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The Washington Post reports that the "lower 48" states of the USA are enjoying spring-like weather. It quotes a meteorologist as saying 1495 record high temperatures have been reached during the month of February (as against 10 record lows); among them:
- Magnum, Okla., hit 99 degrees [Fahrenheit, 37.2° Celsius] on Feb. 11 — tying the state record for hottest winter temperature ever recorded. Yet it occurred two weeks earlier than the record it matched from Feb. 24, 1918, set in the town of Arapaho.
- Denver hit 80 degrees [Fahrenheit, 26.7° Celsius] Feb. 10 — its warmest February temperature on record dating back to 1872.
- Norfolk hit 82 degrees [Fahrenheit, 27.8° Celsius] Feb. 12, tying its warmest February temperature on record dating back to 1874.
[Ed Note: it is actually Mangum, OK, not Magnum. The original WaPo article is incorrect.]
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Springtime for America in February
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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @03:44PM
I wonder what is going on here. It is really warm in the US, but cold in Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2017_European_cold_wave [wikipedia.org]
Are there any sane discussions of this (that can leave out CO2 unless it is a primary part of the explanation)?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @03:58PM
We have pussy willows budding in central Alberta. In February. And record cold waves in other places. It's what happens when you pump more energy into a non-linear system. Which is the role CO2 play here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @04:03PM
Since energy can be transferred by radiation faster than convection, increasing IR active molecules (primarily CO2 + H20) should even out day/night and low/high latitude temperatures (ie like on Venus, where the temperature is very uniform). So I would expect cooling near the equator during the day and warming near the poles at night due to that. What we are witnessing is by hemisphere though, so it must be some more complicated mechanism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @04:10PM
correction: "by East/West hemisphere"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @05:13PM
The difference between Earth and Venus is Earth has life. That has a major impact on climate
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday February 20 2017, @04:24PM
Could be Atlantic Ocean currents slowing down. They traditionally kept Europe warm.
Another think to keep in mind is that all of these records are weather, not climate. Though, when you get new records year after year, that suggests that climate is changing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @05:01PM
Exactly. A single six, or even a six two times in a row doesn't mean the die is biased. But if you get ten sixes in twenty rolls, it is not rational to assume the die is fair. Even though the result is certainly consistent with a fair die; every possible result is, including a million sixes in a row.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @05:15PM
And if a dice isn't fair, we can conclude CO2 emissions are causing the entire temperature increase, right?
This NHST-approach (where you test a strawman) needs to end before it destroys our civilization.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 20 2017, @05:30PM
This NHST-approach (where you test a strawman) needs to end before it destroys our civilization.
This is a red herring. We have a model and evidence supporting that model. It has nothing to do with null hypothesis significance testing.
And let us note that NHST is a valid scientific procedure no matter that it can be abused. I've discussed it here [soylentnews.org] and here [soylentnews.org]. For example, a classic place to use NHST in a valid way is when you have a large amount of complex data, have at best very poor models of the data, and want to quickly find possible patterns in the data (such as health care or customer data at a retail store or grocery). NHST can do that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @05:42PM
No one believes "the climate never changes"[dice is fair] null hypothesis, so rejecting it is a waste of time. It doesn't tell us anything about CO2, etc.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 20 2017, @06:26PM
No one believes "the climate never changes"[dice is fair] null hypothesis, so rejecting it is a waste of time. It doesn't tell us anything about CO2, etc.
I did say NHST was a red herring here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @07:30PM
You should have, NHST is bullshit that needs to die in the hottest fire we can find. We're rarely in a position where we don't have an established procedure, we usually have some sort of status quo that we want to evaluate other options to. The relevant question is usually whether or not there's enough evidence to support making a change in a particular direction, rather than whether or not we have sufficient evidence to support the status quo. The status quo virtually always has enough substance to justify it's use, we wouldn't be using it if it were complete BS.
There's a reason why spam filters typically run on bayesian inference rather than NHST.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 20 2017, @07:49PM
We're rarely in a position where we don't have an established procedure, we usually have some sort of status quo that we want to evaluate other options to.
I mentioned two such areas: health care and customer data for stores.
There's a reason why spam filters typically run on bayesian inference rather than NHST.
Who was claiming NHST was the only tool out there?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @09:22PM
We have pussy willows budding in central Alberta.
Can you, you know, grab them by the willows?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 21 2017, @01:21AM
Nah... Hands are too small
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @04:26PM
Are there any sane discussions of this
No. Sorry but No, not as far as I know.
I like reading the area forecast discussion from my local NWS office as trivially reachable from weather.gov. Thats probably what you're asking for but on a much larger scale.
The closest to what we're looking for is many people don't realize that just like Jupiter has a red spot, the earth has not one but two semi-permanent polar vortex eternal storms and winter weather depends pretty strongly on how well formed the vortex is and where it drifts off to. So if the entire north pole vortex kinda mushes over to Siberia for a week or two then it sux to be Siberia, but it'll be 100F in Oklahoma, until things mush back into their normal places. Or if its not well formed and spins off little polar vortex babies then you get cold snaps and stuff. So that's whats going on but this isn't much of a sane discussion, and not updated daily like a NWS station AFD.
When the poles inevitably completely melt, I bet the polar vortex gets really weird. Most of us are young enough we're gonna see that. Gonna be interesting.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 20 2017, @08:45PM
I sum it by "chaotic system is reacting to continuous drift in inputs"
One year we'll get wild stuff like recently (as forecasted by climatologists for over a decade), while next year might look totally normal again.
Overall, as there is more energy in the system, we can expect more wild stuff going on, but still randomly/chaotically.
No politics required, until we discuss the reasons for the extra energy and the cost of its effects.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @09:22PM
I'm not even sure the calculus style total amount of wildness is increasing.
That's another curious problem where just 20-30 years ago who knows what was happening behind the iron curtain, or 200 years ago nobody knew pretty much anything about the weather other than their locale and some sailor lore at least some of which was bunk. Only had satellites half a century, earth's been around a couple billion and now we think we're experts. The history of engineering is full of arrogant engineers doing stuff that in retrospect was pretty dumb.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 20 2017, @10:16PM
Well, the Chinese, Japanese and Indians have been keeping track of the weather for millenia. For other regions of the world, there are tree rings and ice cores giving us trends.
In the western world, people do need to check how precise the chemists did get with temperature measurements in the middle of the 19th century... This is not "20-30 years ago" stuff.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @10:32PM
people do need to check how precise the chemists did get with temperature measurements in the middle of the 19th century
I agree with the rest of your post at least more or less, but the chemists you list were not operating on an hourly basis in the middle of the Atlantic.
The HMS Challenger Expedition was kind of an anomaly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Challenger_(1858) [wikipedia.org]
It made the news recently, well, a decade ago, when the 50 volume book series of the expedition was available on line
http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/HMSC-INDEX/index-linked.htm [19thcenturyscience.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @10:36PM
Not what is seen on Venus (which is known for its "boring", ie consistent, weather)
(Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Monday February 20 2017, @04:42PM
Well if I limit the question to the phenology of plants then I can offer up the the US Nat'l Phenology Network [usanpn.org] mentioned in the story. There's also been a lot of other studies going back decades.
But in the U.S. we don't take about the impact of global warming as much as if there's such a thing, and if so what is causing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @04:46PM
Yeah, talk about the biggest distraction ever. Whoever helped frame this "discussion" is probably laughing like crazy. Well, villainously is probably more accurate.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 20 2017, @05:15PM
I wonder what is going on here. It is really warm in the US, but cold in Europe:
It's this weird "extraordinarily hot" Arctic temperature anomaly. [theguardian.com] That displaced a bunch of cold air that needs to go somewhere.
(Score: 2) by WalksOnDirt on Monday February 20 2017, @05:16PM
The jet streams have become less predictable, probably due to carbon dioxide. They make wilder swings resulting in warmer weather when the move towards the poles and cooler when they go the other way. This may be random or it may affect east and west differently - I don't know that we can tell yet. It's not easy to predict, and it hasn't been going long enough to trust the observations continuing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @07:23PM
Just because the earth's atmosphere in general is heating doesn't imply that it's going to be uniform throughout the world. Hotter areas in the Americas are completely consistent with colder areas in Europe as the amount of thermal energy in the Americas has to come from somewhere. The amount of warming year over year is still relatively small, but over the course of many years it tends to add to climate change.
Ultimately, when there's more heat in the atmosphere, the weather patterns aren't going to be quite the same.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday February 20 2017, @07:39PM
I'll try.
1) The speed of the jet stream is related to the difference in temperatures between the pole and the equator. When the temperatures get closer together, the speed of the jet stream tends to slow. The pole has been warming faster than the equator, so the jet stream has slowed.
2) When the jet stream slows, it tends to form eddies which break off and stay in one place for awhile. These can trap weather patterns causing them to move a lot more slowly. When this happens a cold snap lingers and so does a warm spell.
3) European countries are generally North of the US, so they naturally tend to be colder. (Think of Russia.) This is usually ameliorated by winds off the Atlantic which flow up the East coast of the US and then are driven across the Atlantic by the jet stream.
4) Because of 2, 3 isn't happening.
WARNING: I am not a meteorologist! This is my "general probably correct" knowledge, and it's well outside my area of expertise. But it's what I think is going on.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 21 2017, @01:42AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves