Links to three interesting ’weather reports’ from last century from Art Raiche

http://tinyurl.com/66tegq    1922 Washington Post story

http://tinyurl.com/6ghpb8    1937 Time story re Northwest passage

http://tinyurl.com/3xfoak    1974 Time story on ice age

Source

No self-respecting global warming presenter would ever miss the chance to warn the audience that higher temperatures could melt ice in places like Greenland, the melting water could lubricate the interface between ice and rock, and watch-out … the ice could increase its velocity, fall or move quickly into the sea, and cause a rapid rise in sea level. If you happen to be Al Gore, you might show us melting ice, water pouring into some moulin (Figure 1), and then cap it off with an image of water drowning out the World Trade Center Memorial. This story in its near infinite varieties appears on literally thousands of websites dealing with the global warming issue.

Figure 1. A moulin is typically a narrow tubular chute through which water enters a glacier from the surface. Moulins can go all the way to the bottom of the glacier, and the water from moulins may help lubricate the base of the glacier, and according to Gore and others, this could accelerate the movement of the ice.

climatologist David Legates

References to the "consensus view" of global warming pervade news coverage of the issue, but climatologist David Legates says that phrase needs clarification.

An associate professor at the University of Delaware, Dr. Legates also serves as Delaware's state climatologist, though the position does not obligate him to share the views of other state officials. Speaking to an audience at the nonprofit Wynnewood Institute Tuesday night, he said something that may have sounded like a concession, coming from a skeptic on the issue: The climate is changing. For about a century, the average global temperature has seen a net rise.
But, he emphasized, the climate always has been changing.

"It's never been a constant," he said. "Climate is dynamic."

Over the past million years, the climate has varied extremely and, for much of the last 150,000 years, the earth has been colder than it is now, he said.

[H/T to CO2 Sceptics]  Ski resorts across Europe and North America have opened early this season after heavy snowfall in the last month.

A series of snowstorms since early November in North America and late October in Europe has enabled several resorts to open ahead of schedule.

The Italian resort of Bormio has opened a month early after heavy snowfalls at the end of October and start of November delivered 50ins to the resort's upper slopes.

More heavy snow is forecast for many resorts across Austria, Switzerland and Italy this week.

Amateur team finds NASA error similar to one they discovered a year ago.

NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is one of the world's primary sources for climate data. GISS issues regular updates on world temperatures based on their analysis of temperature readings from thousands of monitoring stations over the globe.

GISS’ most recent data release originally reported last October as being extraordinarily warm-- a full 0.78C above normal. This would have made it the warmest October on record; a huge increase over the previous month's data.

The October global temperature data highlights for me that it is time for scientists to quit wasting time screwing around with questions of whether global warming will cause more kidney stones, and address an absolutely fundamental question:  Just what is the freaking temperature?

Currently we are approaching the prospect of spending hundreds of billions of dollars, or more, to combat global warming, and we don't even know its magnitude or real trend, because the major temperature indices we possess are giving very different readings.  To oversimplify a bit, there are two competing methodologies that are giving two different answers.  NASA's GISS uses a melding of surface thermometer readings around the world to create a global temperature anomaly.  And the UAH uses satellites to measure temperatures of the lower or near-surface troposhere.  Each thinks it has the better methodology  (with, oddly, NASA fighting against the space technology).  But they are giving us different answers.

For October, the GISS metric is showing the hottest October on record, nearly 0.8C hotter than it was 40 years ago in 1978 (from here).

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