Calling Sen. Inhofe...snowmen desperately needed in Vancouver

[wtmusic]

Record warm January in Vancouver on eve of 2010 Olympics

Vancouver is set to register the warmest January on record with an average temperature more than twice as warm as normal, according to Environment Canada.

It's quite possible this will be the warmest January. We're sitting at 7.1 Celsius for an average right now and it will take a lot of cooling to knock that down," said meteorologist David Jones.

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The balmy winter has caused worry and chatter among fans, officials, and athletes of the 2010 Winter Games and the forecast may go from bad to terrible for Cypress Mountain, which has already seen close to 500 millimetres of rain this month.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/sports/2010wintergames/torch-run/Record+warm+January+Vancouver+2010+Olympics/2491944/story.html

They've had to truck in snow, and build artificial structures underneath to create a racing surface. Forecast? Two weeks of rain, and temps in the 40s.

Move along, no climate change here...

[babylonsister]

1. Great point; I'd love to hear him explain this! nt

[thunder rising]

2. Love the spin! To bad the M$M didn't think of it. But then they wouldn't thwart their masters

[mn9driver]

3. Of course, the reality is that Vancouver's warm winter is not an indication

of global warming, any more than the snow all over the US is an indication that global warming is wrong. This is just weather. If it keeps happening for the next twenty years or so, it will be part of the climate change data set.

The good thing is that both weather extremes are well within the behavior predicted by climate models, which increases confidence that their longer term predictions may be correct, which makes it more likely that governments can be prodded into action on this problem before it's too late.

Hopefully it's not too late. Inhofe will be remembered as someone who did his very best to make things worse.

[wtmusic]

4. I'm interested in the basis for your claim that

"both weather extremes are well within the behavior predicted by climate models".

January's average temperature is twice normal. Which model predicts that?

[mn9driver]

6. CCSM 3.0, EdGCM 4D and GISS ModelE

are all capable of producing local variations like the weather we are seeing in North America this winter. All you need to do is reduce the temporal and spatial scales until you get what you want. There isn't a lot of point in doing so, since that's not what GCM's are supposed to be good at--but the built-in physics are certainly capable of it.

The three I mentioned are available for download and can be run on any reasonably powerful desktop PC. The GISS model is Unix based. There are probably some that will run with Macs, but I haven't looked.

[leftofcool]

5. Inhoffe's ass needs to get over to our parking lot

and start shoveling. He can bring his shitty grandkids too and they can help. Then, his entire family can ship you all the snow at their expense.

[Massacure]

7. I object to the fact that the temperature is twice as warm as normal.

A temperature of 7.1C is not twice as warm as a temperature of 3.3. A temperature of 279.75 is double the temperature of 3.3.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. You too, huh?

:banghead:

[NNadir]

9. I think you're driving at the distinction between Kelvin and Celcius.

The concept of "twice" or "three times" as much has no real meaning in the Celcius or Fahrenheit scales, but it is a perfectly acceptible concept in the thermodynamic (kelvin) scale.

Thus we would say that, since K = C + 273.15 that 3.3 + 273.15 = 276.4₅. "Twice" that temperature, would thus be 552.8K - 273.15K = 279.7₅C. This is 179.7 K or C above the boiling temperature of water at 101,325 Pa, atmospheric pressure.

"Twice" makes sense in the thermodynamic sense because temperature is a reflection of internal energy of a gas, in this case air, and E = 3/2 RT for a mole of gas, where E is the translational energy.