Update 12:00 Noon Saturday: New York City and state roads were close to all traffic except emergency responders at 2:30 p.m. Metro-North and Long Island Railroad service will stop at 4:00 p.m., the governor said. It’s not clear yet when that restriction will be fully lifted.
A powerful storm sweeping over the northeast dumped record amounts of snow all the way from Kentucky to the Mid-Atlantic coast this weekend. At least 14 deaths have been reported and thousands more are stranded in airports or hotels. Those of you in the midst of it have our sympathy!
But as long as the weather outside is frightful, and you’re holed up safe inside with Internet access where it’s so delightful, now would be a good time to hit the net and melt-down the coming right-wing snow job with the burning flames of truth. First, the latest on Winter Storm Jonas from The Weather Channel:
Winter Storm Jonas is the largest snowstorm on record for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Baltimore; and JFK Airport in New York City, with all of those locations receiving over 2 feet of snow. More all-time snowfall records may continue to break as final reports are made official by the National Weather Service. Snowfall totals from the storm topped out near 40 inches in parts of West Virginia and at least 14 states in total received more than a foot of snow from the storm.
My friends at Slate did a bang up job live blogging Jonas and TeacherKen posted an informative, first-hand account of the first few hours of snowzilla as well. And now, for you feature presentation ...
The keywords in the right-wing snowjob no doubt already underway are record snowfall and record cold. The key with how those words have been used in the past to mislead anyone looking for legit information on Jonas and climate in general is a well oiled deception falling under the umbrella term conflation.
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transitive verb
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1 a : to bring together : fuse b : confuse
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2 : to combine (as two readings of a text) into a composite whole
The only physical requirement for liquid precip to turn into snow and ice is the ambient temperature -- it’s either below freezing or it’s not. The mere presence of snow on the ground, even in record quantities, doesn’t tell you much beyond that. Because record snowfall does not equal record cold. Record snowfall is completely independent of record cold.
If anything the relationship between cold air and capacity for rain or snow goes in the opposite direction. In highly oversimplified terms, warm air has an innate potential to hold more water in the form of vapor than comparatively cooler air. In practice this simply means that air just below freezing can often be wetter and, under the right circumstances, discharge more ice than comparatively colder air can. Even a few degrees can make a difference through certain temperature ranges and humidity. Which is one good reason why climate scientists have long been predicting more snowzillas like Winter Storm Jonas as the world warms.
Another good reason is that more heat means more energy in the atmosphere and oceans to work with, which in turn provides whatever storms that do form greater range, size and endurance. In warm seasons this could in theory nudge a Cat 3 hurricane to a Cat 4 or 5, increase the physical dimensions of those hurricane force winds so that the region of maximum destruction centered on the eye is wide and longer than it otherwise would have been, and allow that hurricane to persist rending it a longer life and thus allowing it to survive as a hurricane father and farther away from the tropics where it first formed.
In colder seasons, times, and places, this means wintry storms like Jonas can grow larger, more intense, travel further south -- in the case of our hemisphere anyway — and persist longer than it would have otherwise over those southern regions far away from the polar circles where it first took shape.
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This is where you come in my science-loving progressive friends. The evil forces of anti-science never sleep and they never learn. Expecting them to give up in the face of growing, overwhelming is on par with waiting for a movie star paid to pitch Coca-cola to give up in the face of facts to suddenly announce that orange juice is better for you and that most brands of cola taste more or less the same. But the intended audience is always up for grabs.
See, the usual suspects are more than happy to intentionally tangle the words snow and cold up in such a way that record snowfall gets expertly conflated with record cold. This is easy to do, the deception almost writes itself. Snow is already synonymous in the public conscious with freezing cold conditions.
They also like to mix up daily records vs monthly and/or annual records. Daily hot and cold records fall almost winter and summer, there are 365 chances in any of the thousands of places where calibrated instruments have been placed for this to happen. One way to cut through all that statistical noise is to compare the number of daily cold records and daily wam records for a given interval of time. Here’s what that looks like over the last century:
The number of record highs being set is especially telling because the statistical chance of breaking a record decreases as the length of time records are kept increases.
Examining all of the record low temperatures yields another dramatic result — since the first of the year, the number of all-time warm low-temperature records is outpacing the corresponding cold ones by a ratio of more than 6-to-1. This emphasizes that warmer nights are a major factor in the overall warming trend, not just hotter days.
Monthly record lows vs monthly record highs for a given year are far more valuable in analyzing temperature trends. Annual records are better still, and that’s why climate scientists usually present their data as annual results and moving averages using annual figures. Which brings us back to last year.
That upper-most far right dot represents the average global temperature of the year that just ended as measured by land and sea-based high precision thermometers. Oh why do thermometers hate America?
Those clowns have a way bigger incentive than usual to reanimate their zombie lies this year: NASA working with NOAA made headlines this month when they concluded that 2015 clocked in far and away the warmest year in the modern global temperature record.
The prior warmest year was 2014, and the ten warmest years in more than a century were all in the last two decades. By contrast, the ten coldest years in the modern record were between 1890 and 1920.
Those are the empirical facts, arguing with them is about as rational as arguing with your bathroom scale. But we all know how much respect the fossil fuel industrial lobbyists and the politicians folded safely away in their pocket between a sheaf of hundred dollar bills has for reality when it doesn’t fit neatly into their far right ideology.
Taking on such powerful forces from the warmth and comfort of your home in the midst of a record setting blizzard might seem like a hopeless task. But there are, finally, equally powerful forces lined up in our favor! Not the least of which Kos outlined in his post yesterday on the rise of the electric vehicle industry. Where to start? Well, if you can spare 10 minutes, and all you have to do is drop a handful of comments in the right places pointing out the difference between record snowfall and record low temperatures. If this diary gets on the reclist, I wouldn’t be surprised if your progressives sisters and brothers chime in with a url or two.
Or we can do nothing and let those commentators go unchallenged, their ignorance winning this round by default. And if we do that we’ll be aiding and betting, albeit in a small way, the First Order of Evil. And this week’s blockbuster forecast will become old hat, calling for icy roads, wide spread record snowfall, and perhaps an occasional scattered Al Gore snowman.