 0C to 30C still means that it can snow, but the hig her temperature means that there can be more humidity in the air, a nd as a result more snow. The truth is that the sci ence is getting better, and the need for accurate and un-biased data has ne ver been needed more than now. And besides...petroleum makes our enemies rich. Who c ares about the climate? We’re all gonna be dead bef ore the sh*t hits the fan anyway.

nina says: March 28, 2010 at 2:16 am IT’S TOOOOOOOOOO LONGGGGG

Blog at Wordpress.com. 

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