Is It Really The Warmest Ever?

Both NOAA and NASA this month announced that 2010 was tied for the warmest year. The UK Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University proclaimed 2010 the second warmest year since 1850.

But after the incredibly cold and snowy winters in 2008/09 and 2009/10 and so far in 2010/11, those claims are falling on increasingly deaf ears. The public doubt about global warming has been increasing given the Climategate disclosures suggesting scientists have been ‘cooking the books’, especially when earlier promises of warm, snowless mid-latitude winters failed miserably.

Back on March 20, 2000, The Independent, a British newspaper, reported Dr. David Viner’s of the UK's Climate Research Unit warning that within a few years snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event.” Indeed, Viner opined, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Similarly, David Parker, at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said that eventually British children could have only “virtual” experience of snow via movies and the Internet.

The last three winters in the UK were forecast by the UK Met Office to be mild and snowless. Instead, brutal cold and snow in the UK has the UK Met Office on their heels. Indeed the cold and snow was a throwback to the age of Dickens in the early 1800s. UK MPs called for Official Parliamentary Probe into whether the UKMO reliance on their ideology and CO2 models had biased their predictions.

In the United States, NOAA echoing the UN IPCC, claimed snow would retreat north with the storm tracks and major cities would get more rain and mild winters. The Union of Concerned Scientists said in 2004 scientists claim winters were becoming warmer and less snowy. In 2008, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bemoaned that children would be robbed of the childhood joys of sledding and skiing in the DC area due to global warming. A year later, the area set a new seasonal snowfall record with 5 to 6 feet of snow and sleds and skis were the only way to get around.

The winter of 2009/10 was the coldest ever in parts of the southeast, and in parts of Siberia and the coldest since 1977/78 or 1962/63 in many parts of the United States, Europe and Asia.

The spirits of alarmists and their cheerleaders in the media were buoyed by the hot summer in the eastern United States and western Russia even though that is the normal result when a strong La Nina follows on the heels of a strong El Nino winter. But as is usually the case in La Ninas, global cooling usually follows within 6 months. Indeed, temperatures plunged as winter approached and this past December (2010) was the second coldest in the entire Central England Temperature record extending back to 1659. It was the coldest ever December in diverse locations like Ireland, Sweden, and Florida.

Reluctantly, alarmists and their cheerleaders in the media changed their tune and the promise of warm and snowless winters with ‘global warming’ morphed into global warming means cold and snowy winters. ABC News even said cold and snowy winters would be the new norm because of global warming. Non sequiturs like that have sadly become ‘the new norm’ in the wacky world of the mainstream media.

In Australia, the government’s Bureau of Meteorology and university alarmist scientists promised major drought and blocked dams and flood mitigation projects, but when devastating floods occurred this summer, they blamed that on global warming and again enviros and government agencies escaped the blame. Other scientists had warned that changes in the Pacific would lead to a return of the flood years like 1974, but they were ignored by agenda driven, green leaning government.

In fact environmentalists and alarmist scientists have reinvented global warming and now attribute all weather to global warming – cold, warm, drought and flood. They call it ‘climate disruption’. But the climate has not been cooperating in a way that is convincing the public they have to sacrifice even more to stop a problem they don’t sense is real. Just imagine if they knew how much they really would cost (trillions – several thousands of dollars per year per family) and how little these deep sacrifices would change the climate (not measureable).

Despite claims to the contrary, in recent years, global temperatures stopped warming. Even Phil Jones of the UK Climate Research Unit after Climategate admitted there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995 (15 years) and between 2002 and 2009, the global temperatures had declined 0.12C (0.22F).

To try and stop the bleeding, NOAA and NASA took steps to reduce or eliminate the cooling.

This aggravated what already was an already a bad situation. CRU data base programmer Ian ‘Harry’ Harris’s frustrated rants in his Climategate log were eye-opening “[The] hopeless state of their (CRU) data base. No uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found...There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations…and duplicates… Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. This whole project is SUCH A MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!”

Furthermore, in a candid interview on the BBC, CRU’s Director Phil Jones admitted his “surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated”.

So should we avoid CRU and focus on NOAA and NASA. The answer is an unequivocal no.

In a Climategate email, Phil Jones acknowledges that CRU mirrors the NOAA data. “Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center.” And NASA uses NOAA data applying their own adjustments. All three data bases suffer from the same flaws.

All have managed to extract a warming trend from data that suggests cyclical changes and little long term trend. See how the three data centers working off the same data have reconstructed the global temperature history. NASA in green show the warmest anomalies, CRU generally the lowest. Part of this is the base period for computing averages (NASA uses the cold 1951 to 1980 30 year period for normals, CRU 1961 to 1990 and NOAA the entire period of record.

All show a warming period from the 1920s to early 1940s, a cooling from the 1940s to 1970s another warming from late 1970s to around 1998, and then as Jones noted a flattening. The warming early in the century before the industrial boom was very similar to that from 1978 to 1998. The cooling post WWII was during the post war boom.

Sorry for your hardship friend. It was 72F here in Dallas today, more tomorrow they weatherliars say. I’ll take it.

I’d prolly be OK in a snowy climate, for a while anyways, but the little woman would never make it. She is freezing when it is 68!

The only snow I ever shoveled was last year helping the neighborhood kids build a snowman. I’m good with that.

Stay safe, and keep dry socks on ;)

I am getting ready for it with water lines sleeved, buried deep and building passive solar heat over those for keeping the ground thawed. The house heating system will be a modified version of the following (FPSF slab, insulated concrete tank sheds, etc.) with wood backup.

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/SpaceHeating/SolarShed/solarshed.htm

The power plants will be hybrids (PV and wind with generator backups) including the following (but with the new MidNite Classic controller and clipper for power gains).

http://www.otherpower.com/turbineplans.shtml

...and of course, backups. Propane, due to likely further radical price hikes, will be used only for cooking and backup (remains stable far longer than diesel in tanks).

I don’t have the option of grid power. The nearest hookup for that is over 2 miles away. If I had that option, things would be done a little differently here. Everyone note: wind and PV solar work very well here, but this weather is more brutal than most people would tolerate. Neither wind nor PV work well in most other places (nowhere near as much wind or sun anywhere else). ...110 mph wind loads, about 330 or so sun-days with little atmosphere overhead.

Even the chicken coop will need a heating plant, ‘cause there aren’t any polar chickens.

As for NASA, at least one group is showing the extended minimum, sun-wise. ...didn’t keep a link. I don’t pay attention to front-page rhetoric anywhere, which is most often for the purpose of keeping most people calm and spending.

And as for cold, I am Cold...as in Mr. Freeze and loving it for over 10 years. I live cold at over 9,000 feet, play cold and teach others about the same. My dogs genetically love cold. ...once lived a few days with no abode or heaters in ~ -50 F to teach others about the joys of coldness. ;-)

BTW, my first American ancestor landed in 1669 and farmed in the New World after that, during the Maunder Minimum.

And my surname arrived in 1668. Beat you by one year. Boarded a ship in Perthshire Scotland set to Virginia. We were also peaceful farmers. Will look into you heating and electricity links. Right now stuck in the eastern end of the Los Angeles megalopolis. Gonna be real fun around here when the food starts running out. Currently stuck between 10 million people and the deserts of the southwest.

The first major problem we will face, besides transportation issues, appears to be roof collapses during winter.

Roofs Collapsing under Tons of Snow in New England

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