Bishop Hill Snowdon now and then
Mar 30, 2013 Climate: Surface BBC News, December 2004
The data collected by experts from the university [of Bangor] suggests that a white Christmas on Snowdon - the tallest mountain in England and Wales - may one day become no more than a memory.
The figures indicated that this winter Snowdon is on track to have less snow than any of the last 10 years.
The results appear to back the growing body of evidence to support climate change.
BBC News, March 2013
Snowdon Mountain Railway will be shut over the Easter weekend after it was hit by 30ft (9.1m) snow drifts.
Workers using two excavators tried but failed to clear the 4.7 mile (7.5km) track.
The railway resumed operations from Llanberis last week after the winter break but they were suspended within days after heavy snow on the mountain.
H/T Stephen.
Reader Comments (53)
Ha! Ha! and Ha! again.
And these self-important, frowning, bettle-browed I'm-a-climate-scientist-while-you-by-contrast-are-a-fossil-fuel-funded-no-nothing-worm-who-gets-no-grants-at-all-from the-government-making-me-unbelievably-important-and-smug-and-rendering-you-wholly-irrelevant still expect not to be laughed out of existence?
Oh, how I look forward to their utter, total and complete humiliation.
Mais où sont les Neiges-dons d'antan?
( With apologies to Joseph Heller and. of course, Francois Villon)
Mar 30, 2013 at 8:20 PM | Unregistered CommenterJack Savage.
"but where are the snow-gifts of antan" Forgive my lack of education but where is that phrase from.?
Mountain goats won't know what snow is!!
Oh, wait.....
Weather = Climate
Meanwhile, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel blunder on followed rapidly by the EU gravy train full of failed politicians stealing €1million / year from the poor.
Snow will be a thing of the past....
(ho ho)
In 2007 the National Trust held a photography exhibition called "Exposed - Climate Change in Britain's Backyard", showing photos of Snowdonia with and without snow.
Welsh Environment Minister Jane Davidson said: "It has been suggested Snowdon may have to be renamed but like other parts of the world it stands as a reminder of what is happening to our planet."
http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/2007/11/21/snowdonia-shows-signs-of-global-warming-55578-20137434/
Of course, a few months later it was under a thick layer of the stuff:
http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=75420
@Stephen Richards
The original quote is from a famous Francois Villon poem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Villon
Also, from Wikipedia:
In Catch-22, Joseph Heller's protagonist Yossarian laments the death of one of his bomber's flight crew, Snowden, with "Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?" as well as in French, "Où sont les Neigedens d'antan?" It is, perhaps, the most powerful moment in the novel.
Hence..."Where are the Snowdons of yesteryear?"
Oh..I'll get my coat.
The data collected by experts from the university of Bangor suggests that a warm day in my garden may one day become no more than a memory.
The figures indicated that this March my garden is on track to have less warmth than any of the last 10 years.
The results appear to back the growing body of evidence to support climate change.
For a reminder about how snowfalls are now just a thing of the past, please go here.
Posts such as this one are important and are to be encouraged not only because they contradict the Alarmist claim of "overwhelming evidence" but also because they remind us that Alarmists believe that they are above natural history and have permission to rewrite it as they please.
Will the bbc apologize for this misleading and wrong statement ?
Or do they get, as usual, away with it.
I hope you don't mind Bish, 'cos I have just pasted this up in a comment on Booker over at the DT - with ref.
Funnier still, read this quote from the 2004 article:
Dr Jeremy Williams, of Bangor University, said: "This data confirms what many gardeners believe - winters are not as hard as they used to be."
Eeee. They were lucky. Soft $hite$. When I were a lad we had to go to school on Christmas day through 50-foot snowdrifts. We were too poor to have bridges, so we had to swim across the canal if it wasn't frozen.
The gullibility and credulity of feeble-minded yet prominent people swept off their feet by a fad has no doubt long been a source of amusement and dismay for the common man, and I'd say our times are only different in the scope for harm which such people can bring to the societies unfortunate enough to house them. The entire leadership of the BBC is a case in point as far the CO2 fiasco is concerned, and they may well be typical of a political class that must be amongst the worst we have ever had.
Went for a nice walk today just outside Nottingham. Reached the dizzying altitude of 100m and found myself wading through a foot of snow.
Thanks Andrew for updating us on one of the longer running alarmist soap operas. I was having fun with it back in 2008, as can be seen here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3557934/Watch-the-web-for-climate-change-truths.html
I remember once back in the 1950s camping half way up my favourite Welsh mountain in a foot of snow and exchanging with my friend,. as a blizzard howled outside our tent, a quotation from Vergil's Aeneid "forsan et haec olim iuvabit meminisse" ('one day perhaps even these things will be a plesure to remember" ( (we were meant to know that sort of thing at school in those days). It's good to know that such pleasures can once again be enjoyed by those for whom snowfalls are no longer a thing of the past. A happy Easter to you and all your readers.
To be fair, vast amounts of snow around *easter* doesn't quite contradict the idea that "a white *Christmas*" in that same location is becoming more rare.
What a fabulous juxtaposition. Sometimes all the papers and scientific calculations in the world can't tell the story the way a simple comparison can.
Of course, the glut of snow hasn't discomfited the warmists one bit. Under the current strategy employed by some, you could take the last sentence in the first citation ("The results appear to back the growing body of evidence to support climate change."), glom it onto the second and it would accurately portray the arguments being made by not a few practitioners of contemporary climate science™
Just a second. I was saving this one up. Didn't they say Snowdon would be snow-free in 2020? Not 2013?
From my window, it is rather plastered with the stuff at the moment. Was last year. And the year before that. Err, and the . .
But: as they said a long time ago: "Bound to get a winner one day". I'll just go at get my Omega watch . . .and the tin-opener . . .
Thanks for the Jane (plastic bag) Davidson quotes.
Living in Bala, which is in the Snowdonia National park, one gets used to the weird weather. The BBC informed us one week last winter the temp is averaging 5c but the iced up puddles disagreed.
You too can play "Go on then: Refute the irrefutable" and amaze your friends with your reasoning powers. Complete this simple phrase with your untestable statement of choice:
"One day...............may be no more than a memory"
and watch them gasp in awe..... Why not try "Global Warming" as a starter for ten?
Hours of fun for all!!
OOPs - silly me! That one was testable!
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate_by_any_other_name.html
Well, sort of....
There is more.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4080449.stm
One of the links in the 2004 article also gives free publicity to a "conservation charity hoping to use real-life examples of extreme weather to pressurise the UK Government on the issue of climate change." The charity in question is the Welsh chapter of the WWF.
When used carefully, crowd-sourcing has merits. But the tenor of the approach in this instance appears to be a case of deciding the conclusion first, and then going through the formality of finding the evidence. The BBC reports it in an apparently disinterested fashion.
Welsh and UK environment ministers/spokesmen were reported as welcoming the attention being given to the matter, but that could pretty much mean anything under the sun.
Dunno about you all but I'm getting really fed-up with all this Gloomy Warbling. Can't wait for Global Warming to come back!
Hopefully almost on-topic:
One warm afternoon in early August, I arrived at the platform at Preston railway station to hear the station PA-announcer come on line and say, in an urgent tone, "Will the driver of the snow-plow on Platform 4 return to it immediately."
And there it was in front of me. Those were the days. British Rail even got the wrong kind of sunshine. I wonder where that snow plow is now?. Perhaps it was scrapped and beaten into a windmill (not that it would be any use on Snowden.)
LL at 3:04 am: re political climate change: the political/green left has always preferred to have it both ways. In this case it is clear that we are all damned if it doesn't snow and then damned again if it does. It's amazing how that sneaky CO2 works, isn't? Whatever the climate extreme, CO2 is to blame. Amazingly magical stuff, that CO2.
BBC is going to loose its pension fund investments, in green politics( cap and trade etc) , and it's public trust?
BBC is politicized and corrupt?
I think it's been a tactical mistake for the PR side of climate science to go down the climate disruption/global weirding/extreme weather path.
Not that long ago the line was "weather not climate" and they should've stayed there. Their mistake has brought every weather event back onto the table.
So much snow on Snowdon but it was climate change wot dun it ! Apparently the loss of Arctic ice changed the location of the jet stream making the UK colder:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/25/frozen-spring-arctic-sea-ice-loss
Nevertheless they don't explain why it was even colder in March 1963 when there was presumably a greater extent of Arctic ice.
Don't encourage the idiot. She won't be here for much longer.
O/T but I hope mildly entertaining.
I have a theory. . . .. (Below is an excerpt from last night’s QI episode).
What's smaller than the Moon and keeps moving the sea around?
Not a seal on caffeine.
Not a moon or other celestial body.
It is a marine creature.
Not a blue whale.
It moves the sea with its combined mass.
Not a school of fish.
It accounts for 40% of the biomass of the oceans.
It is the jellyfish.
From Caltech (according to QI):
They are apparently responsible for ocean mixing though to what depth was not stated.
They might contribute a trillion watts of energy which is easily as much as tidal pull or wind.
To give you an idea of the scale, a non-native jellyfish was introduced to the Black Sea and within less than a decade the population had reached a biomass of one billion tonnes, equivalent to ten times the yearly fish catch from all the World’s oceans. Strangely after wiping out all the fish a carnivorous jellyfish arrived and killed all the invaders thus allowing the local fish populations to recover.
So my theory is: I understand SSTs rose from the mid-eighties until 2000 at which point they flattened off.
Is it possible that industrial fishing from the eighties onwards depleted the oceans of so many fish, the jellyfish’s natural predators, that this caused a massive increase in jellyfish populations and this in turn led to some ocean warming?
Troll comments and follow-ups removed.
Wouldn't it be nice if John Humphries gave these guys from Bangor a hard time on the Toady Programme, it is his neck of the woods after all. I'm not holding my breathe though.
'Troll comments and follow-ups removed.'
Is that anything like the street-sweepers job in the 1800s?
I do love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.....
Well, SwiBo, we'll make it on topic. When the jellyfish left, through a portal over Mt. Snowdon, they said 'Thanks for all the jellyfish.'
=================
Recycled but still relevant
Climate psientists say
"The cold that Europe is currently experiencing is due to a warm Arctic and melting sea ice"
Joe Bloggs points out that Europe also had cold winters in the 1960/70s when the Arctic was cold and sea ice levels were high.
James Hansen says "burning coal is slowing global warming".
Is this the same psientist who famously stated; "The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death"?
I could go on, ad infinitum and ad nauseam, with these examples of mutual contraction and cognitive dissonance.
The trouble with climate psience is it tries (and fails) to be a theory of everything. Such theories of everything are usually referred to as "religion".
Why don't those climate scientists and their associated hangers on from the worlds of politics and renewable energy just frankly admit that anything at all the weather does is to them evidence of global warming?
Heat waves, prolonged freezing spells with snow storms, floods, droughts, hurricanes, typhoons cyclones, tornados and ordinary storms, long periods of calm weather when the wind turbines don't turn, - all those things are obviously evidence of the harm done by our emissions of CO2 and we must go back to a medieval way of life to enjoy the same sort of weather our ancestors enjoyed in the Medieval Warm Period which did not actually exist because climate scientists have got rid of it!
Hansen is wrong: burning coal does not slow global warming by aerosols increasing cloud albedo.
Sagan got the physics wrong - look at a thundercloud with 0.9 albedo and observe that this is a large droplet phenomenon, just like high albedo of the Venusian atmosphere. Because that's wrong so is a lot of other stuff but can't write it here....!
We should remember that the presence of snow in Britain is a good indicator of warming because winter average temperatures are a few degrees above freezing. Therefore snow is usually quite infrequent, so a slight warming or cooling will dramatically impact on the frequency on snowfall. A more direct measure is the number of days when the maximum temperature is below a certain level.
My kids are still recovering from the shock of seeing snow.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
In fact the last of the global warming has just disappeared from our back garden.
When this is all over, they'll still be making their PhD backed pronouncements on some subject or other and we'll still be know nothing plebs. That's what is really weird.
What a joke.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/14/arctic-sea-ice-harsh-winter-europe
redc said
I think it's been a tactical mistake for the PR side of climate science to go down the climate disruption/global weirding/extreme weather path.
Not that long ago the line was "weather not climate" and they should've stayed there. Their mistake has brought every weather event back onto the table.
It's a PR necessity. Even though the thoughtful ones know the focus on weather events is double-edged.
While temperatures were steadily rising, we could be fed a constant line of increasing averages. At present we can't.
So to keep global warming in the news they have to increasingly make up stories. How warming causes snow. Or just recently, from the Dutch, how warming is expanding Antarctic ice (spare me!).
Because the greens need to keep our falsely induced sense of panic alive. There's no point having a "we must act now" set of solutions if we aren't kept reminded of them constantly.
So, climate not co-operating, they are forced back onto weather.
It's funny how the Greens deride the consumerist "West" for short term thinking, but are just as quick to go down that route themselves. Just as it's them that focus on high profile stunts, while the people they oppose just go about quietly building political support the old-fashioned way.
Experts and the University of Bangor should never be mentioned in the same sentence (except this one) unless it begins "There are no...". In an ideal world, university and Bangor would not be associated, what poor sap would want to spend their university days in such an utter dump?
DocBud I think you will find the experts from the University of Bangor exactly counterbalance the experts from the University of East Anglia. This is how God stops the Earth falling off the turtles.
Somewhat heartened by the distinct change in emphasis in The Sunday Times this week with three related articles.
Firstly, in the leader column, the Editor has a section entitled 'Look before you leap on Climate Change' - the gist of which is that global warming has been overhyped, and mentions a new grouping, Powerline, which is well-funded and lobbying hard against 'absurd' government energy policies.
Secondly, a scathing piece by Camilla Cavendish entitled: 'Blackout Britain looms while ministers flicker on and off over energy'. Self-explanatory.
Finally, front and second page of the News Review section given over to a feature by Bjorn Lomborg, entitled, in three-inch high headlines: 'THE JOY OF GLOBAL WARMING'... (subheading: 'Going green will cost too much').
All in all, unless government ministers are COMPLETELY stupid (and I do wonder sometimes) - I would have thought that eventually the message MUST get home...