Talking temperatures

What a load of rubbish in this Bristol Evening Post story! The temperature on a single day in a Bristol WINTER compared with the temperature on a single day in the Antarctic SUMMER (Bristol will be cold as the South Pole tonight - snow forecast for the weekend). Such a lack of care over fair comparison. What would the Post be like with setting a complex set of temperature data in its proper context?

Why not instead give some figures for past extreme high and extreme low temperatures along with the average high and low here in Bristol at this time of year? Record Feb high at Long Ashton +18.3 C, record low in Long Ashton -9.7 C (1959-2002), average high 7.7 C, average low 1.8 C (assuming the table of data here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol  is accurate and reliable). Compared to these averages it is going to be quite a bit colder tonight if we get the - 6 C forecast. Temperatures will vary according to where you are in Bristol, with the outskirts generally a bit colder than further into the city due to the urban heat island effect.

BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Horizon, 2010-2011, What is One Degree?

Comedian Ben Miller returns to his roots as a physicist to try to answer a deceptively simple question: what is one degree of temperature?
His quest takes him to the frontiers of current science as he meets researchers working on the hottest and coldest temperatures in the universe, and to a lab where he experiences some of the strangest effects of quantum physics - a place where super-cooled liquids simply pass through solid glass. Plus, Ben installs his very own Met office weather station at home.
Ben's investigations in this personal and passionate film highlight the importance of measurement and accuracy in the 21st century.

BBC - BBC Two Programmes - Horizon, 2010-2011, What is One Degree?

BBC News - How Helsinki airport deals with snow and ice

Interesting perspective on one aspect of dealing with snowy weather from Helsinki - basically they expect a lot of snow and very low temperatures; they are more prepared, with more staff and equipment types and numbers; our snow is wetter and ice problems are more likely; Helsinki airport does not have to handle as many flights as Heathrow...If this kind of weather is likely to occur in the UK more frequently then we have to be more prepared and perhaps change our attitude to travel intensive lifestyles.

...It looks as though there will be another snowy winter, like last year's, says Anika Kala, a spokesperson for the airport. But she says she's relaxed because the airport is "well prepared".

The preparation consists of good equipment, extra winter staff, and a choice of three runways.

While one runway is being cleared of snow or ice, the other two are open for business.

Snow storage
In exceptional circumstances, two runways may be closed. It takes a rare combination of heavy snow and high wind to close all three - as happened, briefly, seven years ago.

What about the equipment?

"We have 250 vehicles of different kinds," says Ms Kala.

"We have sweepers, snow ploughs, vehicles that blow snow from the runways, and friction testers that check the surface is fit for use."

The snow is removed to a special storage area within the airport perimeter. When that fills up, it is taken to other facilities outside.

Last winter 7,000 truckloads were carted off the runways, apron and taxi-ing areas.

Temperatures in Helsinki can drop to -25C - but Ms Kala explains that a good hard frost is much easier to deal with than a temperature of zero or -1C.

"When it's zero degrees, it's moist and there will be ice," she says....

She acknowledges that there is a big difference between Helsinki, which has a total of 600 landings and take-offs per day on its three runways, and Heathrow which has twice as many - on two runways - and five times as many passengers to deal with.

Running a big airport like Heathrow - which is privately owned by BAA - would be a bigger operation than running state-owned Helsinki airport.

But the principles for dealing with snow and ice, Ms Kala suggests, are probably the same.

BBC News - How Helsinki airport deals with snow and ice

Johann Hari: How much proof do the global warming deniers need? - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

Everything the climate scientists said would happen - with their pesky graphs and studies and computers - is coming to pass. This is proving the hottest year ever. Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.

The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass.

This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Centre puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.

Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died.

The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel – tar sands – that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, had been opposed to meaningful action on global warming until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable...

more via this link

Johann Hari: How much proof do the global warming deniers need? - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

Highlighted by snow and ice...

The snow and sub-zero temperatures have certainly revealed the power of nature – to produce both problems, such as safely transporting goods and people over distances, and opportunities, such as for local shops and the UK skiing industry.

The cold/snowy period has revealed our energy insecurity, with gas supplies running much lower than they should be allowed to, surely even more clearly making the case for Government action to insulate all homes to a high standard, free of charge, beginning with the poorest and most inefficient. This also makes the case for much greater diversity in our energy supplies.

To our shame this period has shown that councils and govt can plan to spread grit to keep the motorways open and keep the economy going but gritting in and around elderly peoples homes and our kids schools is not a priority.

On a more positive note recent days have shown us the value of neighbours and community spirit, with stories of people checking on their older neighbours, helping out those who’ve become stuck, and clearing areas for themselves because the council cant/wont get there to do it (surely highlighting the case for giving people more power and resources to do more things for themselves locally…).

Climate change...after all is only weather (?)

The appropriately named Bob Bull, thinks climate change is just 'hype' (‘Don’t believe all that climate change hype’, Post, September 2). But something that has been repeatedly subject to rigorous scientific investigation in ever more sophisticated ways, scrutinised and debated by all manner of people over decades, surely has to be much, much more than the promotion, advertisement and exaggerated claims that Bob says it is! I guess this is the same Bob Bull that is Bristol spokeman of the Association of British Drivers and that his interest is unduly colouring his ‘interpretation’ of the facts – he refers to ‘political zealots’ taking over but through his own words shows that there are such zealots on all sides of the climate debate!

It could be that Bob does not bother with science and the facts at all. How else could he come up with the phrase ‘…climate change, which after all is only weather.’ ? If he bothered to look it up he’d find that weather is the state of our atmosphere short term whereas climate is a long term view of weather patterns. This is a distinction that is crucially important to understanding climate change. The fact that Bob does not understand this fully explains why he feels able to give the statement ‘temperatures have not risen since 2002’ as good evidence against global warming. If what he said was true it would not be relevant because it’s the long term pattern that we should be concerned with. In any case both the NASA and Met Office websites agree that the ten warmest years since modern records began have all occurred since 1997!!

Not only is Bob wrong in thinking that climate and weather are the same, he is also obviously wrong to say its ‘only weather’ and ‘weather is weather’. The weather and how it changes is crucial to: water supplies, including flooding and droughts; crop yields, including food and timber supplies & food availability to raise animals; health and disease, including aspects like rate of spread and heat stress; energy consumption eg for air conditioning; tourism levels; rates of coastal erosion; occurrence and severity of impact of air pollution such as photochemical smog; and more!!

Finally Bob’s view is that ‘green’ and ‘climate change’ campaigns impoverish the world. However, I’d point out that there few if any governments around the world are genuinely green and tackling climate change – and its very much our persistence with the current greed-based, un-green economic system that has brought both economic booms and busts and serious environmental degradation requiring urgent action!