“Getting ready for more global warming: Heathrow airport triples snow clearance fleet“ (2011-09-29). Anthony Watts drags out the hoary old “Snow! Somewhere!” post, this time trying to suggest that “snowier” weather in Britain means “colder” weather everywhere. Thus disproving Global Warming. Again. After-all the BBC tells us so!
Don’t believe the lyin’ BBC when they also report that “the average [UK] first flowering date has been earlier in the last 25 years than in any other period” or that “UK plants are flowering for a second time this year because of the unseasonably warm weather.”
I’m commenting this time because these kinds of posts are like an idiot’s meaningless drool and Anthony is just… so… dribbly.
Forget that regional weather is not an indicator of global climate. Forget that even the regional trend is actually a warming one. Forget that global warming is leading to higher atmospheric moisture levels and that warmer winter air is what produces snow. Forget that Heathrow airport might be investing in snow-removal equipment for business reasons unrelated to climate. Hell, forget that weather is not climate! (That’s kind of mandatory in Anthony’s bizzaro world.)
Just bob your head along to Anthony’s tuneless melody.
In the comments we see that the presence of winter boots in UK shops is proof that Global Warming isn’t happening, as well as wide agreement that the UK Met Office, like all government agencies, is corrupt and incompetent. I also love the always-pompous Smokey’s confusion over the failure of the UK December trend to match the global December trend. Clearly someone hasn’t faked the data carefully enough.
Wott's Up With That? 
See! Weather is completely ineffable and unpredictable! That’s why making unprecedented changes to climate forcings is sure to work out well!
Yes the very fact that they still make snowploughs and icebreakers is further proof , if proof were needed, that AGW is a gubmint plot/scam. Apropos icebreakers did you notice that story that the Russians had opened up th N.E. Passage for the first time. One of the icebreakers was called the Yamal . Google “Yamal 06” to see the irony in that.
There are five agencies that report temperature anomalies. I graph them all and average them to avoid bias. The average shows that there has been no average global temperature increase for a decade. They are graphed through August, 2011 in the pdf made public 9/22/11 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true. Links to them are provided in the pdf made public 3/10/11.
Also included in these pdfs is a simple equation that calculates the average global temperatures (agt) since 1895 with 88.4% accuracy (87.9% if CO2 is assumed to have no influence). The future average global temperature trend that this equation calculates is down. The huge effective thermal capacitance of the oceans (about 100 times everything else) will cause the decline to be only about 0.13°C per decade. The decline may be as much as 0.22°C per decade if the sun goes really quiet.
[Your fixation with “simple equations” for complex systems is quite amusing. I love your note that “a, b, c, and d are coefficients [yet] to be determined”. Am I correct in inferring that your profound discovery is nothing more than wild-eyed dial twisting? – Ben]
Are they putting icebreakers on the runways at Heathrow? Sea level rise must be worse than I thought.
It seems basic science is snark at WUWT. Describing reality is a reprehensible modus operandi according to Mr. Watts!! This exchange is in the comments:
[I got a snort from that. Shorter Anthony – “I know you are, but what am I?” – Ben]
‘Sceptical’ is stepping on Watt’s turf by the use of the word sceptical, they think that sceptical means someone who doesn’t accept AGW.
These guys are making a new language to support their split from reality.
Ben,
You are totally incorrect which you may have discovered if you had looked at the rest of the paper. The coefficients a, b, c, & d and the resulting coefficients of determination are provided in a table on page 3 of the pdf made public 9/24/11.
Note that ‘a’ is just an offset, much like the derived constant (the one that is not multiplied by the independent variable) in a linear regression, the influence of CO2 is eliminated by setting ‘d’ to zero, and ‘c’, the Effective Sea Surface Temperature oscillation range, is between 0.34 and 0.39. That leaves only one ‘dial to twist’ to get a higher coefficient of determination than anyone else has.
Weather is extremely complex and most Climate Scientists seem to get lost in the minutia. Average global temperature, however is quite simple and that is what the five agencies report, what has been referred to in falsely asserting AGW, and what I have accurately calculated and predicted. I welcome any specific technical comments.
[Hmmm. I don’t think I’m the only one questioning your hand-cranked idea… – Ben]</em]
Technical comment: weather is extremely complex; weather is not climate nor is climate weather and, of course: climate is extremely simple. Increase the concentration of a GHG and you get warming. Well that was dead simple all along, no?
Dan Pangburn
The sun has already been quiet, during the warmest decade on record. Every year since 2001 was warmer than any year on record, before 1998.
Ten of the warmest years on record are in the last 12 years.
The warming in the past decade has been a little less than in previous decades but still substantial.
See: “How Fast is Earth Warming?”
Dan, you are no Tamino
In fact, as Tamino shows, after adjusting for variables like volcanos, solar irradiance, ENSO cycles and such, the warming hasn’t slowed at all. – In all 5 data sets
Sailrick,
Saying that the average global temperatures are the hottest on record (the ‘record’ starts during recovery from the Little Ice Age) is about as profound as saying that you drove 10,000 miles last year and the last 10 days were among the greatest distance traveled since the beginning of the year.
You have been deceived by a linear regression of the last 30 full years which ended with the 2010 El Nino. How this happens is discussed under Temperature Trends on page 11 of the pdf made public 4/10/10 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true The agt has dropped since 2010 with the average through August, 2011 shown as the most recent data point on the page 5 graph in the pdf made public 9/24/11. Temperatures went up for the first 20 of the 30 years but have been flat for the latest decade. Showing anything else would be cherry picking. The links are provided so you can check it yourself.
“Dan, you are no Tamino.” Thank you. Eventually, as the CO2 continues to go up and the temperature doesn’t, Tamino will have to come around.
[So only trends over spans greater than 200 years or less than 2 are real? Perhaps you spell potato with an e like that other Dan… – Ben]
Maybe it would help you to read it again. A linear regression on the latest 30 years is misleading. If a linear (or polynomial) regression is the extent of your knowledge then you are stuck with what others do. Curve-fitting, such as what Tamino did, has NO predictive ability.
I derived an equation which is based on the physical phenomena involved and thus DOES have predictive ability as I demonstrated in the 9/24/11 pdf by accurately predicting agt for 20 years and counting as shown graphically. All information and/or links to it are provided so the equation is VERIFIABLE.
Wikipedia describes the coefficient of determination which allows comparison of any measurement data set with calculated values irrespective of the shape of the plot. I describe the process fairly well in the pdf made public 5/24/10 and refine it a bit in the pdf made public 3/10/11. The pdf made public 9/24/11 uses the equation in some revealing ‘what if’ studies.
The key to the equation is that it takes the time-integral of sunspot numbers (which is a proxy for energy retained by the planet) properly reduced by the time-integral of energy radiated from the planet. This is discussed more thoroughly in the pdf made public 4/10/10.
[So all the actual trained scientists are wrong and you’re right? I’ll wait for your Nature paper before getting sucked into your vortex of arm-waving. When will that be “made public”? – Ben]
Last year’s original story was about Heathrow’s woeful lack of preparation.
“UK snow: ‘national disgrace’ – Heathrow owners accused of under-investing in cleaning equipment.”
“Heathrow suffered from “chronic under-investment” ahead of this winter compared with its domestic and European rivals, it was claimed yesterday.”
“…While Gatwick [at less than half the size] has 150 people clearing snow and ice, Heathrow had only 50 “snow specialists.”
“Frankfurt airport, which cancelled only around 25 per cent of its flights yesterday, has 42 snow ploughs compared to 28 at Heathrow, which cancelled two thirds of services…”
The Telegraph, 21Dec,2010
So, here’s a story about Heathrow’s remedies for 2011. Which we might expect to include some overkill, to even further reduce the number of cancellations and for good public relations.
Anthony spices it up for his regulars by adding the words, “Global Warming.” But the story seems more like an adaptation to the simple reality of the last snowfall.
Oh Dear isn’t this exactly what the warmists have been doing here in Britain because we happened to have four days of hot weather?
When it suits you its weather when it doesn’t its Climate.
You really are a sad tosser
[We’re laughing at Anthony et. al. trying, for the thousandth time, to inflate a “weather” news item into a global warming refutation. Perfectly consistent, as is your stupidity. – Ben]
Actually, I’ve seen no articles claiming the recent hot spell could be a manifestation of Global Warming. But, I do think the continued campaigning by the like of ‘enid’ might have had an effect on the media – ‘well done’ them for shouting down a science, sorry I mean ‘refuting’ it with Anthony’s warped logic. ‘I refute this stone by kicking it!’.
Ben,
The usual journals, Nature, etc. are hopelessly biased. The reviewers that they usually assign to climate related papers are meteorology types who are not knowledgeable in a lot of relevant science and are unaware of it. Some of the disciplines that they may be deficient in include computer modeling, mathematics, heat transfer, thermodynamics and feedback theory, all of which are familiar to an experienced Mechanical Engineer like me.
Consider also this quote by Richard Horten, editor of the Lancet “But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”
Perhaps you also consider the lack of increasing temperature to be a “travesty”.
[Your excuses remind me of Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch. If you weren’t nailed to your perch by those damn reviewers, you’d muscle up to the bars of your cage and… voom! The quote you consider so conclusive is about genetically modified foods and medical research, not the physical sciences. Please also spare us your dishonesty in pretending you don’t know that the “travesty” remark was about incomplete monitoring of a particular component of the oceanic environment rather than inferred disgust with climate science in general. Of course the University of Alabama in Huntsville reports that “the lack of increasing temperature” has been measured as rising at a rate of 0.140°C per decade since 1978. You’re nothing more than a textbook example of confirmation bias. – Ben]
Since links to my stuff have been printed and no one has identified any specific technical comments that show any error in my work, I am out of here.
[Yes, pat yourself on the head and scurry off. – Ben]
“meteorology types… are not knowledgeable in a lot of relevant science and are unaware of it. Some of the disciplines that they may be deficient in include computer modeling, mathematics, heat transfer, thermodynamics and feedback theory,”
Tell us Dan, exactly what classes do you think meteorologists and climatologists… hell even oceanographers, take in grad school? You’ve pretty much listed out a typical (though partial) master’s degree curriculum in marine and atmospheric sciences.
“The usual journals, Nature, etc. are hopelessly biased.”
I always wonder why mathematicians are never under attack. I mean, they all say the same and kick out those who think otherwise. It must be some totalitarian religion!
I am one believer. Organized the Pi Sect – those who believe that the ratio circumference/diameter of any circle is a non-rational number. Hopelessly biased? Hell no. Faith. Just faith! And a lot of dark mysterious symbols, like this: Proof that Pi is irrational. There’s this hermite who really was a great great prophet :)
[I don’t see anything unless I believe it. – Ben]
I am now persona non grata at WUWT (can’t post) because I continue to ask where all that money went which Watts pandered for his Surface Station debacle. Talk about hypocritical — when the spotlight is on him, he clams up.
I would love it if everyone here repeatedly asks Anthony Watts on his web site for an accounting of all that money he raised after he knew what his results were but BEFORE he pandered for money. I reckon he made thousands and thousands of dollars.
[That would be interesting. Anthony implies that his “tip jar” is just incidental, but I recall in the run-up to his non-groundbreaking “paper” there were plenty of comments mentioning sending him hundreds of dollars. It may also be a handy anonymous way for financial backers to “encourage him”… – Ben]
if you get banned from WUWT can’t you just use a different computer (eg library, phone) or go in using a proxy or wait for your ip address to change?
[That’s kind of beside the point. – Ben]