Hey Algore! About Those Hurricanes…

It seems there is a new lie exposed every day. Just days after finding out there has been no global warming since 1995, there is this….

Above: Hurricane ACE data from Ryan Maue. Note where 2009 is in the scheme of things. More here.

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Read it all at Watts Up With That?

Speaking of Connecting The Players…

Anthony Watts had this video made so all can understand (maybe) who is involved in the UEA-CRU climate research fraud.

Watts Up With That?

Solar Cycle 24 Still Setting Records

The ice age is looking a lot more likely than any warming at all. As always Watts Up With That? Has all the details.

Spotless

Out of the numbered solar cycles, #24 is now in 7th place. Only 5, 6, and 7 of the Dalton Minimum and cycles 12, 14, and 15 of the Baby Grand Minimum had more spotless days.  Since we’ve now beaten cycle #13, we are clearly now competitive with the Baby Grand minimum.

Here’s a table of how the NOAA panel’s new SC#24 prediction is doing:

November 2008:  predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 83.7)
December 2008:  predicted = 1.80, actual = 1.69 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 84.7)
January 2009:  predicted = 2.10, actual = 1.71 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 73.2)
February 2009: predicted = 2.70, actual = 1.67 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 55.6)
March 2009: predicted = 3.30, actual = 1.97 (predicted peak of 90 suggests an actual peak of 53.8)

April would require the October data which is still very incomplete.  If this analysis intrigues you, I’d be happy to keep you updated on it.  Please also find a couple of  interesting graphs attached as images.

The Graphs are HERE.

Solar Cycle 24 May Be Starting

Well dang, it’s about time. Watt’s Up With That? has the details.

Leif Svalgaard has been saying for sometime now that Solar Cycle 24 seems to be getting underway. Seeing sunspot group 1024 today, I’m tending to agree.

The magnetic polarity (seen on the SOHO magnetogram)  of the spot group combined with the middle latitude indicates it is a cycle 24 spot.

From Spaceweather.com

The most active sunspot of the year so far is emerging in the sun’s southern hemisphere: movie. Sunspot 1024 has at least a dozen individual dark cores and it is crackling with B-class solar flares. This morning, amateur astronomer David Tyler caught one of the flares in action from his backyard solar observatory in England:

Read the whole thing here.

Monday Quick Bites

What, me worry?

Some Solar Cycle Information. Two pieces from Watts Up With That?

The Double Quiet Sun
Usually, and that means in the past year, when you look at the false color MDI image from SOHO, you can look at the corresponding magnetogram and see some sort of disturbance going on, even it it is not visible as a sunspot, sunspeck, or plage area.
Not today.
Is That a Sunspot?
Yesterday I lamented that the sun was blank, not only on the SOHO MDI, but also the magnetogram. Within a couple of hours, one sunspeck appeared. I cited Murphy’s Law. As one commenter put it: ” I think if you check back for the last six months or so whenever you mention the lack of sunspots on here, one shows up.”.

And a couple from Green Hell Blog

New planetary burden: Meat-eating pets
Paul Greenberg opines today in the New York Times that dogs and cats should go vegan. Writing about his cat, Greenberg says,

California (of course) to limit car color choices More evidence of California Communism
Carbon Control News reported today that California regulators have proposed that car makers use so-called “cool” paints to reduce the interior temperature of cars, thereby reducing air conditioning use and, consequently, improving gas mileage.

And some picks from around the blogasphere.

Skeptics Global Warming
We’ve got an update on the Companies Lobbying to Raise Your Energy Taxes.

HE’S MY PRESIDENT, BUT I DON’T HAVE TO LIKE IT
If I hear one more person point out that Obama is the president and that it’s our duty to support him, I just might run amok. For one thing, I resent being reminded that he actually won the election and that it’s not all a bad dream from which I’ll awaken as soon as the alarm clock rings. For another, there was a very good reason that I voted for John McCain, and it certainly had nothing to do with my having great expectations of the man, and everything to do with my conviction that Obama was a left-wing ideologue.

The Challenge Ahead: More than a Third of Senate Now “Swing” Vote on Climate – A high hurdle: of the 36 Senators identified as swing votes, all but seven must be convinced to vote “Yes” in order to secure passage of any climate policy in the U.S. Senate. (Breakthrough Institute)
Think we should encourage Senators to hold the line? Have your say and register your vote here.

The Ice Age Cometh: More Evidence

The evidence is mounting and it is exposing Al Gore and his cult for the frauds they are. But what about the danger of pointing people in exactly the wrong direction? Maybe when the fraud is exposed he and his cronies will be prosecuted. Here is an article about the coming ice age. The two excerpts are the beginning and end. Be sure to read it all.

There is also a Must See video below.

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Snip~~~~~

About 325,000 years ago, at the peak of a warm interglacial, global temperature and CO2 levels were higher than they are today. Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.

The AGW theory is based on data that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a wanton disregard for the ‘big picture’ of long-term climate change. The data from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology, paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

You should read the whole thing.

And here is a fantastic video explaining the upcoming ice age. It’s about 10 min. long and is very easy to understand.

H/T Tom Nelson

And if you want to know how the sun influences our climate, there is no better place to visit than Anthony Watts’ Watts Up With That? Solar Cycle 24 is having a hard time getting started and that may lead to a new ice age, or at the very least, colder temperatures world wide.

Sunspots Still Scarce, The World Gets Colder

Ice and snow reach from coast to coast and more is on the way. The rest of the world is setting new records for cold, snow and ice too. But I live up here in Anthony Watts’ neck of the woods, actually I’m about 100 miles to the north of him and have about 20″ of snow on the ground, so I’ll stick with the U.S. for now. Here’s a picture from a few days ago on the way out of my town.

Winter in Northern California

Okay, that’s not all that unusual around here, but back to the sunspots. Check out this piece by Joseph D’Aleo at ICECAP. We’ve reached #2 for most recorded sunspotless days. Drop by the site and give a little love if you can, they do a helluva job fighting the Global Warming Cult.

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Fellow AMS

With the number of sunspotless days reaching 16 so far this month, we have now exceeded 1912 as the 2nd quietest sun year since 1900. Only 1913 ranked higher with 311 days. With 12 more days this month as of this writing, we could reach as high as 266 days. Note that 2007 also ranked in the top 10.

See larger graph here.

This is the month by month comparisons of sunspotless days this solar minimum (red) through November and the last minimum in the mid 1990s (blue).

See larger graph here.

The geomagnetic activity has also been extremely low. This is the Ap Index. This plot displays monthly average Ap values and 13-month running smoothed Ap values. The most recent data are always USAF estimates; official values are included as they become available.

See larger graph here.

And longer term here:

See larger graph here.

See this Anthony Watts post on the massive breach of the earth’s magnetic field discovered by NASA and the possible solar role in the lowering of the earth’s Ionosphere to an all-time low altitude. See full post pdf here. See more on the ways the sun may affect our climate here.

You’ll also find great stories like these at THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX.

Solar Cycle 24, Where are you?

Anthony Watts has this great illustration about recent solar activity.

I say it’s more evidence of a cooling trend rather than the dreaded  Global Warming. The Ice Age Cometh? Go see the details at Watts Up With That?

More Lies From The Global Warming Cult

An honest mistake? I highly doubt it. “Dr.” James Hansen has been lying about global warming since the ’80′s, and it seems he’s quite practiced at it. I would bet The Goracle got his ideas for his GoreBull Worming scam from those “88 Senate hearings. See what you think.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.  Read It All Here

How about a little background. Look at the astoundingly incompetent and downright dishonest people pushing the Global Warming Lies. Hansen got it all started back in ’88 by giving Algore the great lie in a US Senate committee headed by Algore. “Dr.” James Hansen’s field is actually in Physics and Mathematics, not a thing to do with climatology or even meteorology. In other words, he’s not even qualified to do the evening weather forecast. Check It Out No wonder Algore is an idiot.
And take a look at the qualifications it takes to be chairman of the IPCC, and share a Nobel Peace Prize with The Goracle. (Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science) Go ahead, Take a Look

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

No Qualifications Required

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world’s governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

I first started hearing about the 10 degree Russia mistakes at Anthony Watt’s site, Watts Up With That? All the info you could ever use about climate is there.

Global Warming Debate in London

So they are having another Gorebull Worming debate this week in London. What do you think happened? Yep, right on cue, Record snow and cold. The curse of Algore is alive and well.  You’d think these people would get the hint.

Global Warming in London courtesy of Algore

London

Snow fell in London for the first time in October since 1934, while thermometers fell below zero across the country. Hertfordshire saw up to two inches of snow.

With road gritters out in some areas, night-time temperatures dropped to a bitter 24F (-4C) in eastern England last night with similar lows forecast for tonight. In northern Scotland, gale force winds left temperatures feeling much lower.

Even daytime conditions were unseasonably cold, with Manchester managing a high of only 41F (5C) compared to the 51F (10C) usually expected at this time of year. Source

Florida

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Temperatures across the Southeast including northern Florida hit record-breaking lows early Thursday and a hard freeze extended as far south as Ocala, in the heart of Florida’s citrus country, according to the National Weather Service.

“We’ve had records breaking all over,” said Ron Block, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Tallahassee.  More here

Switzerland

A heavy, wet snow snapped trees, which fell across tracks. The most affected regions included Zurich, Schaffhausen in the north and the areas around the Gotthard pass in central Switzerland.

Passengers moving between Spiez and Interlaken south of Bern were forced to take buses when rail service there was interrupted around 7am. Broken branches and trees blocked roads.

Farmers in the Bernese Oberland also awoke to snow-related problems. Damaged fences allowed their cows to wander freely.

According to MeteoNews, the Swiss lowlands received the most snow for any October since records began in 1931. Zurich received 20cm, beating a record of 14cm set in 1939. Source

New Jersey

Some folks in my home state of New Jersey woke up to a blanket of snow the same week as Halloween. The state’s largest daily headlined the story as “October Surprise: Snowfall snarls traffic and cuts power to 62,000 homes.” In a swath of northern counties, snow fell as if it were mid-winter. Fourteen inches of snow fell at High Point State Park. More Here

The Ice Age Cometh.

I was surfing Anthony Watts’ site just a bit ago. According to NOAA, The US has broken or tied 115 cold records, and set 63 new snow records. Go check out the details at Watts Up With That?

Polar Bears Sittin’ Pretty

Polar bears will be having an easy time in the Arctic after reading this from Joseph D’Aleo at ICECAP.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Arctic Ice Increase Well Ahead of 2007 Pace

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Fellow of the AMS

A very cold polar vortex with a strongly positive Arctic Oscillation is causing arctic ice to increase rapidly and the extent is well ahead of last year on this date.

See full size image from Cryosphere today shows the side-by-side comparison here
Also see how in this image, the 2008 extent rapidly coming in line with other recent years and departing from 2007.

See full size image that shows extent by date for each of the last half dozen years
here

Snowcover is also rapidly increasing. recall last year even after the record low summer ice extent, by late January, the hemisphere was at an all-time record for extent of snow and ice.

See full size image of last week of last January snow and ice extent here.

When the arctic oscillation flips negative, some of the very cold air will make an early appearance into middle latitudes in North America and Eurasia. Watch for an early snowstorm.

See also this story on Watts Up With That on showing the arctic had less ice 6,000-7,000 years ago. See this comprehensive listing of recent story Scientists Counter Latest Arctic Warmth as Psuedoscience.

About That Global Warming….

Where did the global warming go? It sure isn’t here in the northwest. My low temps were in the low 20′s for a week, last Friday there were snow flurries all around the mountains up here and we’ve just now warmed to a sweat inducing 31 degrees this morning. Here are a couple of great articles from ICECAP on the subject of Global Cooling.

!UPDATE! Another great piece by Anthony at Watts Up With That?

————————————————————————————–

Cold Pacific Brings Dramatic Cooling to Northwestern North America

Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008. Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August. “In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound,” said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. “On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.

“In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.” Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too. “It’s been a long time on most glaciers where they’ve actually had positive mass balance,” Molnia said. That’s the way a scientist says the glaciers got thicker in the middle.

Cold temperatures set several new record lows this weekend, including a low of 22 Saturday in downtown Pendleton, Oregon that broke a 118 year-old record of 24. Record lows started falling Thursday with a new low of 20 for Meacham, four degrees cooler than the previous record from 2006, according to information from the Web site for the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Pendleton.

In northern California, a record cold snap in Mendocino County over the weekend caused little damage to wine grapes but chilled the hearts of farmers who already have suffered huge losses this year. “It’s just one more thing on top of one more thing. You kind of hold your breath,” said Potter Valley wine grape grower Bill Pauli. Temperatures dropped to 31 degrees in the Ukiah Valley on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, the coldest Oct. 12 morning since record keeping began in Ukiah in 1893, said Troy Nicolini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Eureka. The previous record was 34 degrees in 1916.

Farmers in Redwood Valley and other cooler regions in Mendocino County reported temperatures as low as 27 degrees. An estimated 30 percent to 50 percent of that county’s wine grape crop had yet to be harvested when the frost hit, killing the tops of unprotected vines and effectively freezing the ripening process.

————————————————————————————-

Arctic Ice Increasing Rapidly By Joseph D’Aleo

As Anthony Watts blogged last week, the arctic ice is increasing at a very rapid rate. You can see how we fell short of last year’s record extent and have recently been rebounding at the fastest rate of the years shown.

See larger image here

Hans LaBohm points out the side by side comparison is dramatic between this date last year and this year.

See larger image here

The recent enhanced warm season melting of the arctic ice has precious little to do with greenhouse gases but is a cyclical phenomena related to multidecadal cycles in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Atlantic appears to be the most important. The Atlantic has been in its warm mode since 1995 with a peak around 2004 and 2005. Warm water from the Atlantic makes its way into the arctic through the Barents Sea and the Pacific through the Bering Strait.

Last year before the alarmists took control, the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) summarized the role of ocean cycles very well in October 2007 in this way:

“One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, points out that pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic, which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia. These pulses of water are helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to reduce winter ice growth.  Another scientist, Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, reports evidence of changes in ocean circulation in the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean. Through a complex interaction with declining sea ice, warm water entering the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait in summer is being shunted from the Alaskan coast into the Arctic Ocean, where it fosters further ice loss. Many questions still remain to be answered, but these changes in ocean circulation may be important keys for understanding the observed loss of Arctic sea ice.”

Note Rutger’s Jennifer Frances found a similar relationship between Pacific and Atlantic water temperatures. Ignore the comment in the ‘abstract’ that the ocean changes are ‘consistent’ with greenhouse warming as we have seen the ocean changes are cyclical and predictable and quite natural. Dr. Willie Soon also found a strong correlation with solar irradiance which may ultimately drive these ocean cycles of warming and cooling.

With a cooling of the Pacific and a less warm North Atlantic and a long, deep solar minimum, the ice should continue to rebound in the next few years. Read more on the arctic and Greenland here.

The Ice Age Cometh

More evidence that Global Warming is over. In reality, it is evidence it never started in the first place. Both are from ICECAP

Is This The Beginning of Global Cooling

By Allan MacRae

Many scary stories have been written about the dangers of catastrophic global warming, allegedly due to increased atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) from the combustion of fossil fuels. But is the world really catastrophically warming? NO. And is the warming primarily caused by humans? NO.

Since just January 2007, the world has cooled so much that ALL the global warming over the past three decades has disappeared! This is confirmed by a plot of actual global average temperatures from the best available source, weather satellite data that shows there has been NO net global warming since the satellites were first launched in 1979.

See larger image here.

Since there was global cooling from ~1940 to ~1979, this means there has been no net warming since ~1940, in spite of an ~800% increase in human emissions of carbon dioxide. This indicates that the recent warming trend was natural, and CO2 is an insignificant driver of global warming.

Furthermore, the best fit polynomial shows a strong declining trend. Are we seeing the beginning of a natural cooling cycle? YES. Further cooling, with upward and downward variability, is expected because the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has returned to its cool phase, as announced by NASA this year.

Global warming and cooling have closely followed the phases of the PDO. The most significant pattern of PDO behavior is a shift between “warm” and “cool” phases that last 20 to 30 years. In 1905, the PDO shifted to its “warm” phase. In 1946, the PDO changed to its “cool” phase. In 1977, the PDO returned to its “warm” phase and produced the current warming. In 2007-8, the PDO turned cold again, so we can expect several decades of naturally-caused global cooling.

Some scientists are predicting that this cooling will be severe, and is a greater threat to humanity than global warming ever was. Meanwhile, politicians are still obsessing about global warming.

And here’s another fine article from Anthony Watts.

Arctic Sea Ice Melt Season Officially Over; Ice Up Over 9% from Last Year

By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

We have news from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). They say: The melt is over. And we’ve added 9.4% ice coverage from this time last year. Though it appears NSIDC is attempting to downplay this in their web page announcement today, one can safely say that despite irrational predictions seen earlier this year, we didn’t reach an “ice free north pole” nor a new record low for sea ice extent. Here is the current sea ice extent graph from NSIDC as of today, notice the upturn, which has been adding ice now for 5 days:

Here is what they have to say about it: “The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era.  While above the record minimum set on September 16, 2007, this year further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years. With the minimum behind us, we will continue to analyze ice conditions as we head into the crucial period of the ice growth season during the months to come.

Despite overall cooler summer temperatures, the 2008 minimum extent is only 390,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), or 9.4%, more than the record-setting 2007 minimum. The 2008 minimum extent is 15.0% less than the next-lowest minimum extent set in 2005 and 33.1% less than the average minimum extent from 1979 to 2000.

Determining with certainty when the minimum has occurred is difficult until the melt season has decisively ended. For example, in 2005, the time series began to level out in early September, prompting speculation that we had reached the minimum. However, the sea ice contracted later in the season, again reducing sea ice extent and causing a further drop in the absolute minimum.

We mention this now because the natural variability of the climate system has frequently been known to trick human efforts at forecasting the future. It is still possible that ice extent could fall again, slightly, because of either further melting or a contraction in the area of the pack due to the motion of the ice. However, we have now seen five days of gains in extent. Because of the variability of sea ice at this time of year, the National Snow and Ice Data Center determines the minimum using a five-day running mean value.

In addition, NSIDC will issue a formal press release at the beginning of October with full analysis of the possible causes behind this year’s low ice conditions, particularly interesting aspects of the melt season, the set-up going into the important winter growth season ahead, and graphics comparing this year to the long-term record. At that time, we will also know what the monthly average September sea ice extent was in 2008 – the measure scientists most often rely on for accurate analysis and comparison over the long-term.”

It will be interesting to see what they offer in the October press release. Plus we’ll be watching how much ice we add this winter, and what next year’s melt season will look like. Hopefully we won’t have a new crop of idiots like Lewis Gordon Pugh trying to reach the “ice free north pole” next year. Read more here.

Global Cooling: Signs Say Yes

I’ve found a couple of great articles pointing out the continued global cooling trend. The first points out our continuing winter, the record snowfall, and the unusual places it has snowed.

IT STARTED IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE WINTER OF 2007

A rare winter snowstorm dusted South Africa’s commercial capital Johannesburg early on Wednesday June 26 closing mountain passes and claiming at least one life. ‘SNOWBURG’ trumpeted the headline of Johannesburg’s Star newspaper. Gleeful children built snowmen in Johannesburg’s Zoo Lake Park, while families could be seen carrying snowballs back to their cars, fast melting souvenirs of the city’s first significant snowfall, the first real snowfall in more than a generation.

On July 9th 2007, thousands of Argentines cheered in the streets of Buenos Aires got covered by snow. The Argentinean capital was white again after nearly a century.

Last time it snowed there was June 22nd 1918. It snowed for the first time in history in some towns of the Santa Fe Province. The snow event followed a bitterly cold month of May that saw subfreezing temperatures, the coldest in 40 years in Buenos Aires. That cold wave contributed to an energy crisis and dozens of deaths. This 2007 May figured among the coldest in recent decades also in Uruguay and Southern Brazil.

Then came summer but the cold didn’t give up entirely, January 10 saw snow in southern Argentina hilly areas, the equivalent of a July snow in Denver.

In Australia which experienced its coldest June on record, Australian ski resorts enjoyed the best season in seventeen years with snow dumping across New South Wales and Victoria. Summer there too was cool and ended very early with snow by late February (the equivalent of our August). We have barely had a summer this year,” said Gary Grant, New South Wales Perisher Blue’s general manager of marketing. “It’s felt as though it’s remained cold since the end of the 2007 season, apart from a few warm days, there air has always had a nip in it.”

In September, Antarctica set a new record for ice extent in the satellite era and ironically stayed at record high levels through much of this past summer. Currently the ice extent is running 60% ahead of last year at this time.

THEN CAME THE NORTHERN WINTER

The trend for record snows in some unusual areas continued but even some normally snowy areas had all time records snowfall. In the United States the heavy snow band ran from the Pacific Northwest through the Central Rockies across the Plains and Upper Midwest, Great Lakes into northern New England. The snow was even heavier in southern Canada.

In the Oregon Cascades, the snow was so heavy, roofs were collapsing. In Steamboat Springs, CO, over 100 inches fell in every winter month for the first time ever and set a new record for seasonal snowfall with 450 inches with weeks more to go. Rendevous Bowl which has a 33 year average of 320 inches, had 566 inches as of March 25.

Madison, Wisconsin blew away there all-time snow record 100.4 inches of snowing exceeding their old record by 33%! New seasonal snowfall records were set in Michigan in places like Ann Arbor , in Ohio where Youngstown had well over 100 inches, 52” above normal and for the winter (December through February for Burlington, VT and Concord, NH.

Much More Here

Now we have this from Anthony Watts. It’s about the solar cycle that hasn’t started yet, and may portend more an extended cooling.

Solar cycle minimum at the earliest in second half of 2008?

Current SOHO: The Sun is blank again

The outlook for solar activity continues to be pushed further back as cycle 23 spots continue, such as the group of 3 seen last week, but no cycle 24 spots are being seen. NASA’s convened panel of scientists obviously missed their mark of consensus in predicting cycle 24 would start in March 2008. There is growing concern over the delay in the start of cycle 24. Now a new prediction portends more delay. If we go to May or later before the solar min is reached, cycle 23 will be the longest cycle since the late 1800s. Now it is looking like cycle 24 may not get started until late 2008 or early 2009.

The rest is here: Watts Up With That?

You can decide for yourself, but considering global warming stopped in 1998 and cooling has begun, I’d say the Goracle has explaining to do. Of course he won’t debate anyone on the real facts, so we have to decide for ourselves.