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Memo to anti-science crowd:  Precipitation isn’t temperature!

Another massive mid-Atlantic precipitation event, another piece of nonsense from the anti-science crowd.   Kevin Mooney of the American Spectator actually wrote an article titled, “Snowmageddon” Versus “Overwhelming Scientific Evidence,” which asserts:

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This is a guest repost from Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson.  I may need to add a new category — uber-extreme weather.  The anti-science crowd has been strangely silent about this uber-storm, though they love to tout cold snaps as evidence of nonexistent global cooling (see “Disinformers to media: Please make case for something that isn’t true using data we don’t believe“).  For more on the records set by this story, see Capital Climate’s “Strong Pacific Coast Storm Breaks Rainfall, Low Pressure Records.”

The “strongest winter storm in at least 140 years,” swept through the Southwestern United States last week, “bringing deadly flooding, tornadoes, hail, hurricane force winds, and blizzard conditions.” Rain dumped on Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix, as mountains received up to four feet of snow. Wind gusts exceeding 90 miles per hour, tornadoes, and water spouts spun off the monster storm. Over 159,000 people lost power in the storm’s wake. Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters wrote on Friday that the storm was “truly epic”:

We expect to get powerful winter storms affecting the Southwest U.S. during strong El Niño events, but yesterday’s storm was truly epic in its size and intensity. The storm set all-time low pressure records over roughly 10 – 15% of the U.S.–over southern Oregon, and most of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah.

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I’m just saying (see “Paging Neil Cavuto: UAH global satellite data has record WARMEST day for January“).

Yes, the UAH satellite data just keeps going up (click to enlarge):

This shouldn’t be terribly surprising:  Long-term global warming trend + moderate El Niño = record temperatures, as predicted by NASA climate scientists, among others.

But it has the anti-science crowd scrambling for alternative explanations, since it just seemed so friggin’ cold out for a few days, which everybody knows is the best way to figure out climate trends.  Anyway, here’s everyone’s favorite Czech anti-science guy:

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Another excellent video by Peter Sinclair, the guy who proved former TV weatherman Anthony Watts knows as much about copyright laws as about climate science.

More “Climate Crock of the Week” videos here.

Yes the anti-science crowd, from WattsUpWithThat to FoxNews, have been touting cold snaps over a small fraction of the globe as evidence of the non-exist cooling trend (see “disinformers to media: Please make case for something that isn’t true using data we don’t believe“).

Well now even they have been forced to acknowledge that the global record that’s going to be set this month is, in all likelihood, for warming — because it is showing up on their beloved satellite data (click to enlarge).

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Last week I went on FoxNews so Neil Cavuto could diss global warming because it was cold outside.  Shockingly, I failed to persuade him that no one ever said global warming would turn January into July — though at least he seems to have internalized my message as the “Duh!” part of his opening in the above compilation.  Think Progress has the whole, sad story in this repost:

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It was relatively cool over CONUS in December, but not closet to record-shattering, as NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported (see below).  And, as Capital Climate notes, this 14th coldest December followed the third warmest November.

Also, Alaska had its 17^th warmest December.  It’d be nice if NCDC would combine the two in reporting, since Alaska is getting baked these days.

It was a relatively warm year (again), part of a long-term warming trend even over the tiny fraction of the Earth that CONUS covers, as NCDC reports:

So, no, we’re  not cooling, as inaccuweather meteorologist Bastardi asserts, not even in the contiguous United States.  If you’d like to see just how non-record-breaking December was for CONUS, here’s the chart:

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Climate change is taking place as the earth continues to warm up.

In the UK, 2009 as a whole was the 14th-warmest on record (since 1914). This above-average temperature trend was reflected globally, with 2009 being the fifth-warmest year on the global record (since 1850).

It [the recent cold snap] doesn’t tell us anything about climate change, which has to be looked at in a global context and over longer periods of time.

The UK’s Met Office, part of its Defence Ministry, has an excellent post, “What’s causing the cold weather?”

They explain that unlike the usual weather pattern of the last 20 years, “over the past three weeks the Atlantic air has been ‘blocked’ and cold air has been flowing down from the Arctic or the cold winter landmass of Europe.”   They also note that December wasn’t record-breaking in terms of cold, but merely “the coldest for 14 years and colder than the long-term average.”

More significantly, the Met Office notes (and yes the figure above is their posting of last week’s land-surface temperature anomalies):

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Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi likes to push anti-science global cooling conspiracy theories, which is no doubt why Fox News extremists like Bill O’Reilly love him (see O’Reilly’s weatherman, befuddled Bastardi: “Global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”).

Now Bastardi has a new video, “Worldwide Cold not Seen Since 70s Ice Age Scare,” pushing a very old conspiracy theory.  Of course, he doesn’t actually talk about “worldwide cold,” but just some cold over maybe 20% of the Earth.  Nor does he explain there’s plenty of warmth elsewhere — see Australian weather bureau: “Central Pacific Ocean surface temperatures are now at their warmest level since the El Niño of 1997-98.″

The video truly becomes meteorological malpractice when Bastardi compares today to the 1970s, utterly misleading viewers into thinking that a few days of cold weather over parts of the word somehow undoes the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s climate system that has been demonstrated through direct scientific observation in recent decades.  In fact, “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. “Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming” (see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous”).

Bastardi’s supposedly Accuweather’s expert long-range forecaster, but he’s predicting “we’re going to see more and more of the cold trending here over the next  20 to 30 years”!  Perhaps we should call him Inaccuweather meteorologist.

Since he repeats his old falsehoods, I’m going to reprint my old debunkings — Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus and The NYT’s climate coverage in 1970s was a megaphone for science, not ‘global cooling’ alarmism.

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… experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all — it’s just a blip in the long-term heating trend.

“It’s part of natural variability,” said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, “we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.”

Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., noted that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880.

Leave it to the Associated Press to state the obvious starting with the blunt headline.  They’ve been doing some of the best straight reporting on human-caused climate change (see AP analysis of stolen emails: An “exhaustive review” shows “the exchanges don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”)

In fact, 2009 ranks among the 5 warmest on Earth, and the entire planet just keeps warming thanks to human emissions (see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous”).  It’s not just the surface that’s warming, but we’re also seeing it where climate science said more than 90% of the warming would end up — the oceans (see “Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans, stupid!“)

Robert Henson, author of The Rough Guide to Climate Change also has a good piece in the UK’s Guardian, “Snow, ice and the bigger picture“:  The cold snap tells us little about climate change, but if you want something to blame it on, try the Arctic oscillation,” which notes:

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Human-caused global warming doesn’t turn January into July, and so it’s no surprise we’ve got lots of snow now.  The anti-science crowd keeps confusing precipitation with temperature, seeing almost any snowstorm as evidence we’re not warming (see “Was the “Blizzard of 2009″ a “global warming type” of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?“).  In fact, since climate change will keep bringing more precipitation to certain regions, many northern ski areas will probably have lots of snow for the foreseeable future.  But most major U.S. ski resorts would be devastated if we keep on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions (see Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!).  This CAP repost looks at some impacts on and actions by the ski industry.  The AP photo is a 1.5 megawatt wind turbine built by Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, MA.

The ski industry could be in big trouble if climate change continues unabated, and leaders in the industry are taking steps to make their resorts more sustainable while educating their guests.

Take Aspen, for instance. The resort is already seeing a gradual increase in frost-free days and warmer nights, according to Mike Kaplan, CEO of Aspen Skiing Company, and aspen trees are dying off in large numbers. A study by the Aspen Global Change Institute forecasts that if global carbon emissions continue to rise, Aspen will warm by 14 degrees by the end of this century—giving it a feel similar to Amarillo, TX.

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You can’t deny it’s cold outside in Washington, DC today — any more than you can deny the planet is unequivocally warming and humans are probably the cause of most of that warming, can you?  I mean, the fact that it’s cold in early January isn’t news.  It’s the friggin’ winter!

Oh wait, you say we’re setting records for cold over parts of the country.  But if you accept the temperature station data going back over a century that says we’re setting records for cold over a small part of the globe over a short period of time, then you have to accept this very same data over the entire globe over a long period of time, no?

Yes, the 2000s were  the hottest decade in the temperature record by far, though this decade is all but certain to surpass it easily (see here).

Barring a last-minute cancellation, I’ll be on FoxNews with Neil Cavuto at around 4:20 pm ET to talk about the weather and the climate.  There’s never a bad time to talk about climate science and human-caused global warming, is there?

Anyway, here’s what most of the globe is doing right now, temperature-wise, according to NOAA:

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Our story so far.

The anti-science crowd pushed the nonsensical meme that a big snowstorm in winter is somehow counter-indicative of human-caused climate change.   I then discussed the actual science, which makes clear that is, in fact, nonsense, and, if anything, such a storm is consistent with climate science, though you “can’t make a direct association between any individual weather event and global warming” (see Was the “Blizzard of 2009″ a “global warming type” of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?).

That post incited the anti-science crowd at Newsbusters and elsewhere to do their misinformation thing, falsely asserting that I blamed the story on global warming, which I expected.  But I was surprised that Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard apparently doesn’t know the difference between wind speed and precipitation, apparently believing that all big snowstorms are blizzards, which they are not.  Worse, if you read the comments to my original post, the anti-science crowd apparently believes that any extreme weather event that happens during the winter must be evidence against human-caused global warming.

UPDATE:  Turns out Noel Sheppard is an economist who wrote a “special report” for Business & Media Institute on November 30, 2005 titled, “Media Myths: The Housing Bubble Is Bursting,” attacking Krugman and others for warning of the dangers of a housing bubble!  I’m so reassured that “no housing bubble” guy now says we needn’t fret over climate change either…. h/t Krugman via Douglas in the comments.

And so we come back to a question I’ve asked many times, “Why do the anti-science disinformers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?”

After all, the science is crystal clear that many extreme weather events have increased in recent years — and that there is a link to climate change. The point is such well-established science that even that bastion of denial, the Bush Administration, acknowledged it in a major 2008 report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate.  Yes, alarmists like Bush’s Commerce Sec. Carlos Gutierrez, Energy Sec. Samuel Bodman, and Science Advisor John Marburger III, signed off on the conclusion that:

Heavy precipitation events averaged over North America have increased over the past 50 years, consistent with the observed increases in atmospheric water vapor, which have been associated with human-induced increases in greenhouse gases.

And they signed off on the conclusion that those “Extreme precipitation episodes” now “account for a larger percentage of total precipitation. The most significant changes have occurred in most of the United States.”

Yet the disinformers and their allies try to attack, mock or shout down any talk of such a link whatsoever.

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Brad Johnson at Think Progress notes today:

As President Obama brokered a last-minute deal with China, India, and other nations to jointly fight global warming, American conservatives continued their assault on reason when it comes to climate science. All through the week, right-wingers from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News highlighted the fact that Copenhagen, the site of the international climate negotiations, received snow at Christmastime, which they falsely characterized as a “blizzard.” Now the Drudge Report and others are highlighting the real blizzard sweeping up the East Coast as a supposed contrast to “global warming.”

For Drudge to call the dusting Copenhagen received last week a “blizzard is, of course, laughable.  To suggest it is ironic to get a little snow in mid-December in Denmark during a climate conference is doubly laughable (see “Snow in Copenhagen: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly“).

As for the East Coast storm, my home in DC did get 18 inches of snow — although if this had been a true blizzard, I doubt my flight from Copenhagen on Saturday would have been allowed to land in Dulles airport and I wouldn’t of been able to get home 12 hours after I left Denmark.  Certainly temperatures in the DC area have been in the normal range over the past week — it’s only the precipitation that has been very anomalous (for actual data on recent warming trend in the U.S., see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“).

In any case, I have previously discussed the scientific literature, which makes clear that we have seen an increase in intense precipitation in this country, just as climate science predicted we would (see Why the “never seen before” Fargo flooding is just what you’d expect from global warming, as Obama warns).   The NOAA-led report by 13 federal agencies Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States issued earlier this year makes the same point.

I’ll review the science shortly, but first, TP points out:

Even CNN’s Ed Henry piled on, saying “DC snowstorm chills Pelosi’s global warming trip,” calling it a “strange twist.”

If having snow around the holidays on the East Coast were strange, I doubt the song “White Christmas” would have been written.  Ah, but what about record snow?  Capital Climate reports that the DC snowstorm has set multiple records (previous in parentheses):

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A bunch of illegally hacked UK e-mails storm the anti-scientific side of the blogosphere at the same time as an uber-extreme weather event hits Britain.  I guess when it rains, it pours — literally:

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Thom Porter, staff chief at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) talks about the changes he has witnessed in the Californian climate and how it is increasing the risk of forest fires:

A bit strange this comes via a story from the UK’s Telegraph, but an important, science-based message from someone in the front lines nonetheless:

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