Oh No! Spain gets a dose of Global Warming!!

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jimmy m
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10 Jan 2021, 1:00 pm

Emergency crews in central Spain cleared 500 roads and rescued over 1,500 people stranded in their vehicles, allowing Madrid and other areas on Sunday to slowly shovel out of the country's worst snowstorm in recent memory.

After recording 50 centimeters (20 inches) of snow in the Spanish capital between Friday night and Saturday, Madrid and a large swathe of the country remained impassable Sunday, with roads, rail lines and air travel disrupted by Storm Filomena. The blizzard has been blamed for four deaths.

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More than 150 roads were still impassable Sunday. Authorities said all trips by car should be postponed and tire chains were obligatory for journeys that could not be avoided. They said all people trapped in their cars by the snow had been rescued, but hundreds of cars needed to be recovered after being abandoned by drivers.

"The danger is not over," Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said. "A week of extreme cold is coming and that will transform all the snow on the ground into ice, thereby multiplying the risk. The storm is bringing with it a cold wave that could push temperatures down to record levels." Spain’s weather service forecasts temperatures to drop as low as -14 degrees Celsius (6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the eastern province of Albacete by Tuesday.

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Source: Spain shovels out of snowdrifts left by Storm Filomena

Wasn't it seven years ago that the New York Times published an article by Peter Fox predicting the "end of snow" because of man-made global warming. Fox isn’t the first to warn about the demise of snow. Scientists and activists have been predicting for the last 21 years that snowfall would rapidly decline and virtually disappear as the Earth warmed due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions being put into the atmosphere. In 2000, climate scientist David Viner with the University of East Anglia told reporters, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Viner argued global warming would make snowfall “a very rare and exciting event”.

So Spain enjoy your very rare and exciting event this year! And then make sure you own a snow shovel, just in case!


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CockneyRebel
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10 Jan 2021, 1:25 pm

I wish I was there right now. I'd be playing in the snow.


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naturalplastic
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10 Jan 2021, 2:11 pm

An increase in snow is NOT evidence of more coldness in the world.

It's evidence of more water in the world's atmosphere.

you're gonna get more precipitation (bigger rains, and bigger snows) in a given location than before if there is more water loitering in the earth's atmosphere than before. And the most likely reason that there would be an increase in water in the atmosphere is because of an increase in the air's ability to store water. And the most likely cause for that increase in atmospheric water storage capacity is...an INCREASE in air temperature.

Remember learning the difference between relative humidity and absolute humidity in middle school?

As every middle school kid knows: there is a difference between absolute humidity and relative humidity. When you reach 100 percent in either kind you get precip, but 100 percent humidity in cold air is a much smaller absolute quantity of water than 100 percent humidity when its hot. Thats why the Amazon gets 100 inches of rain a year, and why London gets a fraction of that even though both locations have notoriously humid climates. Greenland, and Antarctica, are both buried under a mile of ice and snow. But Greenland gets less snowfall in a century than London gets a single year ( Greenland gets as much precip as the Sahara, but what little snow it gets fails to melt-hence the accumulation over the thousands of years).

So you're sarcasm backfired, but....the NY Times was wrong as well. So dont feel bad. :D

If global warming is happening we would expect an INCREASE in both rainfall and in snowfall because there would be an increase in the absolute quantity of water in the air as the world becomes progressively more like the Amazon, and less like the Poles. Of course after a point you would get start to get less snow if the weather in your location got even more tropical so all precip fell as rain and none could fall as snow. But in the short term an increase in snow is evidence FOR global warming, and not against it.

If the same amount of snow fell on Spain as before, but that snow failed to melt by the following spring, and then the same thing happened the following spring so that the snow accumulated over the years THEN that would be evidence of a coming ice age, and evidence against global warming. But I dont know of any place where that is happening.

But reiterate:it would be a decrease in snow meltage, not an increase in snowfall, that would be evidence against global warming.



jimmy m
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10 Jan 2021, 2:45 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
So you're sarcasm backfired.


Oh, but sarcasm is so good when every week there is another hysterical article in the press blaming any strange weather anomaly on global warming. I remember a few years ago, they even tried to say that global warming could produce another ice age.

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An increase in snow is NOT evidence of more coldness in the world. It's evidence of more water in the world's atmosphere.


Hmmmm. To get snow you need both cold temperature and moisture. So if it was a sunny 90 deg F in Spain right now, I sincerely doubt that it would be snowing!


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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10 Jan 2021, 5:13 pm

jimmy m wrote:
[i]Wasn't it seven years ago that the New York Times published an article by Peter Fox predicting the "end of snow" because of man-made global warming.


Found it.

Quote:
But the real reason is a lack of knowledge. I know, because I, too, was ignorant until I began researching the issue for a book on the future of snow.

I was floored by how much snow had already disappeared from the planet, not to mention how much was predicted to melt in my lifetime. The ski season in parts of British Columbia is four to five weeks shorter than it was 50 years ago, and in eastern Canada, the season is predicted to drop to less than two months by midcentury. At Lake Tahoe, spring now arrives two and a half weeks earlier, and some computer models predict that the Pacific Northwest will receive 40 to 70 percent less snow by 2050. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise — they grew 41 percent between 1990 and 2008 — then snowfall, winter and skiing will no longer exist as we know them by the end of the century.

:?

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And it led people to ask me, “Why save skiing when there are more pressing consequences of climate change to worry about?” The answer is, this is not about skiing. It is about snow, a vital component of earth’s climate system and water cycle. When it disappears, what follows is a dangerous chain reaction of catastrophes like forest fires, drought, mountain pine beetle infestation, degraded river habitat, loss of hydroelectric power, dried-up aquifers and shifting weather patterns. Not to mention that more than a billion people around the world — including about 70 million in the western United States — rely on snowmelt for their fresh water supply.


https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/opin ... -snow.html

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Nothing besides a national policy shift on how we create and consume energy will keep our mountains white in the winter — and slow global warming to a safe level.

This is no longer a scientific debate. It is scientific fact.

:?


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10 Jan 2021, 5:22 pm

Found this about 2010, which connects to the subject of moisture in the air, https://www.catalannews.com/society-sci ... ed-in-snow

10 years since freak March storm left Catalonia covered in snow

On March 8 2010, the country was hit by the heaviest snowfall of the century so far, with major disruptions to transport and power networks
08 March 2020 11:04 AM
by ACN | Barcelona


Quote:
The cause of the storm was an anticyclone between the UK and Germany that produced an area of low pressure with relatively warm and humid air that came into contact with colder air, which produced precipitation in the form of snow over Catalonia.

...

Quote:
A snowstorm, and especially one of those proportions, is the last thing anyone expects at the beginning of spring. Fortunately, such freak weather conditions don't come around often, and you have to go back to Christmas 1962 to find one that matches the storm 10 years ago.


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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10 Jan 2021, 5:26 pm

A find about the current storm's contributing factors, https://www.spainenglish.com/2021/01/09 ... voc-spain/

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The agency said that it was due to the unusual combination of a cold air mass stagnant over the Iberian Peninsula and the arrival of the warmer Storm Filomena from the south. The storm is expected to move northeast throughout Saturday, where Catalonia is now also on high alert.

A record temperature of -35.6 C was recorded at Vega de Lourdes in León, northern Spain, AEMET said.


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10 Jan 2021, 8:09 pm

jimmy m wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
So you're sarcasm backfired.


Oh, but sarcasm is so good when every week there is another hysterical article in the press blaming any strange weather anomaly on global warming. I remember a few years ago, they even tried to say that global warming could produce another ice age.

Quote:
An increase in snow is NOT evidence of more coldness in the world. It's evidence of more water in the world's atmosphere.


Hmmmm. To get snow you need both cold temperature and moisture. So if it was a sunny 90 deg F in Spain right now, I sincerely doubt that it would be snowing!


Exactly

If it were 90 degrees, with high relative humidity, and there were a sudden cold snap you would get even more snow than you have now because of the sudden drop in water carrying capacity of the air- resulting in even more precip than you had.

And actually you need heat to get snow. Not cold. Because you need heat to store enough water in the air to have snow. If coldness caused snow then why does Atlanta Georgia get more snow each year than Antarctica gets in a thousand years? Atlanta is hotter, thus has more absolute humidity, so when it snows in Atlanta Atlanta gets a greater quantity of snow in an hour Antarctica gets in a century.

How is sarcasm "so good" if it backfires? And why is that "hysterical"? There is evidence that past ice ages were caused paradoxically by an increase in temperature. Weather is complex. Its not impossible.



jimmy m
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10 Jan 2021, 11:13 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
There is evidence that past ice ages were caused paradoxically by an increase in temperature.


I almost sounds like you are saying that if temperature rises due to global warming, then it will produce an ice age. Thus the world will not burn up but rather become extremely cold.


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