Global Warming?
I’ve noted in other postings that the Brazilian coffee crop is threatened by unusual cold, and that South Africa had surprising snows. At WUWT they noted the cold in Australia too.
Just to round things out and point up that it’s not just a Southern Hemisphere thing, we have this report from Mount Washington, New Hampshire: Snow. In July.
Mount Washington, New Hampshire
From the Boston Globe: July Snow Falls
Ignoring the calendar, which showed the beginning of the month of July, a dusting of snow fell Thursday on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, startling tourists and forcing the closure of the road to the top.
“It’s not extraordinary, but it’s definitely interesting,” said Stacey Kawecki, a meteorologist for the Mount Washington Observatory.
Mount Washington, the Northeast’s highest peak at 6,288 feet, has recorded snow in every month. The last time it was recorded in July was 2007.
Not entirely unusual, but also not in alignment with an unusual warming…
The simple facts on the ground (cold white facts) are that the world is either:
a) Normal. Nothing out of the ordinary going on.
or
b) Getting colder at a rather surprising rate.
The facts are not consistent with the notion of a warmest ever anything …
For it to be record warm, we would not be recording surprising cold excursions globally.
IMHO, it is the temperature record and equipment that is having problems, not the planet. So I’m going to keep on watching the snows fall, in both hemispheres, as we watch the world enter the cold phase of the PDO. An event we’ve not seen in 60 some years. To remind folks, the record heat in the nation was in 1934. Then the entry to a cold PDO happened. We had the “new little ice age” scare up to about 1978 or so. Then we entered a warm PDO phase and things got better. Now we’re having a “global warming” scare. We hit our peak in 1998 and its not been warming since. It’s been cooling. And with this PDO shift, the snows have returned. So unless you were around in the 1940’s you have not been a part of a warm to cold transition like this one. It will be fun to watch.
Me? I’m a child of the early 1950s, so I remember the cold times. But not the warm ones that preceded them. But I did talk to a lot of the “old folks” in my little farm town when I was a kid. (People did that then, talked…) They told me stories of the really hot olden days. And some of the really really ancient folks ( 90 years or so old) told me about the times it had been really cold before it had gotten hot… and not to worry about all the ice age talk, it was just talk. So what we have here is a simple and normal cyclical change of the planet. Nothing people did to cause any of it, and nothing we can do to stop it.
So sit back, pour a cup of something pleasant to drink, and watch the snows come.
Musings from the Chiefio 
I am an avid hiker. Several times I attempted to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. Never made it all the way. But one of the things I learned along the way is that Mount Washington can get snow Any time of the year.
Having said that, I do NOT look forward to a Grand Minimum, which seems to be in discussion lately.
Yes, it can snow there any month (as pointed out in the posting). But that it IS snowing there this July says that this July is just like any other July and it is not significantly warmer than July from years past.
When you have a very marginal location and time for snow (say, in July where it only happens in some years) that is where marginal heating would show up first. At that edge case where something can just barely happen. It ought to stop happening… Yet it hasn’t stopped.
Sometimes it is valuable simply to point out that the null case is what is happening… It’s not abnormally hot. It’s not hotter than 1934. It’s just normal. (Though a bit colder than average in the southern hemisphere right now, but inside standard ranges of distribution.)
I expect it will take about 4 or 5 more years to get the oceans cooled enough to start getting abnormally cold (assuming we have a Sleepy Sun that long). I also expect we’ll see changes in mass flow of water first, before temperature changes, due to the heat of vaporization. So expect a lot more rain in a lot of places (as the warm ocean evaporates, then the water condenses as rain in the cool air) for a few years before we get to the temperature change part of the process.
FWIW, I’d expect a second ‘kink’ in the temperature drop curve when you hit the heat of fusion of water. The freezing point. As the snow falls, you release all the heat of fusion. There ought to be a band of fairly constant temperatures at the rain / snow interface. You can only drop below freezing once all the water is frozen, and that takes a lot of heat transport.
So my very long range prediction would be for a band of lots more rain, with snow at the far poleward end, and very slowly that snow line will march toward the equator, a bit further each year, over about 10 years. The southern edge of rain also ought to migrate toward the equator (in the N.H., but in the S.H. it ought to be the Northern edge of rains). So places like the deserts of Mexico ought to get a bit more rain as the dry zone shifts. This increased precipitation (and phase changes of water) represents a massive increase in heat flow out of the oceans and into space, but will happen with small temperature changes (due to the phase change heats). That process will continue until the oceans cool enough to slow their evaporation, then the rains will slacken. I’d guess in about 10 years. (By ‘slacken’ I mean ‘less each year during the normal rainy season’, I’m not expecting rain out of season… The seasonal cycles will still be there, just with more rain during the rainy parts, until the oceans cool.)
IMHO, what we are seeing now is the start of that. Snows in places that usually get them, even the marginal places, but a bit heavier than the average. More rain in places like the South American Tropics and China (thus the flood reports). There is a whole lot more that could be done with the precipitation data in terms of looking for patterns than is being done…
So I’s suggest watching the water (rain, snow) as it will be the start of the show long before temperatures catch up.
It’s really nice to read ideas laid out in orderly fashion with no snags, burrs or adulterations.
Fresh air. Thanks.
You are most welcome!
All snow is gone today and tourists on the observation deck. http://www.mountwashington.org/weather/cam/deck/deck.jpg
But it’s New England – home of rapidly changing weather.