WidreMann

Looks like it will still have issues with being too cold and snowy in the medium-range.

12 hours ago, Waiting on snow said:

Each day I'm more amazed how we ****ed this winter up. Neutral to weak Nino, low solar, record NA snowcover in Dec. Yet we still screwed it up. If we couldn't make this year work you have to wonder if we can make any work again.

Nino failed to really materialize and MJO screwed us. All of these things were sort of options on the table, not great indicators. It all comes down to good blocking around Greenland, -EPO and an active southern stream. Everything else is just proxies on that and not at all guaranteed.

Y'all, that's the difference from previous forecast, not a forecast of +3 to +4.

It's dead, Jim.

1 minute ago, Iceagewhereartthou said:

I really like Chris Justus, but his facebook says "coldest air in several years" coming after the front, then the wyff outlook shows highs in mid 40s, lows in 20s. Not only did he forget about last Jan, but that's not even the coldest of this wimpy winter.

It is funny, though, how a massive outbreak has now turned into basically a day of seasonably cold weather.

My amateur experience is that the FV3 is worse than the GFS. They said it has a cold bias, and that's very clear in comparing the charts. It needs to bake more.

Tuesday snow chances are dwindling for central NC. And then a mild start to February. Only model still showing cold February is the CFS. See y'all next winter!

NAM moves the precip through before the cold air really arrives. Shows a small band north of the Triangle into southern VA, but that's less pronounced than at 18z.

4 hours ago, BornAgain13 said:

Not sure how accurate this is, but I'll take it and run...

You need to use the Kuchera maps, because it will not involve high ratios.

51 minutes ago, FLweather said:

Some low 40s showing up under this band on radar atm Jacksonville SW towards Gainesville.

Can't help to feel places RDU east maybe see something Frozen.

The mountains will block that.

Very few people are likely to see snow east of the mountains with this. Let's be honest.

11 hours ago, RT1980 said:

Learned a lot here this past few weeks and I appreciate it!   90% are weenies, 2% are in the know, 6% have no clue and just mirror others post, the last 2% just have common sense!

A lot of the big mets were betting on a big pattern change too. It's not just the weenies. The MJO collapsed along with El Nino and the SSW failed to propagate downward much. A bunch of maybes turned into nos.

On 1/25/2019 at 12:57 AM, snowlover91 said:

 

Read what was posted. If you want to advance in one of these fields then research needs to agree with AGW theory or else you have no future in said field. That’s pretty easy to understand. I’m not saying it’s a coordinated effort or hoax. I’m saying the emphasis on AGW, “saving the planet”, and other similar ideals are widely perpetrated in both the media and academia. To that end the pressure is to conform to that standard and it’s quite easy for scientific research to succumb to a “group think” mentality when this type of emphasis is in place. Whether intentional or not the pressure pushes people that direction. 

I also have to disagree about climate scientists having nothing to gain. They have everything to gain. Their current job stability, funding, grants, opportunities to advance in their field, etc. There are immense amounts of money used for “green” projects in countries all over the world, we are talking billions and billions of dollars. Governments fund various projects, grants, research fields, etc dealing with climate change and other areas. It’s ludicrous to say these people have nothing to gain.

Just in the US alone here are some numbers concerning tax payer money going to climate change related uses. https://www.climatedollars.org/full-study/us-govt-funding-of-climate-change/

“From FY 1993 to FY 2014, government reports show that annual spending on “climate science” grew from $1.31 billion to $2.66 billon, for a total of $42.49 billion. Of this total, $0.64 billion came from the stimulus bill. Annual expenditures in this category over the period increased over 200%. During the same period, “other” climate-related expenditures (including tax credits) grew from $1.05 billion to $8.94 billion, for a total of $104.29 billion, with $25.5 billion coming from AARA. The increase in annual expenditures in this category was 850%.

If we combine both categories, total expenditures for the period grew from $2.35 billion to $11.59 billion, for a total of $146.78 billion, with $26.14 billion coming from ARRA. The increase in total annual expenditures was 490%.”

Every job and field on the planet involves the exact same dynamics. You're writing about this as if climate science is uniquely susceptible to the corrupting influence of...people needing jobs or something. If that's true of climate science, then it's at least equally true of deniers as well, and I can certainly think of additional motives on the denier side that are lacking on the climate scientist side.

2 minutes ago, SnowGoose69 said:

It looks anafontal to me.  I don’t know how often anafrontal snow occurs there but I’m sure it’s not a common setup

I feel like we had something like that back in 2000.

People who have never been in academia and don't know how it or science works are appalled to find out that, like any other human endeavour, there are little turf wars and fights and disagreements over all manner of things. This doesn't discredit the field at all. It's entirely irrelevant. There is simply no evidence whatsoever of a large-scale, coordinated effort to manufacture evidence and scientific models on the level needed to perpetrate a hoax like this, with the amount of openness present in modern science, and the degree of decentralization. It's hard enough to get politicians to agree with each other and their party sometimes, and there's a lot of money and votes and power involved. How do you think some unnamed shadowy cabal has managed to hoodwink hundreds and thousands of scientists, technicians, administrators and the like, working at hundreds of institutions across the globe? You all need to seriously think about the work it would take to do that, and to what end? If the goal is to change capitalism, there are far more direct and effective ways of doing so. The only side that has a direct and obvious monetary and political self-interest is the corporate denier side. The scientists have basically nothing to gain. If climate change is wrong, then they'll research something else. There's plenty interesting out there. It's not like academia is this lucrative, illustrious career. It's generally pretty terrible and it requires passionate people who do it in spite of the lack of money and toxic work environments, not because of that. The incentives simply do not align with a hoax of this magnitude. Sorry.

DRY.

On 1/21/2019 at 1:37 AM, snowlover91 said:

Well some prominent AGW proponents have publicly admitted reasons why. 

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth...”

The late Stephen Schneider, who authored The Genesis Strategy, a 1976 book warning that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity, later changed that view 180 degrees, serving as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports. In a quotation published in Discover, he said: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

And these golden nuggets.

A July 2004 communication from Phil Jones to Michael Mann referred to two papers recently published in Climate Research with a “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL” subject line observed: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow---even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is." 

A June 4, 2003 e-mail from Keith Briffa to fellow tree ring researcher Edward Cook at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York stated: “I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc…If published as is, this paper could really do some damage…It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically… I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review—Confidentially, I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting.”

When Moore was asked who is responsible for promoting unwarranted climate fear and what their motives are, he said: "A powerful convergence of interests. Scientists seeking grant money, media seeking headlines, universities seeking huge grants from major institutions, foundations, environmental groups, politicians wanting to make it look like they are saving future generations. And all of these people have converged on this issue."

Source 

The first one sounds quite reasonable from a policy perspective. People can't make heads or tails of the details of climate change, but they do understand and react to scary scenarios. Seems to work just fine for right-wingers and things like immigration and terrorism.

The other two...ehh, they could be bad, but it's on a pretty small scale. None of that stuff is going to overturn climate change. Within every scientific field, you see this kind of drama. People disagree about all kinds of stuff, and can get pretty testy about it too. And there are always a few people who are on the outs are are happy to attack the mainstream positions as being fundamentally flawed when they really just have some sub-problems to be resolved.

The last bolded quote, especially, is just saying that the paper as is would discount some of the work in dendroclimatology. It didn't say the paper was correct, per se, nor does that mean that reconstructions are horribly wrong. But since the topic is so sensitive, the risk of bad research being used against the field is much higher, so I understand their concern. I'd feel the same way, to be honest.

The source article is garbage. It quote mines people from 30-40 years ago, many of whom have nothing to do with the science of climate change, and doesn't explain the context of why they might be making that statement anyway. I would agree that peddling a false scare is bad, but taking care of the environment is important, and global catastrophe is a way, theoretically, to motivate people to give a shit, if that's what it takes. That's what these people are talking about. There is also a connection between economic systems that put industry and money above all else. Not only does it overproduce and do nothing to tackle the negative externalities of that (like pollution and environmental degradation), but it leads to many social ills as well, even as it also enriches many people and improves their standard of living. It is true, whether you like it or not, that our global economic system is inextricably linked with how we handle our environment. Having an environmentally-conscious economic system will require some significant changes. The market won't solve it, or at least not before it's too late. It really isn't just a question of whether or not climate change is happening, or what the damage will be, but also a question of what does address it and other environmental problems entail. And the answer is, unfortunately, likely to involve some big changes in our system. Doesn't mean we all become communists, but crony capitalism and a culture of consumption might need to go away.

Very cold, but dry, on the GFS so far.

11 minutes ago, Waiting on snow said:

Are you really surprised by that? Even if the epic pattern did materialize we wouldn't have any better chance than we do now. 

I'm not, because when I saw that the PV split failed to propagate downwards and the MJO crashed, this wouldn't happen.

This pattern is turning to shit very quickly.

https://twitter.com/ScottWesterfeld/status/446805144781348865 https://twitter.com/ScottWesterfeld/status/446805144781348865

Seriously, y'all. Conspiracies about climate scientists, uhh, making up something for the purpose of, uhh, I guess money somehow. Everyone else is clean, though. There are clearly no other industries or political interests that would want to deny or downplay their involvement in negatively affecting the climate. There is no history of corporations and other moneyed concerns covering up or denying their acts of pollution. No, it's the folks who call it out who have something to gain like, I dunno, I guess a livable planet? I'm really at a loss for what kinf of conspiracy there could possibly be, especially from groups that publicly release their data and reports regularly.

Deniers are a special breed of stupid.

LR GFS looks a lot better. It's not great by any stretch, but it shows more of a pattern re-load than a breakdown, and keeps general troughiness over eastern NA.

And then the pattern, such as it is, breaks down.

Never mind, GFS sends it down into Florida. Ripe to make a comeback, of course.

We just need a dang high pressure. Apparently, that's a lot to ask for these days.