Yet More Unseasonable California Weather Blogging

It's a Holiday Weekend. We're supposed to laze about outside playing frisbee, hiking to astonishing view points, and eating barbequed marinated shrimp at redwood tables beneath the warm California sun. But are we? Nooooo...

IIRC, when the air is 70F, its molecules are moving only 5% faster than when the air is 25F. But when I feel the 25F air on my skin, do my nerves tell me: "Hey, these air molecules are moving 5% slower than usual. How interesting!"? No. My nerves tell me: "What the f--- do you think you're doing, brain? Get us out of here NOW!"

Comments

[jhupp]

At 1am last night in Chevy Chase, I walked the mile and a half back to my house in short sleeves. The air temperature was in the high 50s. Perhaps someone inverted the country while we weren't looking.

[pgl]

It's been cold in Los Angeles too. I even saw some ice as I ran this morning next to the yard where there had been some water overflow. But I bet most folks in the nation have little pity when we Californians complain about a "cold winter".

[nemo]

Man, you Californians are wimps. Every time I visit the Bay Area in the winter time I hear someone whining about how cold it is when the night temperature dips below 50F.

I've lived in Chicago, New Haven, New York, Boston, Santa Fe, Denver, and Iowa City. Except for Santa Fe and Denver, which routinely reach 40F even in January, all those places are cold enough that we're HAPPY when the daytime high reaches 25F in between Christmas and March first! You can actually walk across a parking lot without a hat over your ears, with your coat flapping open! You can take off your gloves to fumble for your car keys without risking frostbite! It's practically summertime! Thank God it's not 12F, or -5F!

And those places are easy to take in the winter compared with Maine, Minnesota, and the Michigan UP.

Wimps, wimps, wimps. And those Bay Area folks are just as wimpy about hot humid weather. You should hear them whine and complain if they have to visit Chicago or New York in July. And those cities are easy to take in the summer compared with Houston or New Orleans. Spend your whole life in a climate controlled environment and you become weak.

[a different chris]

Could you please send some of that cold our way?

We in Pittsburgh are on our third day of miserable rain which doesn't even have the moxie to be properly icy.

I just spent all weekend moping over what a beautiful blanket of white this stuff could have made if we were at the appropriate Western Pennsylvania temperatures.

And I'm not even a skier.

[Kathryn from Sunnyvale]

Nemo,

OK, fine, but then I don't want to hear any complaining from the midwest or east coast the next time they go for more than 20 or 30 days without rain.

They can't call 20 days without rain a "drought," because here in California we call 150 days without rain "Summer."

California's farmers are facing a loss of a billion dollars worth of crops. Wimps, yeah.

(And it isn't that Californians don't know what cold is even within the state. We had a Winter Olympics. We have plenty of places that get 20 or 40 degrees below freezing during the winter- but they're in the mountains or the northeast part of the state.)

[pgl]

Hey - I predicted Nemo's comment! Then again - I used to live in New England.

[DCA]

From San Diego--the water line to part of the house runs across
the roof. This morning, no water, as somewhere in the pipe there
was ice. Problem went away after sun had been up for a while.

[John Emerson]

Seriously, if it's +25 around here for very long people start to complain. Cars start falling through the lake ice and people drown, and the fishing goes all to hell.

[Bupa]

It hit 70 today in Chevy Chase for the second time this year. This is about 30 degrees warmer than average. Temperatures have been running 10 to 20 degrees above average for more than a month. According to this website, http://www.knmi.nl/research/oceanography/enso/effects/
During an El Nino in January your neck of the woods should be warmer than usual and my neck of the woods should be cooler than usual.
So things are really backwards.

[Bupa]

Brad,
How did you survive your years at Harvard if you find 25F unbearable? You must spent your winters hibernating in the library.

[Ben V-L]

You have a false premise: that we feel temperatures. What we feel is the heat flowing in or out of our bodies. As one textbook puts it: in a cold campground outhouse, would you rather sit on the metal toilet or the wooden one?

We are most comfortable in our active, awake state when the surroundings are some 20 degrees (F) below our temperature (so, 70's). Then our heat loss roughly equals our generated heat. Temperatures in the 50's have twice the heat loss and feel cool. The 20's aren't just 5% cooler in this perspective. They are more than three times as cool as 70's.

Another example where thinking on absolute scales is pretty useless is air pressure. If the pressures on either side of a door differ by a few percentages, it can rip your arm off.

[RT]

What the two Chevy Chase posters said. I live less than an hour SE of them, and yesterday and today have been wonderful.

I've lived in or near the D.C. area for most of my life, and I've never seen winter hold off for this long. Even in 1971, winter finally arrived at New Year's, after an absolutely balmy week between Christmas and New Year's.

[Douglas Knight]

nemo:
"And those places are easy to take in the winter compared with Maine, Minnesota, and the Michigan UP."

What? I thought the UP was like Buffalo, a lot of snow, but pretty warm. (You can't have snow if it's cold!)

[dilbert dogbert]

Donner Lake 12 degrees, Reno 0 degrees. Brrrr! We are at the cabin at Donner trying to get the heat on in the lower cabin. The water just started flowing in the upper cabin.
Skiing at Boreal tomorrow! Us old cogers get a $5 all day lift ticket!! A reason to enjoy old age. Not much snow but Boreal makes snow so it might be ok. The price is right. Not sure I will enjoy skiing in this cold weather. At least it is clear and sunny.
The daughter said it is still warm in the east. They drove up to CT to visit family and it was still warm in the NE. The Boston Brother in Law says winter hasn't shown up yet. He is down in Newport Beach working on the boat. Wed he has to go back to Boston - tough life.
Just remember Spring is a coming in!!!

[Michael Carroll]

Nemo,

People in the Bay Area are not climate wimps. San Franciscan's regularly put up with lows in the 40's... in July.

Still, here in Philadelphia I'm jonesin' for some snow.

[Matt]

Um, absolute zero Fahrenheit is about -460 degrees, and temperature is average kinetic energy, so velocity will go like the square root...

sqrt((460 + 70)/(460 + 25)) = 1.045

Close enough.

[anne]

Perspective....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/science/earth/16gree.html

January 16, 2007

The Warming of Greenland
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland — Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.

When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind.

"It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn't it?" Dennis Schmitt said.

Mr. Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed on a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.

Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.

Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island's distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.

Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as half an acre; every hour or so, several more tons of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.

All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — "lonely mountains" in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland's ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.

"We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now."

In August, Mr. Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean....

[Bupa]

Anne, I read the Greenland article over lunch. Then I made the mistake of reading this http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/01/calling-all-science-teachers/#more-392
at the tail end of lunch. Now I have acute indigestion. What a mistake.

An excerpt: "In some countries, viewing "An Inconvenient Truth" has actually become a required part of the science curriculum, and with good justification, we think. Given that the DVD is currently selling for $19.99 through Amazon.com, you'd think that the National Science Teachers' Association ( NSTA) would jump at the chance to quickly get 50,000 free copies quickly into the hands of their members. Yet, when Laurie David, one of the producers of the film, made this offer to NSTA last November, it was summarily turned down on the grounds that the NSTA has a 2001 policy against "product endorsement"....NSTA invoked not only the product endorsement issue, but also a fear that distributing the film would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." David goes on to point out that one of these supporters is in fact ExxonMobil."

When I was a child science teachers were usually rather kind-hearted "crunchy" folks who liked to demonstrate convincingly that our lifestyles had unintended consequences that we really ought to think about. Times have changed.

[Maynard Handley]

Adding to Ben V_L's point (which is certainly essentially correct as regards the perception of cold) a second aspect of the situation to remember is that what surely matters is not the speed of air molecules, but the speed at which chemical reactions occur.

The (very very rough) rule of thumb is that chemical reactions run twice as fast for each 10K rise in temperatures. This is sufficiently rough as to be useless as an actual quantitative guide, but gives you a feel for the rapidity with which reactions become faster as temperatures heat up.

Since we are warm-blooded, this is of mainly academic interest, but there's a whole lot of invertebrate life out there that doesn't have the benefit of our warm blood and for which this changing of the speed of chemical reactions presumably has real perceptual consequences (to the extent that insect brains, for example, have perceptions).

[Dirk]

Greetings from Northern Germany, where we enjoy a very mild autumn/winter. Only one day of frost so far, and we're supposed to see snow. And this is happening all over Europe. Moscow and Stockholm should have snow and frost, but on our Celsius scale they are stilla round or above zero! I guess this winter certainly is special on both sides of the pond.

[John Emerson]

Bupa's story was sickening. Finance and PR are gaining control of everything. This has already happened to the media. Economic rationality can be poisonous. Certainly if I were Exxon I wouldn't do anything differently, and after all, the science teachers do good work in other areas.

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

This kind of late for people to be still reading comments but I wanted to let folks know of a problem with high effiency heaters. They have very low flue temperatures and therefore need a condensate drain. At low temperatures the condensate drain can freeze in a heater installed in unheated spaces . Then you are in deep do do as the heater will shutdown and then your place will freeze. Of course this means burst water pipes. This just happened in our place at Donner Lake. We were lucky to be there when it happened and prevented a repeat of the March pipe burst and 3 week flood.