A warm wet winter

Old Rocks

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Oct 31, 2008
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Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record — and the deniers say it disproves (!) climate science Climate Progress

Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record — and the deniers say it disproves (!) climate science
Plus Dr. Jeff Masters on "Heavy snowfall in a warming world"
February 8, 2010
Memo to anti-science crowd: Precipitation isn’t temperature!



Another massive mid-Atlantic precipitation event, another piece of nonsense from the anti-science crowd. Kevin Mooney of the American Spectator actually wrote an article titled, “Snowmageddon” Versus “Overwhelming Scientific Evidence,” which asserts:


This is the first time since record keeping started that two storms of such magnitude have hit the region during one winter. Already some localities are reporting the largest snowfall ever recorded.

To be sure, these events do not prove or disprove human caused global warming. But the momentum is now very much on the side of skeptical scientists who question these theories and President Obama should at least pull back from his awkward juxtapositions.

Yes, for the anti-science crowd, the kind of extreme precipitation event the mid-Atlantic states just experienced somehow weighs against the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused climate change — even though it is entirely consistent with the predictions of climate science (see Was the “Blizzard of 2009″ a “global warming type” of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)? and analysis by uber-meteorologist, Dr. Jeff Masters below).

What’s particularly laughable about Mooney’s article is that according to the UAH satellite data so beloved of the anti-science crowd, the storm occurred on the warmest February 6 — and indeed, during the warmest winter — in the temperature record (data here — the orange line ending in the white box in the figure above tracks temperatures in 2010).

Capital Climate has an excellent analysis on Super Storm 2010, which finds:


The conclusion I would draw from all of this is that the 2010 storm was distinct from other similar events in the past by having moisture be the dominant element over temperature in producing the extreme snow amounts.
 

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