Ice Still on Lake Superior in June!

June 1st, 2014 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Unless everything melted overnight, there is still ice on Lake Superior — and snow on the ground in Michigan — in freakin’ June.

Here’s the MODIS satellite image from early afternoon on 31 May, 2014…I’ve outlined the main areas of ice which are concentrated near the south shore of Lake Superior, mostly near Marquette and Pictured Rocks:
MODIS-Aqua-5-31-2014-ice-near-Marquette

Also from yesterday, here’s what it looked like at ground level (photo courtesy of my friends at Lake Superior Photo in Marquette):
Superior-ice-5-31-2014-Lake-Superior-Photo

And here’s another photo from yesterday, showing that not even all of the snow on the ground has melted…this from Ben Musielak, in Paradise, Michigan (I’m sure there are lots of examples of this across the Upper Peninsula in the lake effect snow belt areas):
snow-in-Paradise-5-31-2014

In case anyone needed to be told…this past winter’s persistent “polar vortex” was not that unusual, and wasn’t due to global warming climate change climate disruption.


87 Responses to “Ice Still on Lake Superior in June!”

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  1. Clay Stiles says:

    Stay after them, Dr. Roy!

  2. AlecM says:

    No wonder Holdren’s bitch, O’barmy is trying to get the CO2-Eugenics Final Solution in place ASAP.

    The US population must be starting to wake up to the scam, surely?

  3. bassman says:

    AlecM, a little over the top. Those EPA rules are great for local pollution issues too, forget about greenhouse gas issues. I prefer the term global warming induced climate change. Obviously regional climate changes year to year (USA 2012 and 2013). The overall CO2 forcing is what will pull these variations further and further from 21 century norms. Overall these changes will be disruptive to many things. I think to have an honest debate on here we need to stick with sensitivity arguments and individual forcings.

    • Armisian says:

      “overall, CO2 forcing is what will pull these variations further and further from 21 century norms.” A hypothesis that tracks more strongly with an individual’s political ideology than either education or field of expertise.

    • AlecM says:

      There is no CO2-AGW; the so-called ‘consensus’ is based on ludicrous physics no professional scientist of engineer taught standard physics accepts. Gore was warned of this over 20 years ago but ignored the warning; I wonder why?

      However, for ~50 years, US Atmospheric Science has taught false ‘back radiation’ physics. It originated from Carl Sagan who made a bad mistake in the aerosol optical physics of clouds which led him to believe that Venus’ surface IR Irradiance was a real heat flux; it isn’t.

      Only now that professionals from other disciplines taught correct IR and heat transfer physics have penetrated the Climate Models and seen the incorrect physics is there a reasoned scientific reaction. There is also the empirical evidence, no statistically significant warming for nearly 18 years despite c. 16% increased [CO2].

      The reason why there is no GHG-AGW is that the atmosphere self controls by a mechanism no-one has hitherto suspected. To pursue de-industrialisation and the return to a subsistence agricultural system that the lunatic extremists like Holdren and his eugenicist pal Erlich have proposed for 40 years, will lead to a 50% cull of the population. Do you really want that?

      • Nate says:

        Without the ‘ludicrous physics’ of CO2 greenhouse gas warming, please explain how the temperature of Venus is so much higher than that of Mercury.

    • Lynn Clark says:

      bassman, the overall CO2 forcing won’t do diddly squat. It’s way past time you started thinking for yourself instead of regurgitating alarmist bullcrap. Here’s a few good places for you to start your re-education:

      http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/06/01/le-chatelier-and-his-principle-vs-the-trouble-with-trenberth/

      A critical look at global and regional temperature data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG_7zK8ODGA

      On the efficacy — or lack thereof — of climate models: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhipLNeda4

    • Ken F. says:

      “Norms?” What “norms?” Number1: There is no man made warming. Zero. Number 2: There is zero evidence man is causing any warming. Any warming comes from the sun. Number 3: What is NORMAL? Maybe “Normal” is a little warmer than now. It’s ridiculous to think the microscopic bit of CO2 we produce makes ANY difference when CO2 is only tiny fraction of overall green house gases to start with. They were using the same stupid excuses in the 70’s claiming we were causing global cooling and a new ice age. Man made global warming is nothing less than an excuse to control us. Start THINKING.

  4. “The overall CO2 forcing is what will pull these variations further and further from 21 century norms”

    How could you know ?

    What are the “21 century norms” after accounting for natural climate variability ?

  5. Thanks for that one Dr. Spencer. – It warms up, and then it cools down. – There are “Peaks and troughs”, or highs and lows, in the “Temperature-curve”. – Unfortunately, if the “Ice Core Graphs” and other “Lake and Ocean Bottom Core-Graphs” are correct then, I’d say; “Unfortunately, we are on the way back to the next “Glaciation” or Ice Age. – I would be very happy if an increased Atmospheric CO2 content would bring some ‘in my opinion, much needed, warming. But I cannot find any evidence, anywhere, that there is any chance of that happening.

  6. Gunga Din says:

    Hmmmm….I wonder why I haven’t seen this on The Weather Channel?
    (Though they did have a blurb on Katrina today.)

  7. MRW says:

    Dr. S.

    Get some June pictures. A summer month has a nice ring to it.

  8. Lynn Clark says:

    Freakin’ Ice Still on Freakin’ Lake Superior in Freakin’ June, Dude!

    There, fixed it for you. 😉

  9. It would be interesting to see what the land based thermometers report for this region over this time period, as an independent reality check on their accuracy.

  10. bassman says:

    Lynn, think about it clearly your arguing against the entire scientific staff of NOAA and NASA. It is just bizarre that you guys on here think the planet won’t continue to gain energy at increasing rates in the next century. Even Roy agrees that Earth will continue to warm. What will be your excuse when 2014 is the warmest year on record and deep ocean heat content, sea level and other indicators continue to rise. How many excuses can you come up with. It’s just bizarre. I trust thermometers and that we have a decent understanding of natural forcings. Aerosols are the only real unknown and those are temporary anyways. The CO2 forcing is very very well understood. Argue about feedbacks sure but this nonsense of “cooling and cycles and returning to an ice age” is the most ridiculous of all arguments in the scientific world at this point.

    • John K says:

      Bassman,

      Hmmh! You may want to examine the climate. We still witness ice-age conditions. A few thousand years ago the permafrost, tundra and likely the entire polar ice-caps didn’t even exist. Whatever happened to those mastadon remains stuck currently in permafrost? Keep trying.

      Have a great dahy!

    • rah says:

      Hmm I read an article at ICECAP by Pointman that I think applies here: “Even a casual acquaintance with the history of science teaches us one simple thing; it advances across a battlefield drenched in the blood of sacred cows. The Earth revolves around the Sun? Something falls to Earth because it’s being pulled by some invisible force rather than just having weight? Space can bend and time can run at different rates depending on where you are in something called a gravity well? Continents can actually move? Where’s your head? Are you insane?”

      The alarmists and governments claims are simply no backed up by what we are experiencing. NOAA can distort the temperature data all it wants to make it appear that it is warmer than it is but freezing temperature of fresh water does not change. So when NOAA says one thing but the great lakes has record ice cover in the winter and Superior still has ice on it in JUNE they aren’t fooling anyone but the foolish.

    • Gail Combs says:

      ” It is just bizarre that you guys on here think the planet won’t continue to gain energy at increasing rates in the next century. “

      FIRST: The ONLY way the earth gains energy is either from the Sun or from the molten core PERIOD. All Co2 can do is possibly retard the escape of that energy to space.

      SECOND: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives 1.5 W/m 2 for the forcing of anthropogenic CO2 [cf., Reid, 1997].

      THIRD: During the Holocene solar energy reached a summer maximum (9% higher than at present) ~11 ka ago. 9% higher is ~ 122 W/m 2 or 100 times the forcing of anthropogenic CO2.

      FOURTH: The sealevel Highstand was 1.5 to 2.0 meters higher than present between 3.5 and 6.0 ka ago.
      References:
      Mid to late Holocene sea-level reconstruction of Southeast Vietnam using beachrock and beach-ridge deposits
      (wwwDOT)sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818113001859
      or
      Oahu showing mean sea level higher than today between ~5000 and ~2000 yr ago with a maximum ~2 m above present ca. 3500 yr ago….
      (wwwDOT)soest.hawaii.edu/ericg/kap_paper.pdf

      FIFTH: Over the long term glaciers are growing.
      References:
      Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic and A new approach for reconstructing glacier variability based on lake sediments recording input from more than one glacier

      LAST we are near or at glacial inception and many geologists think higher CO2 levels can keep us out of glaciation.

      From the paper Can we predict the duration of an interglacial? I extracted the 21 June solar insolation @ 65◦ N for several glacial inceptions:

      Current values are insolation = 479 W m−2

      MIS 7e – insolation = 463 W m−2,
      MIS 11c – insolation = 466 W m−2,
      MIS 13a – insolation = 500 W m−2,
      MIS 15a – insolation = 480 W m−2,
      MIS 17 – insolation = 477 W m−2,

      From NOAA I got these:
      depth of the last ice age – around 463 W m−2
      NOW (modern Warm Period) 476Wm-2

      This would indicate that when the solar insolation gets somewhere below 500 W m−2 other factors can tip the climate into the cold state of glaciation.

      Why ever do you want to DECREASE CO2, the only possible blanket the earth has away at the tail end of the Holocene especially when research shows Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California

      • Nate says:

        I think some have suggested saving some carbon, i.e. coal, to be released at the right time, in a few thousand years, to reduce the effects of the next ice age. But now is not that time.

    • AlecM says:

      There is no accumulation of energy from CO2-AGW. It doesn’t exist. It is a projection by those who after 1997 set out to deceive the World when it was shown that CO2 did not drive the end of ice ages.

      No professional engineer or scientist taught standard physics and who does the professional task of seeing whether there is any experimental proof of the IPCC’s physical assumptions, agrees with the IPCC’s claims.

      Most IPCC scientists are stating that there is no evidence of the ‘positive feedback’ but they’re still clinging on in the hope that there will be a warm El Nino. They’re already blaming the absence of the El Nino on the Indonesian volcanic eruption.

      PS Even Tyndall’s experiment has been misinterpreted: the assumption of gas phase thermalisation of GHG-absorbed IR energy would be breach of Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation. These people simply failed to do their job, but that is what you get when Obama invested $70 + billion in supporting the displacement of real physics by juvenile stuff.

    • NoFreeWind says:

      > I trust thermometers
      I trust them too, but it is the people plotting the charts I don’t trust. I think you should spent some time looking at what the temperature record showed in the 1990’s before this fraud took off after An Inconvenient Truth and the liberal backlash against Bush.

      Most people have no understanding that much of what we have right now is due to Bush and the lies from the right to propagate the Iraq War. It didn’t work out so good and after a few years of that it gave the left uber confidence to push their own rotten agenda. They’ve basically had free will to do and say and write and publish anything they want, because, hey now, Bush lied and it didn’t turn out so good, so they are right ones to blindly follow. Most people don’t have enough intelligence or inclination to assess data and history and the generally complex world of climate change. And, if the answer might contradict with their deep seated political beliefs, why even bother?

      ANYONE, I mean, ANYONE, after serious study, that thinks that even if the IPCC is generally right that their is absolutely ANYTHING that can be done on a world-wide basis that would make any difference whatsoever in global climate change has absolutely no understanding of human nature and how dependent the world global prosperity is dependent on fossil fuels with no possible replacement in sight. Oh, I forgot, nuclear energy has been around for over 50 years, but that’s no good either.

      Let’s start with the US and the EPA regs. Here’s the EPA analysis of the 2010 hope to reduce global temp by .01C!
      http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=57cadd3c-afb0-4890-bae5-3d6a101db11f

      For this thinking man. This entire argument is ABSURD!!! It’s sad that a scientist like Roy has to spend his time on this nonsense when he could be working to make life better for us all, instead he has to work against people that want to simply steal our money, take our freedom and push their self-serving agenda. I guarantee you, it don’t serve US!

    • Lynn Clark says:

      bassman, think about it. Clearly you’re incapable of thinking for yourself. I gave you links to an article and a couple talks by some smart people, one or two of which qualify as bona fide “climate scientists”, which argue against the nonsense you’re regurgitating. Are you incapable if recognizing when government scientists (and others) are leading you down the primrose path? Go read the article and watch the two talks….and think about what you’re reading, hearing and seeing. Then report back. Unless you’re willing to do that, what you regurgitate is of no value or interest to anyone here.

  11. John K says:

    Hi Roy,

    Since you brought up Lake Superior again:

    “The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down of the big lake they called “Gitche Gumee.”
    ‘Superior,’ they said never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early!…
    Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings in the rooms of her ice water mansion…”

    Quote taken from Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald”

    It seems CO2 alarmist credibility may have failed and died long ago in some room in her ice water mansion.

    Have a great day!

  12. bassman says:

    Rah, NOAA wasn’t hiding anything. Anomaly maps clearly showed a good year of below average temps over eastern US and parts of Canada that includes the Great Lakes, everywhere else was quite warm making it the 4th warmest year on record despite being ENSO neutral and cold pacific surface temps. There are so many ways to show how the planet has warmed over the last 4 decades aside from surface temps. That being said, Temps are going to rise very soon on UAH (5 month delay from the MEI index). I wouldn’t be surprised if NOAA and Nasa both record 2014 as the warmest and UAH being the 3rd warmest. RSS and UAH are really sensitive to MEI and will likely show 2015 as the warmest. All this is assuming that a moderate El Niño occurs against the background greenhouse gas forcing.

  13. Bassman, you seem to be quite convinced that “The Man-produced” part of the CO2 in the Atmosphere is responsible for the resent “Global Warming” (GW) – Please explain, in detail, how this is possible. Remember this one ‘very important thing’: It is up to those who make a claim, any claim, to explain the said claim in detail.

    If you cannot do so, then stop making the claim.

  14. bassman says:

    O H , Do I need to explain photosynthesis and Mitosis also? CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the carbon from fossil fuels is easily identified by isotope. The patterns of warming show a distinct “heat trapping” pattern with faster warming at night and winter versus let’s say warming from the sun which would show the opposite. This is all basic HS science. If you need it described go buy a basic textbook. Climate science is way beyond this now. Only a merchant of doubt would keep pretending everything is unknown or uncertain in order to advance a agenda not supported by science.

    • Gail Combs says:

      “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the carbon from fossil fuels is easily identified by isotope.

      Actually that is an untrue statement.

      SEE: The Trouble With C12 C13 Ratios

      There are other articles too but I am too tired to go digging for them.

    • crakar24 says:

      Go back to high school science, go buy a basic text book? Ok lets do that………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….nope cant find it anywhere.

      Bassman can you please show me where the text books state and demonstrate co2 has “heat trapping” abilities.

      Cheers

    • NoFreeWind says:

      >he carbon from fossil fuels is easily identified by isotope.

      Roy doesn’t think so
      http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/increasing-atmospheric-co2-manmade%E2%80%A6or-natural/

  15. Mike says:

    It’s quite impressing that there is still some snow and ice left in areas which are in the same latitude as my home in europe. I live near a lake too and we hardly have any ice in the winter due to the gulf stream and the prevailing west winds. Not to mention the “snow drought” in our country, when we see less snow than many southern countries. ðŸ™

  16. bassman says:

    Michael Mann will be updating his “Dire Predictions” book this summer. That is probably the best place to start. Everyone knows CO2 traps heat and doesn’t “create heat” like incoming solar energy. The sun is a factor just not that significant compared to the CO2 forcing.

    • David Johnson says:

      “Bassman” I am awfully impressed by the way you effortlessly ignore every question put to you. You would make a rather good politician!

    • rah says:

      “The sun is a factor just not that significant compared to the CO2 forcing.”

      Yes everyone knows that if solar irradiance dropped 50% tomorrow we would remain comfortable for years because of a gas and if atmospheric Carbon Dioxide went to 50% of it’s current level the earth would go into another ice age. Eye Roll.

  17. bassman says:

    If your referencing watts up with that or climate depot your questions and answers are full of half truths and deceptions. This site should condone sites like that. The UAH series show a clear warming pattern only explained by GHG. The peer reviewed science is very clear on this.

    • NoFreeWind says:

      Well, I know that the US has has only represents a small percentage of global land mass, but the NASA GISS “data” shows it isn’t any warmer than it was in the 1930’s. (add current 1998 to present US data to this chart)
      http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

      oops, let me take that back, turns out that scientists at NASA realized that the 1999 chart was ALL WRONG! That’s the “old chart”. Doesn’t work anymore. Ignore! It was an accident. Mistake.

  18. Thanks, Dr. Spencer.
    Ice can be very beautiful, but is it good?
    I think it look ominous.

  19. ed says:

    Bassman
    What deep ocean indicators show an uptick in heat content? I think you are assuming that. Even Trenberth can’t find the “excess” heat in the oceans and it’s disconcerting to him.

    No one is going to fry, no ice caps are going to melt and no coastlines are going to flood as a result of some extra plant food in the atmosphere for the next few hundred years. That’s speculation at best.

    Humans inhabit climates that range from -50 to +110 degres F. One or two degrees more makes no big difference other than to those trying profit from the hysteria.

    • Having read the posts today, I am glad to find that more and more comments represent good science vs. tiresome politically influenced “science”. The absurd 97% view, for instance! Recall the great physicist Dr. Richard Feynman who once said, “If you thought that science was certain–well, that is just an error on your part.” I am afraid that the concepts of Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Weirdness as used today will soon have to submit to empirical evidence. We have had record cold even in the Southwest the last couple of years. Having lived in one high (about 3400′ altitude) desert town for more than 50 years, we were surprised two years ago to have two zero degree nights in a row. Mature trees died, and I don’t even want to remember the frozen pipes. Climate has always changed, we are still in the last interglacial, and there have always been major weather events; but it does seem more and more likely that the present solar minimum will result in extreme cold weather in the near future. Hopefully, it will not presage an ice age. Bottom line is that CO2 is a trace element in our atmosphere with much less influence than the water vapor and other elements. Plants need carbon dioxide for the very oxygen we breathe. More CO2 means larger healthier plants, more oxygen for all animal life on the planet. It is so obvious, and I hope to live long enough to see the present insanity end. Of course, our once great nation’s economy will be totally destroyed, the debt is already not payable by our future generations, and the suicide rate keeps climbing as so many people are just giving up. What can our publicly funded ‘scientists’ be thinking?

  20. bassman says:

    Ed, You have to have seen this. This is straight from NOAA.

    http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

    With a PDO/ENSO returning to positive I imagine the 700 m range will warm quite a bit in addition to surface warming. There was no hiatus in energy gain. Surface temps will continue breaking records in the next couple years. We still have over 1 degree C warming in the pipeline even if we cut emissions now.

    • Gail Combs says:

      NOAA is a political tool just like the FDA and USDA. I would never ever take the word of a politically motivated bureaucracy without a very large salt shaker.

      The worse boss I ever worked for was a retired chemist from a US bureaucracy. Data meant nothing to him. Only political game playing was important. He picked the wrong side and got fired within a couple months.

  21. Tell the people back in the Northeast and Midwest that they were hallucinating about the extreme cold last winter. There have been more cold records broken than heat ones recently. And as been said before, the 1 or 2 degree C. warming that seems so precipitous to yourself, Bassman, are nothing to those of us in the SW where the temperatures every day have a huge swing–40 degrees F. or more. We wear coats at night and T-shirts in the daytime for a lot of the year even in Phoenix, Az. More people die from cold than from heat!

  22. Ken F. says:

    If the tiny bit of CO2 we produce causes warming, what effect do wind farms have? Wind farms REMOVE energy from the atmosphere. They do not produce energy out of nothing, they are removing it from the wind. What about solar collectors? They also capture energy that would be absorbed by the earth. Maybe that will make a change too.

  23. bassman says:

    Ken F, your talking more about energy conversion, not really gained or lost energy. And it’s not on the scale of 400 ppm CO2 warming. We are departing normal temps that have supported agriculture in its current state. Certain areas of the globe are very vulnerable to some of the early climate change events we are already witnessing. Extreme rainfall events and drought intensity are
    playing a big role and will only get worse among many other issues.

    B.A. stockwell, I have bad news. Richard Tol (big skeptic) just admitted to the GOP who called him to testify that the consensus was above 90%. It seemed like the GOP lawmakers didn’t want to hear that but there the ones who called on him to testify. It’s clear that every major scientific organization endorses the idea of AGW in some form or another. You guys are the fringe arguing against the science, sorry. You have every right but your wrong as far as all peer reviewed science seems to show.

  24. coturnix says:

    Isn’t that how according to the most official versions reglaciation starts? Some ice and snow keeps for longer which in turn cools the weather and make even more ice and snow keep even longer and so on.

    Mid-latitudes are accordingly much more important albedo-wise that northern latitudes. The polar vortex, bulging south thus cools the earth much more than warms where the vortex bulges north. No wonder russian pomor people sailed into the arctic ocean from the kola peninsula in 17th century during the so-called LIA, while the europe at the same time suffered extreme cold snaps both summer and winter.

    • Gail Combs says:

      Yes that is how glaciation starts. The “Polar Vortex Pattern” of cold and snow this winter is the same pattern as the Laurentide Ice Sheet….

  25. Ronald Havelock says:

    Bassman’s last point, about the major scientific organizations endorsing CAGW or some version of it, is something that we skeptics have to consider or worry about. I read the NRC report of a couple of years ago and realized that the actual report didn’t endorse any particular theory but pointed to all the uncertainties underlying the data they had. The editor who summarized the report for the general public and policy people inserted the crucial bit that human activity was partly or largely responsible for the warming. We should realize that we are up against a scientific fraud of enormous proportions, driven by environmental zealots who have infiltrated key scientific organizations in the United States, Europe, and, of course, the U.N. itself. They are boldly aggressive and quickly slam any and all doubters, never mind the supposed strictures of scientific method. This problem goes way beyond normal partisan politics, and the only thing like it, in recent memory, was the distorted use of data, much of it false, exaggerated scare tactics (“mushroom cloud” that preceded the invasion of Iraq (“slam dunk”) This is another “slam dunk” as Bassman seems to think, but his views as that of the great majority, are impervious to factual contradiction. Ask yourselves why even most Republicans are willing to let Sen Inhofe swing in the breeze. Look at how the young and promising senator from Florida, Marc Rubio, was sent packing back into his burrough! And why do the big oil companies give us the cold shoulder? Hey, they don’t want trouble, do they? so their commercials feature windmills.
    My name is Ronald G. Havelock. I have a Phd in psychology from Boston University where we were ingrained in the scientific method and looked dubiously on any claims that didn’t have some kind of statistic behind them. How could the vaunted “Scientific Establishment” so flagrantly abandon scientific method and ethics when it come to the sacred “environment”? I think we need to go after them directly and ask, where is the evidence?
    What correlation? what level of statistical significance between what variables?
    The inconvenient truth is that they have NOTHING! If I am wrong, show me and don’t tell me about “consensus.” Remember, there was “consensus” among all the wise men about Iraq!

  26. Mike Maguire says:

    “Certain areas of the globe are very vulnerable to some of the early climate change events we are already witnessing. Extreme rainfall events and drought intensity are
    playing a big role and will only get worse among many other issues”

    OK, rainfall intensity is the only one you are correct on.

    You are mistaken on drought. Look at this chart of world wide droughts and intensity over the last 32 years.

    http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/sdata20141-f51.jpg
    http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata20141

    Maybe you also did not know that increasing CO2 causes plants to adapt and do better under drought and heat than at lower CO2 levels.

    http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/photosynthesis-and-co2-enrichment/

    Why would we want to strip away a plants increasing ability to adapt to natural droughts by cutting something that isn’t even causing increasing droughts?

    Forest fires are not up but the size in recent years has increased. Evidence of climate change? Well maybe but not from increasing droughts but because of much more fuel to burn as a result of atmospheric fertilization by increasing CO2 increasing vegetative growth. Woody stemmed plants benefit the most.

    Should we cut back on CO2 because plants are growing too fast? All animals eat plants and/or something that ate plants.

    We can all agree that the earth has warmed and that part of that was from increasing CO2(maybe even more than half).

    The debate should be over though………….about the proven law of photosynthesis, the role that CO2 plays and what it is doing to our biosphere, vegetative health and crop yields.

    We have no accurate testing or laboratory to determine what natural climate cycles are effecting our planet, so that we can separate that from the greenhouse gas warming.

    On photosynthesis however, it’s pretty simple.

    Sun + water + CO2 = sugars + oxygen

    Of course we need some minerals, usually from the soil but we pretty much know what the ideal amount of sun, water, CO2 and minerals should be for for plant growth.

    On CO2, that amount is more than double the current 800 ppm.

    Since atmospheric CO2 started increasing, there has yet to be an animal that died from breathing ambient levels………..and there never will be.

  27. Mike Maguire says:

    http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/01/john-holdren-video-polar-vortex

    “A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues,” Holdren asserts”

    “Increasing frequency” as in “back to the 1970’s” before CO2 was this high.

    Use this link and a starting date of 11-25-76 and advance, using the + for the day thru each day thru the Winter of 1976/77.
    Don’t worry about the ending date below unless you want to do a loop.

    Note: The Polar Vortex drops way far south, over and over and over during the Winter of 1976/77 and other Winters in the 1970’s…………it does that alot when we have extreme cold for reasons unrelated to the amount of CO2 that is in the air.

    During that Winter, California also had a severe drought…………because of the same pattern.

    It does that a lot, when we have an upper level high in the East Pacific/West Coast region that sometimes teleconnects well with a Polar Vortex dropping very far south, downstream and east of the upper level high, like has happened many, many times before from natural cycles.

    But what do I know, I never built a climate model, I’ve just been an operational meteorologist for 32 years

  28. Kevin O'Neill says:

    Dr Spencer, this post is nothing more than a variety of “LOOK SQUIRREL!”

    Where do the April and May 2014 NH temperatures rank per your UAH measurements? What is the past history of ice on Lake Superior in June (or JULY!)? Is the fact that a particular region or area of the globe is experiencing colder temperatures than the previous decade an appropriate datum to extrapolate to the hemisphere or the globe as a whole?

    In your position as a scientist don’t you seek the truth? Is the truth served by offering up LOOK SQUIRREL posts that seek to misrepresent reality? I grew up in Superior, Wisconsin. I lived no more than 5 miles from Lake Superior until I joined the army at age 23. My wife grew up across the bay in Duluth, MN. Her house overlooked the lake. Ice on Lake Superior in June was not uncommon in the 50s or 60s. It was not unknown for there to be ice on the lake in July. Now it is an anomaly. It’s news. Yet the rest of the globe is still experiencing above average temperatures.

    As someone with no scientific training it is sad that I can see the gaping holes in your little fable. It is just as sad that your regular commenters cannot see them. I despair that self-professed Christians find it so easy to bear false witness.

  29. Mike Maguire says:

    “Ice on Lake Superior in June was not uncommon in the 50s or 60s”

    So you would agree with my view. A natural ~30 year cycle, that helped boost warming in the 80’s/90’s and didn’t get any weighting when building global climate models(which attributed all the warming to CO2) has flipped back to the other side(cooling for that particular cycle).

    We had global cooling from the mid 40’s to around the mid 70’s from this cycle………..which helps explain the ice on Lake Superior in those years.

    We had global warming from then, thru the 1990’s from this cycle(in addition to whatever the greenhouse gas warming was from CO2).

    Recently, the flip back to the colder part of that cycle is resulting in colder and snowier Winters again, especially for the eastern half of the United States.

    http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=1

    What cycle am I typing about?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_decadal_oscillation#mediaviewer/File:PDO.svg

    PDO

    Kevin,
    You may not have any scientific training but you can read graphs and charts, right?

    You leaned about photosynthesis in school, right?

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130708103521.htm

    “I despair that self-professed Christians find it so easy to bear false witness”

    Please keep the religion out of it and let’s stick to the empirical data and scientific facts.

  30. Carl M. Bennett. BEE; MS says:

    Remember that all the Sciences and Mathematics tell is what would be if. Not what is. They may be useful and “correct enough” to be useful and functional over some range and domain of Time and Space, but seem to never be “correct enough” over ALL Time and Space, e.g., Within Black Holes, At The “Beginning” if their is such a thing, etc. When the Sciences and “Maths” do not agree with “Reality” it is the Sciences and “Maths” that are inadequate, not “Reality” that is necessarily “Wrong”. I currently feel stochastic uncertainty exists for ALL Time and Space, but it is just a personal conjecture for now. At my age ( 80) I have neither the time, energy, nor intellect to do more than ponder this conjecture.

  31. Kevin O'Neill says:

    Mike Maquire writes: “So you would agree with my view. A natural ~30 year cycle, that helped boost warming in the 80′s/90′s…….”

    No, Mike, I would not agree. There is a science called limnology. The limnology literature explicitly looks at ice on/ice off dates for inland freshwater lakes. Historical records go back several hundred years. When plotted, these dates show the same shape as the infamous ‘hockey-stick’. I’m afraid your theory does not match that of the data.

    You can educate yourself on the topic by Googling:

    historical trends in lake ice cover

    and reading a few of the papers and articles that are shown in the results. Or you can continue to believe in a theory that has no basis in reality. The choice is yours.

    • Mike Maguire says:

      “Or you can continue to believe in a theory that has no basis in reality”
      Hugh???

      I follow the data. As stated earlier: “what do I know, I never built a climate model, I’ve just been an operational meteorologist for 32 years”

      The PDO shifted to negative around a decade ago. The AMO is shifting. THe AO and NAO, which were more positive during the global warming decades have been featuring very negative values in some recent Winters that almost always cause cold Winters in the Midwest and Eastern US.
      Snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has been increasing.

      Lake Superior having the most ice in numerous decades is just another piece of evidence.

      All those things are data.

      “historical trends in lake ice cover” If you understand my position, you will know that I agree.
      1. There has been global warming
      2. Some has been from CO2’s greenhouse gas effect
      3. It caused historical trends in ice cover to be downward, especially when the warming was at it’s greatest in the 1980’s/90’s
      4. The stalling or slowing or whatever you want to call it in the warming since then would support a continuation of what we had BUT NOT ADD TO IT.
      5. This year………from weather, the Lake Superior ice spiked to the highest level in many decades. A level that exceeded anything that occurred during the global warming years in the 80’s/90’s or since then. It may have just been an aberration but you have to go back to your days growing up, when conditions were like this………..during a -PDO and a natural climate cooling cycle to find it as commonplace.

      Regardless of how you want to interpret ice on Lake Superior in the long term/climate scheme, it supports my position for the 30 year natural climate cycle shift and does not support Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming.

      Again, just a meteorologist here making observations and making interpretations based only on facts. I’m not projecting global cooling but will say that odds are elevated for the next 15 years for the same areas of the US that had extremely cold Winters recently(2013/14 and 2009/10,for instance) to have a few more Winters like this(with sometimes mild Winters mixed in).

      • Kevin O'Neill says:

        Obviously, Mike, You couldn’t be bothered to read the actual literature. I cannot do more than point you in the right direction.

        Your theory completely ignores the fact that even with global warming there is *still* weather. I believe this past spring has been characterized as the 3rd warmest on record, but yet there the ice sits on parts of Lake Superior. Why? Local/regional weather variation. The Great Lakes region was one of the few spots in the northern hemisphere that didn’t partake in the warming.

        In context, the average over the past 31 years is 51.2% ice coverage on Lake Superior. The lowest coverage was 9.5% in the 1998 El Nino year. In the 20 years of the 80s and 90s (your period of warming) 7 years were at or below average – 7 of 20 Since then (16 years) all but 2003, 2010 and 2014 have been below average; 13 out of 16. Isn’t that an indication of continued warming? Or should conclusions only be drawn from the outliers?

        This past spring the globe was at near record highs, but the Great lakes region was cool – and from the *cool* region you draw conclusions and ignore the rest of the planet’s warmth. I have no advanced training in anything related to a climate science and even I know that’s a pretty foolish way to go about things.

        Neither the PDO or the AMO or ENSO or any of the multitude of oceanic cycles we can list are forcings. They do not create energy – they simply act as distributors. As you probably well know, OHC has not paused. You also probably know there’s a lot more energy in the oceans than in the atmosphere. Anyone that claims warming stopped, paused, or underwent a hiatus should make it clear they mean surface temperatures.

        The globe as a whole has continued warming – and when that energy stored in the oceans is redistributed to the atmosphere (for instance if El Nino makes a likely appearance this fall) we will see surface temperatures skyrocket.

        The ice in the arctic is quite likely to set some record lows in the next few weeks (record lows for particular dates). How is it the globe has not warmed since the 90s – yet arctic ice keeps disappearing? If you focus only on surface temperatures you are ignoring the vast majority of the system as a whole.

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