Some photos - snow on Mount Bogong in the Kiewa Valley

I'm away at the moment, and went home to the Kiewa Valley for a couple of hours yesterday. It was a glorious winter day, more like spring, except for the snow. I took a few photos of the snow on Mount Bogong and neighbouring peaks, and of some cockatoos that were grazing by the side of the road.

And no, heavy snow in winter doesn't signify a shift to cooling, in case anyone is wondering. It does remind me of years gone by when snow like this was more common. (Click the arrow in the middle to start the slide show, click the arrow bottom right to view full screen.)

From the beautiful Kiewa Valley in north eastern Victoria. Credit: Sou as Bogong Breeze

It's the snow not the cold, Eric Worrall

Eric Worrall takes over the reins of WUWT when Anthony is away, which has been a lot lately. Today he's shown that he doesn't understand the first thing about climate change. He wrote a short article with the headline: "If it is Hot, it is Climate, if it is Cold, its Climate".

What he's talking about is the stormy weather that hit the USA in the past few days, with crippling dumps of snow. As I speculated earlier, this was most probably fueled by the anomalously warm sea as seen in this image from NOAA. :

El Nino, the California drought and Sierra Nevada Snow

Yesterday Anthony Watts wrote one of his rare articles about the drought in his home state of California (archived here). His headline read: "Drought buster? Up to 10 feet of snow this week for California’s Sierra Nevada". Under the headline he wrote (my emphasis):

Here is some good news for drought-stricken California; the latest forecast model output from WeatherBell suggests that the Sierra Nevada snow-pack will get a fresh dump of up to 10 feet of snow. 

He posted the chart below, with a scale up to 48 inches from the look of it, not 120 inches (though the scale doesn't indicate units). Up the top it states "Maximum 147.6 in". (Click to enlarge it).

Source: WUWT

His prediction of ten feet of snow this week struck me as rather a lot in just a few days. Not knowing how quickly snow can build up in the region I did some research. "This should hit the headlines", I thought to myself. However the only news I could find on the Sierra Nevada snowpack were about how up to "2 feet of fresh snow are expected to fall this week in the Sierra Nevada's highest points" (Associated Press in the Sacramento Bee - 3 January 2015). That's eight feet short of Anthony's ten feet prediction.

A rare and exciting event at WUWT

A rare and exciting event has occurred at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He can't find one of what he calls his failed climate predictions. The rarity isn't that he couldn't find it, it's that he actually looked for the source! As you know, in deniersville, a climate prediction can fail as long as it hasn't happened yet. It doesn't have to be a near time prediction, it could be a prediction for the years well into the future. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a prediction to be a failed prediction. In deniersville, if a newspaper reporter (or occasionally a scientist) says anything about the future, and even if they don't, it can be added to one of those silly denier lists that float around cyberspace.

I don't know why Anthony Watts is so upset. He doesn't usually bother linking to original sources when he posts a list of so-called "failed predictions" that he filches from some denier website or other. In deniers' minds it doesn't matter if there never was a prediction in the first place. or if there was it doesn't matter who made it.

I once tried to source some of the supposed "predictions" he posted back in 2014, but mostly all I found was a copy of his denier list, not an original source for the quote. In other words, most of the so-called predictions are probably just made up out of thin air. At best, some might be quote-mined from newspaper articles. Very few are scientific predictions. Only eight of the 107 so-called "predictions" had a live link to any source, none of which was a "failed prediction"!

Reflections from surface and clouds - is there an albedo expert in the house?

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is a mite upset (archived here, latest here) because scientists aren't telling him he's right. In fact, they aren't telling him anything at all. And few of the readers at WUWT are helping him out, though a number are encouraging him with "scientists don't know nuffin'" comments.

Warnings - This article is long and meanders a bit - I have to call a halt at some point. This is just a blog article after all :) If you are looking for definitive answers about albedo, you won't find them. What you will get are some of the interesting bits and pieces I discovered as I went looking. There's no guarantee I've got it all right, either. This is something I've not explored in depth before now. So feel free to quibble in the comments.

Back to Willis Eschenbach. He thinks he's found a problem with a chart in a paper by Graeme Stephens of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (and elsewhere), and colleagues. The paper is about planetary albedo, which is the the fraction of the incoming solar energy scattered by Earth back to space. It's not a bad introduction to the subject, with some caveats as you'll see. The authors make two main points, as described in the abstract:

1. the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (NH, SH) reflect the same amount of sunlight within ~ 0.2Wm 2. This symmetry is achieved by increased reflection from SH clouds offsetting precisely the greater reflection from the NH land masses. 
2. The albedo of Earth appears to be highly buffered on hemispheric and global scales as highlighted by both the hemispheric symmetry and a remarkably small interannual variability of reflected solar flux (~0.2% of the annual mean flux).