Today’s Icy Cook Inlet/Craig Medred photo
The beginning of the end of the year 2019 – the warmest in Alaska history – drew to an end in the state’s largest city in the style of the new-normal weather to which many in state’s urban core have grown accustomed.
From the top of the Hotel Captain Cook, the view of rain splattering down on snow-free, 45-degree downtown streets looked more like what one would expect to see in a Seattle suburb than Alaska on New Year’s Eve.
Within hours, however, that was history, and the old normal was on its way back. The temperature by midnight had dropped to 25 degrees and snow was falling heavily. By noon on New Year’s day, the National Weather Service reported snow depths of 7 inches to almost 22 inches spread across the Municipality of Anchorage.
And Old Man Winter was only warming up (or should that be cooling down?). When the snow ended, the 25-degree temperature of early New Year’s day just kept going down, down, down.
Good-bye Seattle; hello International Falls, Minn., the self-proclaimed “Icebox of the Nation.”
As the ice flows grew in Inlet waters largely ice-free only a week earlier, some recent Anchorage arrivals unfamiliar with weather like this were forced to ponder “where went that global warming thing?”
Nowhere really.
Though warm winters in Alaska’s largest city might have started to look like the new normal, that sort of thinking ignores the reality of weather, which yo-yos year to year, and climate which is defined on the basis of 20-year or longer trends. The Weather Service at this time uses the average of 30 years to define its climate “normals.”
A lot of variation can hide within a 30-year average.
Alaska annual temperatures – like those across the rest of the northern hemisphere above 60 degrees latitude – have crept upward since 1900. But the shift has been anything but a steady increase.
Berkley Earth graphic. For reference, Anchorage is at 61 degrees north
Down, down, down
Statewide, Alaska was generally in a cooling phase from 1950 until about 1975, and then everything changed.
And then they skyrocketed.
As the Weather Service notes, the five warmest years on record in Anchorage have come in the last six years. The cold winter in that six-year span was 2017, which still ranked 22nd in a local climate record dating back to 1917.
There is no reason to believe the latest cold snap is the beginning of the end of this years-long warming trend, but there is also no reason it couldn’t be. Though atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide – the main gas insulating a sun-warmed planet to keep it from turning into just another frozen rock hurtling through space – appear to have been steadily climbing since around the start of the Industrial Revolution, the linkage between the gas and global warming is not so clear.
European scientists who earlier this year reconstructed the global climate of the Last Interglacial (LIG) period 120,000 to 129,000 years ago noted that the Earth was at that time warmer than it is today even though the “greenhouse gas concentration was comparable to the preindustrial period, with carbon dioxide around 275 parts per million (ppm) and methane around 700 parts per billion.”
Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at an unprecedented 407.4 ppm.
Baffling even experts
Weather is already known to be hard to predict, and as data continues to collect over the decades to come, it is possible the same will prove true of climate.
“I certainly entered this winter confident that the stratospheric polar vortex (PV) would be perturbed and have been surprised so far this winter by the resiliency of the PV to disruption…,” he wrote. “I also expected that low Arctic sea ice and a relatively warm Arctic would favor high latitude blocking/high pressure.”
That hasn’t happened as the northern hemisphere moves into what is officially winter. As a result Alaska is now starting a winter looking more like the old normal than the new normal.
“….Since late December,” Cohen observed, “the strong PV has coupled to the surface contributing to expansive low pressure in the Arctic and relatively cold temperatures in contrast to my own expectations. And typically, when the Arctic is cold the mid-latitudes are mild.”
All of Alaska falls under this Arctic influence and thus the well-known coupling between Anchorage the American Heartland. When it’s warm here, it’s cold there and vice versa. While Anchorage residents shivered in the subzero cold on Tuesday, the high hit 40 degrees in Chicago.
What all of this means, Judah was hard-pressed to say.
“Though I see little support for a significant disruption of the PV in the near future, with the possible exception of possible Scandinavian blocking the latter half of January, if the PV stays strong right through the end of winter that would be highly unusual in itself, especially in the era of accelerated Arctic warming,” he wrote.
Sea surface temperatures off the Alaska coast remain unusually warm, but still Cohen wasn’t offering much hope at this point for those wishing for another unusually mild winter in the Anchorage metro area where most Alaskans live.
From now through the month, he wrote, the patterns “favor normal to below normal temperatures across Alaska, much of Canada and the US along the Canadian border,” but there could be some more snow. There is always that hope for skiers and other winter sports enthusiasts.
And for those who worry about Arctic sea ice, there is good news. It has been growing rapidly given the cold.
‘December 2019 sea ice grew by an average 31,700 square miles per day. This is faster than the 1981 to 2010 average gain of 24,700 square miles per day) and is the third fastest December ice growth rate in the satellite record, behind 2006 and 2016.”
Ice coverage in the Bering Sea remains below normal, but the latest satellite imagery showed the ice extent south of the Seward Peninsula and closing in on Saint Lawrence Island.
Inland in the nation’s coldest, darkest state, temperatures along the Yukon River were in the range of 40 degrees below zero to 50 degrees below zero which made Anchorage seem almost balmy.
Categories: News
Bryan,
Water vapor is the “Main” greenhouse gas. CO2 is a minor player.
Which is why in the worst-case model runs, doubling it only creates 2 to 5 degrees C of warming in 100 years.
To predict that warming, the models assume the small CO2 warming results in more water vapor which is then responsible for the most of the 2 to 5 degrees C.
That assumption is unverified, but without it, no global warming alarm, so it is required in the models.
No alarm and the government grant funding would go away and that would be a crisis we just couldn’t live with.
If CO2 had no greenhouse effect, water vapor would keep us warm enough that we most likely wouldn’t notice the difference
Excellent article Craig thanks so much for all your research. While we are in the present interglacial we are seriously at the mercy of the milankovitch cycling of the periodic variation of the earths orbit and rotation axis producing rhythmic climate changes, how incredibly remarkable to witness and be able to perceive!
I get a kick out of reading the shallow commentary here of media induced tv parroting while these incredible phenomenon are being exhibited right before out eyes. Kind of sad actually.
The uncertainties in our knowledge of solar system behaviour is something to be astounded by not bicker over. Good God humans are a mere blip on eons if time.
Considering the ice was a mile above our heads just 10,000 years ago this ride isn’t over yet. The geologic archives give us clues of the Precession constants eccentricity of orbits and ancient astronomical cycles. Becoming aware of our present condition of spaceship earth hurtling through space at 60,000 miles per hour might help deepen comprehension away from from the Hillary mantra?
What I do know is that living biological life forms do well with clean clear oxygen filled air. So our shallow life giving envelop of atmosphere does not need any more invasive chemicals to breath. Unless we choose to mutate?
I wonder if this is going to go down as the coldest starts to a year ever, or at least in the last handful of years that we’ve been keeping accurate weather records? I’ve heard the Arctic Ocean is making ice at the fastest pace ever, or at least in the last handful of years that we’ve been keeping tabs on Arctic ice formation. Hopefully somebody who has lived in the state for a handful of years can inform us about how our handful of records are supposed to represent the timeline that represents ever.
The medieval warm period was warmer than it is today, so was the Roman warm period, it was also warmer than it was a month ago. But that was back when anthropogenic global warming was happening in Alaska and rain was falling like it had never done before in ever, except for when it did. Even during the medieval warm period and Roman warm period there were cold snaps and hot spells. Ain’t nothing new, but now it’s news.
A pair of reverse-polarity sunspots were reported in recent days, an indication that Solar Cycle 25 is getting underway. There was a single, isolated reversed-polarity sunspot over the summer, but a pair, above & below the equator, is a better indication. We will need a few more confirmations to call it a lock.
There has been concern that SS 25 would be extremely weak, or even be a no-show, and that would correlated with severe historic cold spells. I.e., The Little Age.
Still, solar activity remains at lows not seen in a century, and pushing 2.
On the face of it, it is the Sun that is the major arbiter of our climate … and the failure of Climate Science and its Computer Models to acknowledge & address this, badly discredits their overall effort.
Hmm, so, if the earth is “warming” according to Steve S, how can it be cooling back to normal temps? If it is warming it would continually ride would it not? Is that real ice on the Cook Inlet? Impossible!! What is amazing is the amount of people who believe in the whole “Global Warming” lie. Shaking my head with amazement. “But it was the warmest Summer eva”. Um, not it wasn’t…
My point:
“Twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Monday wrongly attributed Australia’s devastating bushfires to climate change — an assertion that follows the arrests of 183 people accused of setting fires over the past few months.
Australia has been ravaged by deadly bushfires in recent weeks, claiming the lives of at least 25 people and millions of animals across the region. Climate change activists have been quick to attribute the devastation to anthropogenic climate change.”
Bryan,
Always wonder what temperature it is where you are at?
As for AK’s cold snap…good for winter to finally show it’s mug up here.
Weather is not climate and from Deluth to the Poconos to the Alps, the skiing industry is showing the results from our changing climate.
Deluth just added snow making to cross country trails for the first time in history and the Poconos showed 51 degrees on Christmas with ski areas hurting for business.
In Italy the results to the industry are devastating:
“Rising temperatures have contributed to the decline of hundreds of ski resorts on Italian slopes From Piedmont to Friuli, there are hundreds of abandoned ski resorts in Italy. Researchers counted 186 in 2011, a number that is likely to have grown since.”
So as always, please adjust your sights to the larger picture across the globe.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/09/seduced-abandoned-tourism-and-climate-change-the-alps
The Guardian has completely sold out and admitted to publishing climate crisis/emergency propaganda. They are not a reliable source for any climate related news.
Meanwhile Greece is covered in snow…
https://greekcitytimes.com/2020/01/07/extreme-cold-front-in-greece-brings-plenty-of-snow/
Imagine! A world in which Mediterranean ski-resorts struggle!
Keep trying Steve S,
“Glacier National Park is replacing signs predicting that its glaciers will be “gone by 2020.”
Sharp-eyed visitors have noticed that far from disappearing by 2020, some of them have actually increased in size, and 29 of the glaciers in the Montana park remain stubbornly unmelted, despite “climate change.”
Steve,
Since you are fond of telling us that the US is only 2% of the global surface area, can you please inform us as to the percentage of global surface area the Italian Alps comprise? I’m not sure of the science on your line of thought, but since you’ve decided it somehow means something perhaps you can explain what a place with much much smaller global surface area than the US somehow proves anything.
To the greens like Steve, the trick is properly defining precisely what ‘normal’ is. Is normal defined by temps at the height of the Medieval or Roman warm periods? How about the end of the Maunder minimum during the Little Ice Age? Perhaps they would like to go back 5,000 years when this portion of Cook Inlet was buried under half a mile of ice.
Earth is about 2 million years into a series of ice ages. Sooner or later those ice ages will stop. Sooner or later the next ice age will begin and the ice will start moving out of the mountains again.
My question remains: precisely what is ‘normal’? Better yet, who or what gets to define it? Cheers –