WidreMann

I would bet on PIOMAS, just from having looked at satellite pictures of the state of the ice. There's no way we have thick ice in enough places to justify the total volume being on par with the last few years.

Maybe the most alarming predictions won't come true, but even the middle of the road predictions are scary enough. Of course we will adapt, as will the rest of life. It just won't be pretty. There is enough suffering in the world as is.

It's funny you say that right as we've had an extreme acceleration of warming unlike anything in our period of direct record. There's really no data that says otherwise. Maybe there were rapid warmings in the pre-weather record days that have been washed out of our tree ring and ice core analyses (though unlikely). In any event, it's not happened during the period of our modern industrial civilization. We've seen how smaller-scale climate changes have had a big impact on historical civilizations. What will this do to ours?

To add to this, people are failing to grasp that AGW is about how humans are applying a small modulation to an existing system, and there are small changes, but they are very significant for life on earth. With CO2 at all, the planet would be some 50 degrees cooler, I believe. Raising it by 3 or 4 degrees, therefore, is not a big deal in terms of the numbers. But it is a big deal when it causes sea levels to rise and some land to be inundated. Again, it's not a lot of land. Most land will be fine. But we have a lot of cities on the coasts. That's a big deal for humans. When rising CO2 increases acidity levels in the ocean, it still may not be by much. But it's a lot for the life that lives there, that starts to die off when it can't handle the change in water chemistry. What we are talking about is life's sensitivity to change, not about gigantic changes to the atmosphere (which we really aren't making). Life can handle change, but over larger time periods. When there are significant changes in a short time period, a lot of life dies off. Of course, in time, it will recover, as it did 65 million years ago, or during other extinction events. It's bad news for humans, though, because we depend on the ecosystem as it is. We can mitigate with technology or general inventiveness, but it will be a very big blow to our current civilization. That's why people should care. Not because the planet will explode (it won't). Not because one weird species of frog in outer Mongolia will go extinct (why should anyone care about that anyway?). Not because temperatures will go up by a billion degrees (they won't). It's because the small changes made to a climate that has been fairly stable for civilized human history have big effects for life and human life, which is sensitive to small changes. What good is oil and profit if we can't eat, can't live where we used to? That's the trade-off.

That's brutal. Will we even have any ice come late September?

Some run-to-run consistency in the long range would be nice.

Above normal heights everywhere. Wow. Dipole is good or bad for ice?

Regardless of NAM vs non-NAM, any time we rely on cold air to show up during the storm, we're GOING to get screwed. Our best storms always have the cold air already in place well ahead of the storm.

It won't. It was a jerk at 12z and it'll be a jerk at 00z. It's gonna look like the NAM, I guarantee it.

So we cut that in half, turn more of it into rain, and assume lower ratios. That gives you about 2-3"? Still not bad, I guess.

December 2000 was 1-2 feet across the whole piedmont, all snow. No temp issues. This storm is still only looking like a few inches at best, with some mixing concerns at the beginning. Not a great comparison. Also models are a lot better.

"The BL Temps Suck Guy" -- LOVE IT! But seriously, we're gonna fight with them Friday evening. Precip always moves in faster than expected with these set ups, so we're gonna lose some precip to the rain monster.

The funny thing is that the NAM has 925 and 850 ESPECIALLY cold. It's surface temps that are way warm.

Wrong thread...

I think asking for more than two lucky analogs was a fair request. Shaggy provided an adequate response to my request.

You need more than that. Years with landfalling tropical systems that had no spring tornado outbreak? What constitutes an outbreak? What area does the outbreak occur in and what area does the TC have to make landfall? All you've done so far is not very scientific at all.

I'd rather get suspended than follow the rules about not prematurely calling for a bust. That's right, I'm calling for Irene to miss us or be weak and worthless, and it's still 7 days out. Take it to the bank!