Chris Knight

And indeed, this shows the futility of attempting to produce a time-series measure such as "Global temperature anomalies" based on land based weather station temperature measurements, however individually accurate or unbiassed.

When I was young, I was taught to eat soup by taking the soup at the edge of the bowl, rather than at the centre - it was cooler, and the soup could be eaten faster, though remaining warm. If the spoon was just used to take soup from the centre of the bowl, there was a risk of burning your mouth or else blowing over the spoon, which was impolite, and having the dregs of the soup cold. Same with a south-north position for the jet - it either takes heat from the surface where the surface is hotter, or where it is cooler, leading to different rates of cooling. QED.

I think BBC Gardening will be out of fashion soon. Not only will we have to conserve every drop of water that falls onto our measly plots of earth, we shall have to use the collected water to hold the summer heat to keep us warm during the long winter months - big black tanks in summer and white fleecy covers during the colder seasons, and at night - with everything else wrapped in spaceblanket aluminised plastic bubble wrap. Reality TV will consist of reporters with FLIR thermographic cameras calling on people whose houses are abnormally hot, and radiating like pulsars in the suburbs. Daytime TV with titles like "Insulation, Insulation, Insulation!", and "Glass(fibre) in the Attic" will be the daily fodder for the unemployed.

Nah - I pick this June as starters (sorry TWS )

Is it a dunny for sheilas when they have a barby?

Which is fine and dandy as a representative weather station, no dispute - but when historical "weather" records for this part of Surrey are used for "climate" studies - it just creates a upwards kick in the record - which needs to be adjusted - so do past records get adjusted down, or up, and by how much, or do more recent measurements get adjusted, and by what criteria? Finally, who is to tell if the adjustments made are reliable in relation with the longterm record? And this is for a single station - there are thousands of stations worldwide, which have been replaced for just this mode of reasoning - for weather reasons! Yet the data still gets woven into the climatological record. There seems to be some dispute in another thread in this climate change area where weather station siting is being discussed. I wish some people could broaden their minds on occasion!! There is overlap, and the two fields of interest do not seem to sit well together.

Thanks S_B_1

Dunno. Is there any prior case in which too much vodka caused emoticons to stop working? Too much G&T once stopped my keyboard working! The moral: Don't ever blame the alcohol until after it has been drunk - don't think, drink it first. Edit: Damn, my emoticons have stopped working - Rum, in my case.

Those following this thread may be interested in this link "A Case for Climate Cycles: Orbit, Sun and Moon" by W.H. Berger, J. Pätzold and G. Wefer 2002 is worth reading. One insight which I hadn't thought about before is that any (external or cosmic) cycle of influence is affected by season (on earth, and in all latitudes, with whatever differential effect that may have), and thus of greater or lesser effect each time each cycle is at its maximum influence.

Thought I did, Pete - quoting your reply to Tamara's post

Sorry, my mistake Pete, I was reading this thread on its own, not in conjunction with the other thread in the General discussion area where "nasty" was mentioned. The joys of being a moderator, eh, Pete? I would not want to do it. I assumed NSSC was replying after the entry by La Bise. I took no offence, and there certainly was nothing here to [report]

You missed this one, Pete, immediately above Tamara's

Using Firefox 3.0.12 on XP pro, no problems with running the forum, but I don't like two features compared to the old style forum - the way image attachments appear in pop-up windows, greying out the main window in the background, I preferred the separate browser window, which allowed you to both read the post and look at the image, or at several images at once. It is now also likely that you have to scroll the page down to make the close (X) button visible, whereas before it was closable from the window's title bar or taskbar. I also find the extra click on "Go" on the forum jump annoying and unnecessary. Otherwise - great.

Hi GW, I think that if the conditions at any time in the past had been as they have been over the last few years, those few who may have ventured onto the icepack during the summer melt may likely not have survived, and those hunting caribou for bone-marrow and meat for the dogs on solid land did. It would have been a salutory lesson, and such a foolhardy venture probably not repeated. I am sure there must be tales of famed hunters who never returned, for whatever reasons - there were tales of kayakers washed up on Scottish beaches weren't there?

Whaddaya mean "(-ish)"?

The inundation - would that be the Durham Grand Canyon 2009AD, GW, or maybe the tsunami in the aftermath of the Minoan collapse of the Santorini caldera ca. 1645BC? Maybe the post-glacial flooding during a rapid sea level rise that separated Australia when the Gulf of Carpentaria filled during the Dream Time. All burnt deeply into the local collective memory. It is thought that Beringians lived on the pack ice and ice shelves of the northern Pacific rim for as much as 15000 years before the end of the glaciation. Indeed, was there a north Atlantic rim, with people travelling between the old and the new world, way back then? Circumpolar peoples only started to inhabit the northern lands after the ice retreat at the end of the last glaciation perhaps 8-10 thousand years ago. They were nomads, like the animals they hunted, and one patch of ice resembles another, so whether far north or south their oral history does not tell. Those who travelled too far north had a long, cold dark winter to look forward to, and no solid land beneath their feet if the ice happened to melt. Their oral history would be difficult to find, I think. Tip of the day: One of the ways to tell if your dried fish is still frozen is how 'snappy' it is!

"Climate chaos" - always goes together like "infinite universe" and "pathetic excuses", they were never separated, even the ? time when the poles were last "ice-free". By at least one of the tectonic forecasts, that which we now call the United Kingdom will be located near the North Polar axis at some time in the future, with it's fossil record showing that near tropical conditions existed here in the past, including crocodilians. Ellesmere Island was not at the latitude it was today when "Get me a fish, and make it snappy!" was the order of the day! That was naughty, GW. However, no-one would disagree that the polar weather for the past few years has removed what once seemed to be a permanent sea ice cover in Arctic waters. It is fascinating to watch what will happen over the next few years, but so far, the results have not been devastating, and the resultant northern hemisphere climatological signals since 2007 have not got anyone wetting their pants. Maybe something will happen this year, but, so far, nothing has tipped. So far the cold has just transferred southwards a bit, if NH winter 2008/9 temperatures in inhabited regions are to be believed, but nothing extreme has been recorded. So: No Neddy - whatever that means, no "WAKE UP!!!>>>" and no Job, miserable bugg.. that he was, and no more cold bottoms and no more cold feet, thank you very much GW! Que Sera, Sera so far. Alaskan salmon fishing is more at risk from farmed salmon than any climatic changes, and possibly a good thing too, a bit like UK coal mining - a dangerous and potentially damaging industry, not only for the environment, but those who worked and lost their lives and children in the industry.

IMO, Ice, it isn't so much the tides, which you point out have a large daily presence. Their energy is added to by the tidal braking of the moon, about 3 terawatts,(see short article by Carl Wunsch, here), but even this is not where the climatic effect on the atmosphere and oceans is greatest. It is the Northerly and southerly range of the variations in the moons orbit, together with the elliptical orbit of both the moon and the earth which set up complex harmonics, due to the variations in gravitational pull strength and direction, in the earth's oceans, and atmosphere. These variations each have several periodicities, which is what is being demonstrated in the poster by Claire Perigaud which Pete posted earler, certainly the 14.7 day periodicity of the lunar semi-orbit, and the 18.6 year lunar nodal cycle, and the various important sub-harmonics seen in the data and models set up by those at the JPL, which they apparently feel should be incorporated in the GCMs. These harmonics, together with geographical features of coastlines are used to calculate tide tables, and predict with remarkable accuracy the time and height of tides for seafarers all around the world. Although in many places around the world there are two high tides and two low tides daily, this is not always the case. In the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, the circumpolar current has no obstacles in the form of continents, so at Ross Island there is usually only a single high tide and a single low tide, and sometimes the variation between high and low tide is as little as a few centimetres, whereas a week later the range may be at it's maximum of just over a metre, and this tide does not follow the phases of the moon. The tidal harmonic interactions are likely to create standing waves, which would be slow moving, like the Rossby and Kelvin waves found in atmosphere and oceans, and subject to boundary reflections etc., as they reach coastlines, or topographical land features, but would also cover large geographical scales of distance over long periods of time. What is the cause of those gravitational waves by the way? I would guess that it would need not only considerable processing power, imagination, topographical and cosmological datasets, and programming abilities to model all these factors, as well as a will of steel in sending off grant applications, and ignoring the rejections, and pressing ahead towards determining if these untried theoretical ideas really had a large role in affecting the climate. One thing though, it once was important enough to calculate the tide tables. It was once important enough to accurately map the sky to determine the exact latitude and longitude from any point on the earth, and important enough to develop accurate chronometers to make this possible. If climate change is as important as some people believe, it surely is important to know as much as possible about what makes it work. I don't know that solar variation has any effect on climate beyond the obvious what energy comes in... part of the argument, but there is no doubt that the moon and the climate are intricately linked, if only by the effects of the variation in the rate of rotation of the earth.

Some interesting links there Pete, (and the one above from Claire Perigaud, who is a NASA JPL Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction scientist, no less, but has not published anything on Lunar-ENSO connections AFAIK. She can be contacted here apparently ). As a matter of interest, what were your Google search terms that brought up these articles? The middle of the three articles by Dr Robert C. Balling Jr. led me to this interview on this blog - ouch! (reading part II as well)

And I always thought Yorkshire folk would call a spade a spade. I have a favourite broom myself, had it for years. Even after four new heads and five replacement broomhandles, it's still going strong.

Nice pics, Jonathan.

Now I understand, GW, how this must affect your outlook - "even the white bits are black" - eh? Rainy asked a good question earlier. I have a feeling that the cold meltwater which has pooled in central north Atlantic waters for each of the past few years has been associated with unsettled UK summer weather because the Azores high gets stabilised over the cool water to the west of the Azores. The Jetstream rides over the north of this high, and drags our weather in from Newfoundland and Greenland.

Sorry fozi999, your image was so small and indistinct, I didn't realise it was the same establishment that I admire too, and I found a much prettier picture than you did! Now there is the Oxford Radcliffe observatory, which is a (possibly more) beautiful building, with a longer historical weather record. I will give you a chance to get an image and location of it up here before I do. Don't wait too long tho! :lol:

A/C is not on all the time - apparently some US citizens have had not had to turn them on at all this summer, the weather has been so pleasantly cool! I would bet that they are also thermostatted. A/C outputs distribute heat more in the hottest weather, heating up surrounding walls and surfaces, even if shaded, and extending into the evening since the interiors of the A/C'd building still need cooling. So no step change - just hotter hot days and nights, and of course moderated by breezes or still weather, so the hottest still days measure an even higher temperature than without the A/C contribution. Here's Durham University observatory, with a continuous weather record going back to 1840. I wonder what AWS they used then, and if it was always on the roof? No, that was a scurrilous fiction:

Or everybody there has "flu", and since the kids are off school until September, we will now take a BBQ break