hog88
Your ray of sunshine
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HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - From Huntsville to Mobile, summer temperatures have been cooler than normal this year.
In fact, the summer of 2013 will be listed as one of the coolest summers in the past 131 years, according to state climatologist John Christy, director of the Earth Systems Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Christy announced today that this summer is the fifth-coolest on record in Alabama with average temperatures that are almost 2 degrees below normal.
"Overall, this summer was both cool and wet, although we warmed and dried as August came to a close," Christy said in the announcement. "Several local daily climate records were set for the coolest daytime high temperatures.
"Certain crops, such as corn, benefited from the weather, and the average Alabamian's utility bill for electricity and water was probably noticeably lower this year."
According to Christy, 1967 shows up in most Alabama weather stations as having the coolest summer since reliable weather record keeping started in 1883. Other summers on the cool end of the record have all been since 1960 and include 1997, 1992, 1961, 1989, 1994, 2003, 2004 and 2013.
In calculating the average temperatures for each region, the announcement said, the climatologist's office uses only daytime high temperature readings for stations within a 50-mile radius of each city center.
Only daytime highs are used because nighttime low temperatures at some stations have slowly been contaminated by the growth of urban areas around those stations. The data were combined in a process that takes into account station moves and instrument changes.
In West TN. it's been hotter than Hell the last couple of days. Today's to be around 96 & I don't even know what the heat index will be. I understand Memphis to be even hotter like around 98. Glad I don't live in Dallas....think it's to be 104 today.
There has been a 60 per cent increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, they equivalent of almost a million square miles.
In a rebound from 2012's record low an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia's northern shores, days before the annual re-freeze is even set to begin.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year, forcing some ships to change their routes.
A leaked report to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seen by the Mail on Sunday, has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.
If correct, it would contradict computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming. The news comes several years after the BBC predicted that the arctic would be ice-free by 2013.
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Despite the original forecasts, major climate research centres now accept that there has been a pause in global warming since 1997.
The original predictions led to billions being invested in green measures to combat the effects of climate change.
The change in the predictions has led to UN's climate change's body holding a crisis meeting, and the the IPCC was due to report on the situation in October. A pre-summit meeting will be held later this month.
But leaked documents show that governments who fund the IPCC are demanding 1,500 changes to the Fifth Assessment Report - a three-volume study issued every six or seven years as they claim its current draft does not properly explain the pause.
The extent to which temperatures will rise with carbon dioxide levels, as well as how much of the warming over the past 150 year, a total of 0.8C, is down to human greenhouse gas emissions are key issues.
The IPCC says it is 95 per cent confident that global warming has been caused by humans - up from 90 per cent in 2007 according to the draft report.
However, US climate expert Professor Judith Curry has questioned how this can be true as that rather than increasing in confidence, uncertainty is getting bigger within the academic community.
Long-term cycles in ocean temperature, she said, suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend.
At the time some scientists forecast an imminent ice age.
Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, said: 'We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.
The IPCC is said to maintain that their climate change models suggest a pause of 15 years can be expected. Other experts agree that natural cycles cannot explain all of the recorded warming.
Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.
Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC's emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.
Warming of up to 1.2 degrees Celsius over the next 70 years (0.8 degrees have already occurred), most of which is predicted to happen in cold areas in winter and at night, would extend the range of farming further north, improve crop yields, slightly increase rainfall (especially in arid areas), enhance forest growth and cut winter deaths (which far exceed summer deaths in most places). Increased carbon dioxide levels also have caused and will continue to cause an increase in the growth rates of crops and the greening of the Earthbecause plants grow faster and need less water when carbon dioxide concentrations are higher.
Now a University of Washington scientist named Jinlun Zhang may have solved it. Writing in the Journal of Climatology, Zhang argues that about 80 percent of the growth can be explained by changes in the prevailing winds around the frozen continent; the remaining 20 percent, he suspects, might be the result of changes in ocean circulation.
I don't know what the real facts are but stuff like this just drives me insane - especially when anyone who questions stuff like this is described as anti-science
The guy may be right but it sure sounds like advocacy in the article rather than science.
It's unfortunate that the issue has become so politicized. Manbearpig is the primary culprit .
Dang 14 minutes? You got a summary? Maybe a highlights?
Anyway big snowstorm coming down from Canada into the Midwest. It is October but it's early
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It's definitely worth watching because it exposes the logical fallacy of carbon pollution and man-made global warming, which has become "climate change" to liberal whack jobs and the academic Left.
To begin with, the number of tornadoes in the US this year is on pace to be the lowest total since 2000 and it may turn out to be the lowest total in several decades.
Second, the number of wildfires across the US so far this year is on pace to be the lowest it has been in the past ten years and the acreage involved is at the second lowest level in that same time period
In addition to wildfires, extreme heat is also way down across the US this year. In fact, the number of 100 degree days across the country during 2013 is not only down for this year, but it is perhaps going to turn out to be the lowest in about 100 years of records
The five summers with the highest number of 100 degree days across the US are as follows: 1936, 1934, 1954, 1980 and 1930.
