Extreme Temperatures
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Snowflake

Snow covers parts of California

Image
© KCRA/NBCCalifornia's Sierra Nevada Mountains get the season's first dusting of snow on Saturday.
The first day of fall looked more like the first day of winter in parts of California!

The area around the Sierra Nevada Mountains hit with snow and heavy rains.

The wet weather even causing slick road conditions and caught residents by surprise - who said they were just in t-shirts a few days ago!

Snow Globe

1975: Climatologists wanted to melt the North Pole - to keep the Earth from freezing

Climate change graph
© Steven Goddard
Climatologist fear global cooling
© Newsweekdenisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
Note that this super cold period from 1975 is now understood by climatologists to have been a super hot period, thanks to pioneering work done at Penn State University.

Igloo

Antarctica Sea ice hitting record highs

Antarctic sea ice_1
© NSIDCAntarctic sea ice extent.
Sea ice surrounding Antarctica hit a record high in August and is on track for another record-breaking month in September. Clocking in at a stunning 7.2 million square miles (18.7 million square kilometers), last month's sea ice extent was 4.5 percent above the 1981 to 2010 average and the largest extent since record-keeping started in 1979, according to data released today from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its monthly State of the Climate Report.

September marks the end of Antarctica's winter, and daily sea ice reports posted online at the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., suggest the growing ice pack has already smashed the all-time record ice extent set in September 2012. This year's massive sea ice reached 7.53 million square miles (19.51 million square km) on Sept. 14, 2013, the NSIDC reports.

The old record was 7.51 million square miles (19.44) million square km. The data is preliminary and the NSIDC website came back online yesterday (Sept. 16) after a three-day shutdown due to the Colorado flooding disaster.

Coffee

The corruption of science: If you still believe in 'climate change' read this...

Obama
© UnknownPut him in the Special Punishment wing. He's earned it
If any business were to submit a prospectus as patently false and deliberately dishonest as the ones used to advance the cause of the global warming industry, its directors would all be in prison by now. (C Jeff Randall)
Does that mean Ed Davey should have followed Chris Huhne into the slammer for his claim to Andrew Neil on BBC Daily Politics the other day that in "a recent analysis of 12,000 climate papers...of the scientists who expressed a view 97 per cent said that climate change was happening and that it was human-made activity."?

Not quite, unfortunately, because nothing Davey has said there is technically untrue. A better candidate for prison, actually, would be whoever tweets under the name @BarackObama. When he Tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" he was promulgating a demonstrable untruth.

Snowflake Cold

German Professor: IPCC in a serious jam... "5AR likely to be last of its kind"

Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
© www.kaltesonne.deProf. Fritz Vahrenholt
And: "Extreme weather is the only card they have got left to play."

So says German Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, who is one of the founders of Germany's modern environmental movement, and agreed to an interview with NoTricksZone. He is one of the co-authors of the German skeptic book "Die kalte Sonne", which took Germany by storm last year and is now available at bookstores worldwide in English under the title: The Neglected Sun.

In Germany Prof. Vahrenholt has had to endure a lot heat from the media, activists, and climate scientists for having expressed a different view. But as global temperatures remain stagnant and CO2 climate sensitivity is being scaled back, he feels vindicated.

Snow Globe Xmas

Earth gains a record amount of sea ice in 2013

Earth has gained 19,000 Manhattans of sea ice since this date last year, the largest increase on record. There is more sea ice now than there was on this date in 2002.
Change in global sea ice area
© Unknown
timeseries.global.anom.1979-2008

Igloo

Better get your woollies!

No doubt about it. The Earth's climate is cooling!

One of the most prescient indicators clearly shows it, namely the Danish Meteorological Institute's daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel. They have been measured for over 50 years which shows a long-term average of 90 days with the air temperature above freezing.

The Year 2013

The year 2013 has seen a dramatic departure from that routine. In 2013, the summer (above freezing temperatures) lasted for only 45 days, one half of the average number of days. Not only did the frost-free days start much later than on average this year, they also ended much earlier, see the figure below. In fact, the frost-free period seen this year was significantly shorter than in other year since 1958, when the recordings began.
Global Cooling
© Danish Meteorological InstituteFig. Observed temperatures in the Arctic (latitude above 80° N) by day of the year in 2013 (red line), the long-term average (green line) and the freezing temperature (blue line); temperatures in degree Kelvin (K).
The new data corroborate other findings of no global warming for the last 18 years. In fact, not a single of the 20-plus climate prediction models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) even shows the recent temperature developments as within their model uncertainties. It begs the question: Is another ice age imminent?

Snowflake Cold

Ice age cometh: No warming left to deny... Global cooling takes over... CET annual mean temperature plunges 1°C since 2000

global temps
© www.woodfortrees.orgGlobal temperatures have fallen over the last 8 years.
Lately we've been seeing and hearing lots media reports of cooling and cold weather extremes. Global temperature data, such as HadCrut 4, show warming has disappeared altogether.

Looking at the data for the last decade or so, one thing stands clear: Global temperatures have been showing many more signs of cooling than warming. Already we are sensing that global temperature has lost the battle to stay up. The HadCrut data series above shows that cooling has gained the upper hand. Indeed warming is now in the history books, having died some 15 years ago.

Igloo

Rare solar cycle has cold implications for UK climate

NASA last week confirmed their prediction that the current solar cycle 24 is likely to be the weakest since 1906.

Intriguingly, the current solar cycle shows a striking similarity with solar cycle 5 which was also very weak, with the same double peak as the current cycle, and ran from approximately the mid 1790s to around 1810.

Solar cycle 6 was weaker still and stretched from around 1810 to the early 1820s.

Solar cycles 5 and 6 were so unusual that they were named the Dalton solar minimum after meteorologist John Dalton and coincided with a period of increasingly cold winters and poor summers.

This type of climate is a result of a jet stream that's positioned further south than normal - caused, it's thought at least in part, by the behaviour of the sun.

The mechanism as to why weak solar cycles may affect the position of the jet stream is poorly understood.

But a more southerly positioned jet stream is the reason why the UK has recently seen a return of cold snowy winters and a run of poor summers.

Cloud Grey

Physicists claim more evidence for link between cosmic rays and cloud formation

clouds
© Unknown
A Danish group that has reproduced the Earth's atmosphere in the laboratory has shown how clouds might be seeded by incoming cosmic rays. The team believes that the research provides evidence that fluctuations in the cosmic-ray flux caused by changes in solar activity could play a role in climate change. Other climate researchers, however, remain sceptical of the link between cosmic rays and climate.

The conventional view of climate scientists, as expressed in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that most of the warming of the Earth's surface over the last few decades is down to the atmospheric build-up of manmade greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. But Henrik Svensmark of the National Space Institute in Denmark believes that an effect related to the Sun's fluctuating magnetic fields may also play a major role in the warming.

For well over a decade Svensmark has studied how the energetic particles reaching Earth from deep space, known as cosmic rays, can influence the planet's climate as a result of changes to the Sun's output. The idea is that cosmic rays seed clouds by ionizing molecules in Earth's atmosphere that draw in other molecules to create the aerosols around which water vapour can condense to form cloud droplets. The low-lying clouds that result then have the effect of cooling the Earth by reflecting incoming sunshine back out to space. Since the Sun's magnetic field tends to deflect cosmic rays away from the Earth, the planet will be warmer when solar activity is high and, conversely, cooler when it is low.

Comment: For more on Henrik Svensmark's research see: The Cloud Mystery