So New York City was expecting the worst storm ever with up to 1 metre of snow, except it didn’t quite turn out as bad as that. In spite of the no-show, people still took precautions and stripped supermarket shelves of essentials like water, bread, milk, eggs, etc.
What’s curious about the storm is that it comes soon after the Japanese released a report showing that 2014 was the hottest year on record. Which bolstered claims of global warming. Here’s one report with pretty graphs and even a video.
But of course there are other sides to the coin. For example, here’s a chart of the major snowfalls in the New York area since 1888, when records began:
Snowstorm records for NYC
The curious thing about this is how the peak storms tend to occur in clusters:
1888 – 1899 (12 years)
1935 – 1948 (14 years)1960 – 1969 (10 years)
2003 – 2011/2015 (9 to 13 years)
Solar activity runs in cycles around 11 or 12 years long … is there a connection? Also note the peak storms are getting more frequent, at a time when global warming is supposed to be accelerating. Curious, no?
But wait… there’s more.
Meteorologist: 2010s officially the snowiest decade in the east coast in the NOAA record – surpassing the 1960s
A professor of meteorology at MIT has dissed the claims about 2014. There’s only a 38% chance that the claim is actually correct.
Some scientists at Berkeley (BEST) have also questioned the claims:
“Our best estimate for the global temperature of 2014 puts it slightly above (by 0.01 C) that of the next warmest year (2010) but by much less than the margin of uncertainty (0.05 C). Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”
http://static.berkeleyearth.org/memos/Global-Warming-2014-Berkeley-Earth-Newsletter.pdf
Chinese scientist did their own research in the South China Sea and came up with this:
By using overlaps between successive generations of giant clams and corals, the three scientists – Hong Yan of the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Yuhong Wang of Fudan University, Shanghai – reconstructed a record of sea-surface temperature changes going back 2500 years.
The Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods both showed up prominently in the western Pacific and East Asia. Sea surface temperatures varied considerably over the 2500-year period.
Changing patterns of winter and summer temperature variation were also detected, disproving the notion that until the warming of the 20th century there had been little change in global temperatures for at least 1000 years, and confirming that – at least in the South China Sea – there is nothing exceptional about today’s temperatures.
Dr. Yan said: “This new paper adds further material to the substantial body of real-world proxy evidence establishing that today’s global temperature is within natural ranges of past changes.” Dr. Soon added: “The UN’s climate panel should never have trusted the claim that the medieval warm period was mainly a European phenomenon. It was clearly warm in South China Sea too.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/05/hottest-year-ever-giant-clam-reveals-middle-ages-were-warmer-than-today/
Or here’s some choice prose about the so-called Great Pause (in global warming):
RSS and UAH satellite data show there has been no global warming for 18 years and three months — a so-called pause in global warming that has lasted since the late 1990s and continued through 2014.
“The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with ‘substantial confidence’ that the science was settled and the debate over,” Christopher Monckton, the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and a climate skeptic, wrote in his analysis of the near two-decade pause in warming. “Nature had other ideas.”
“Though approaching 70 mutually incompatible and more or less implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals and among proselytizing scientists, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed, and is demonstrated in a major peer-reviewed paper published this month in the Orient’s leading science journal,” writes Monckton, who has been studying and writing on global warming for years.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/01/12/satellite-data-says-2014-actually-wasnt-the-warmest-on-record/
So I think it is still wise to keep an open mind on the whole climate debate … it is a very complex system and we are far from understanding it completely.