More evidence of global warming

[Rocky Rascovich]

Incredible weather scenario unfolding across the central Rockies, specifically Colorado as an unusually strong upper level low settles in across the region... with plenty of cold air aloft, snow has been reported over many of the mountain passes across central and northern Colorado.

I would'nt be surprised to hear of some reports of measurable snow in places like Leadville and the Winter Park/Fraser/Granby corridor by tomorrow morning. I can just imagine what Trail Ridge Road and the Mount Evans road may look like by tomorrow.

Truly an extraordinary event for this early in the season.

Rocky&family

 

[Chris Hayes]

This is deffinately not the typical august for Ohio. In Ohio, when you think of august you think of temperatures in the mid or upper 80s with some 90 degree days. So far, it's only been in the 70s here, with nighttime temperatures in the 50s. Our last day of over 80 was on the 4th, I believe. Gonna be changing though. Going to be in the mid-upper 80s come mid next week. Not too soon either Bring on the global warming!

 

[Jeff Lawson]

It's currently 48F with heavy rain at my place in Littleton. There was a break in the rain yesterday evening, but otherwise, it's been raining pretty much constantly since late Thursday night.

I'm anxious to see if the high peaks in the Front Range have any noticeable snow on them once the clouds clear out. One of the webcams in Vail shows some fresh snow in the Gore Range, at least. I was just up there last weekend for an outdoor wedding; good thing it wasn't held this weekend...

 

[B Ozanne]

Thanks for sharing. By mid-August this isn't that crazy for the high peaks. In a month the leaves will be changing up high.

Remember, GW is responsible for everything...even snow in the Rockies in August.

 

[Jason Harris]

I know this thread is tongue-in-cheek, but there is the warming in the Canadian arctic that is notable:

Record heat forces closure of Canada Arctic park

Posted Sat Aug 2, 2008 3:24pm AEST

A major national park in Canada's Arctic has been largely closed after record high temperatures caused flooding that washed away hiking trails and forced the evacuation of tourists, an official said.

Every year around 500 people visit Auyuittuq National Park, which covers over 19,000 square kilometres on Baffin Island and is dominated by the giant Penny ice cap. The park is popular with hikers and skiers.

The combination of floods, melting permafrost and erosion means that the southern part of the park will remain shut until geologists can examine the damage, Parks Canada spokeswoman Pauline Scott said.

"We've lost huge proportions of what was formerly the trail in the park. It's disappeared - gone," Ms Scott said by phone from Iqaluit, capital of the Arctic territory of Nunavut.

Most visitors walk through the park - which is slightly smaller in area than Israel - starting from the southern edge, near the town of Pangnirtung.

The problems started last month with two weeks of record temperatures on Baffin Island that reached as high as 27 degrees Celsius, well above the July average of 12 C.

This, Ms Scott said, triggered massive melting which sent "a huge pulse of water through the park", washing away 60 kilometres of a trail used by hikers and destroying a bridge over a river that is otherwise impassable.

Earlier this week, once the extent of the damage had become clear, 21 visitors had to be evacuated by helicopter.

"We're not as worried about the flash flooding as we are about the instability of the ground and the slumping and the cracks appearing all along that entire 60 kilometre length (of the trail)," Ms Scott said.

Temperatures in large parts of the Arctic have risen far faster than the global average in recent decades, a development that experts say is linked to climate change.

Last week, giant sheets of ice totalling almost 20 square kilometres broke off an ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic and more might follow later this year, scientists said.

Ms Scott said more problems could be in store for the park.

"We've had lots of hard rain in the south part of Baffin Island in the last five days so we don't know what this is doing to further destabilise melting permafrost, because this is what is causing the erosion," she said.

In June, Pangnirtung declared a state of emergency for three weeks after flash flooding cut off the town's water supply and sewage system.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/02/2322340.htm

 

[B Ozanne]

I know this thread is tongue-in-cheek, but there is the warming in the Canadian arctic that is notable:

Record heat forces closure of Canada Arctic park

How do you know it was human induced global warming?

 

[Greg Blumberg]

I'd like to say that blaming global warming for individual weather events is not a very good way to encourage the climate crisis theory. Global warming refers to climate, not weather. Weather and climate are not one and the same.

 

[Jason Harris]

Re:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Harris View Post
I know this thread is tongue-in-cheek, but there is the warming in the Canadian arctic that is notable:
(B Ozanne)
Record heat forces closure of Canada Arctic park
How do you know it was human induced global warming?
--------------------
I never said it was "human induced," but since this thread is about global warming the article brought up some interesting data exceeding the global average rate of change--and when you've got summer temps more than twice the average and the records are unprecedented and in conjunction with other arctic ice melt, seems like something to add to the discussion.

 

[Tyler Allison]

Weather and climate are not one and the same.

Maybe...but you can't have climate without weather.

 

[Greg Blumberg]

Maybe...but you can't have climate without weather.

Exactly. What I meant in the context of weather was that weather is usually defined as an individual event, such as a tornado outbreak, a big snowstorm, or a day with a lot of rain.

Climate however, mostly deals with averages and long periods of time. Average temperatures, average rainfall, etc. Computing an average takes the entire set of data, including the extremes. You can take an average temperature over a week to a month to a year to five years and so on.

My point is that you cannot compare an individual point with an average (when it comes to weather) and use it to come to one conclusion. You've got to compare an average to an average. News companies do not understand this when they report. They aim to report drama, which usually comes in the form of negativity. So they jump on the "climate crisis" bandwagon that attributes every extreme weather event to global warming. When is the last time the news reported the Arctic ice caps refreezing, or just another normal day?

Just hypothetically, some questions for the above news article:

When was the last time the park had problems similar to this, but not in this magnitude?
When was the last time the park closed for this problem?
Does the park normally have floods during this time of year?

 

[Patrick Marsh]

The analogy often used, "Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get," is not entirely accurate. A better way to say this is

"Climate is the probability distribution function of possible weather outcomes and weather is an event drawn from this climate PDF."

Example PDFs: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Normal_distribution_pdf.png

The key is not to think of the climate as a single value. Climate is the range of values (the PDF) that weather (event in the PDF) can obtain. People get hung up on talking about the mean of the median of the PDF, but most things people (especially us on this forum) care about happen in the wings of the PDF.

Under the premise of global warming, the PDF of temperature shifts toward warmer temperatures. This means that you are more likely to pick a warmer event than a colder event (as compared to the initial PDF). However it is still possible to pick a cold event. What isn't discussed by proponents of the GW theory is what happens to the variance. Does the variance remain constant between the two PDFs meaning that the coldest events in the original PDF aren't possible in the new PDF? If the variance decreases (the red line in the PDF example above) then it is possible to have a climate where you don't get the extreme cold event or the extreme hot events of the orginal climate. If the variance increases dramatically (the blue line), it's possible to have both colder and hotter extremes in the new climate when compared to the original climate.

I think the 100 pound gorilla in the room is what happens to this variance. It is the variance that poses the greatest risk to adaptation under a warming climate. If the mean temperature increases by about 2 degrees over the next 100 years, but there is a low variance, it is possible to adapt over that time. However, if the variance is high and the weather goes from a extreme heat to extreme cold on a regular basis, that is a huge problem. The same goes for the "global cooling" argument as well.

And for full disclosure, my research is in severe thunderstorm environments in both the current and future climates.