Hot as Hell in Brazil

My wife told me this morning that it's hot as hell in Brazil. She's following some Brazilians on social media, and they can inform us that temperatures are uncomfortably hot. That makes sense, because it's the middle of summer down there, and heat waves are to be expected.

Anecdotal complaints about hot weather are of course just that. They don't constitute reliable data beyond the local observations that they are. However, the complaints fit nicely in with stories about the Earth becoming hotter by the equivalent of five atomic bombs exploding every second.

If we are to take the experts seriously, we're clearly in trouble, and the forecast of a colder than normal winter made in early December must most certainly be null and void. So, let's see what the actual data tells us regarding this winter so far.

What we see is that there's nothing much out of the ordinary going on. The extent of snow cover was for a while higher than normal, but is now about average after having been a little less than normal for a few weeks. The only thing unusual about this winter is that the snow cover is thicker than normal by quite a lot. There's more water locked up in the snow this winter than we've had on average in the years from 1998 to 2011.

This too is no surprise. The late 1990s and early 2000s were warmer and drier than usual, at least in the places I've been monitoring: i.e. Norway and Portugal. A consequence of this is that we're currently in a dip when it comes to the size of glaciers in Norway and other places. For instance, Briksdalsbreen is completely gone. This is due to warm and dry weather some 20 to 30 years ago. But if we keep getting the thick snow covers that we've had recently, the glacier will come back over the next few decades.

Glaciers don't immediately reflect climate changes because they are both slow moving and slow to shrink or grow. The delay is typically between 20 and 30 years, so we can't look at glaciers and tell anything about the climate as it is today. They only tell us about the past. It's the thickness of the snow cover each winter that tells us what the climate is right now, and it indicates that glaciers that have disappeared are about to return.

The coming and going of glaciers is something we've known about ever since the 17th century. The Nigard glacier was all but completely gone at the start of that century. But by the end of it, the glacier had gobbled up a farm located close to the bottom of the valley. Then it retreated at a remarkably brisk pace during the 18th century, and it's now all but gone, some 370 years after it reached its maximum extent.

Consensus science these days is telling us that the CO2 content of the atmosphere, which has gone from 0.035% back in the 18th century to about 0.041% today, is causing our planet to heat up at a rate equivalent to five atomic bombs going off every second. However, consensus science up until some 40 years ago saw things differently. Climate was back then seen as something related to the sun and its cycles.

It has been known since the 17th century that our sun goes through cycles that last some 11 years. These cycles are in turn cyclical, with maximums and minimums that correlate well with the coming and going of glaciers. The consensus was therefore that there is a direct relationship between solar cycles and Earth's climate.

If we stick to this older theory, we must assume that glaciers have now reached their minimum size due to the so called modern maximum, a solar super-cycle that peaked some 20 to 30 years ago. A modern minimum looks to be in the making, with solar cycles having become less intense over the last few decades.

I'm not sure what to make of the five atomic bombs going off every second. It doesn't sound very scientific to me. At the very least, it must be some kind of measuring error. However, I do know that the data currently being collected regarding snow cover is what we should expect according to the older, and now mostly ignored, theory that links climate changes to our sun's cyclical output.

Sun

By DracoLumina17 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link