Actually, it's been with us for about a week – light falls, just enough to whiten the ground but not enough to cause any problems. But, this morning, we got at least three inches dumped on the city. Now with clear skies, it is freezing hard.
The local paper picked it up but, contrary to the assertions of that idiot David Viner about snow becoming "a very rare and exciting event", it is so common that it has become routine.
What has also changed is the terminology. It has undergone a paradigm shift. Quite routinely, people refer to the white stuff as "global warming". It has become part of the everyday language that needs no explanation. It no longer even raises a smile: "global warming" means snow.
Needless to say, the paper hypes it up telling us that the weather "created havoc" with the local sports fixtures as football and rugby matches across the district were called off. And there is a "moderate risk" of severe weather affecting us on Wednesday, when we could get as much as four inches of global warming.
This is not in the same league as Washington and many parts of the States, but what was once considered a big deal here is being shrugged off. Apart from the namby-pamby sportsmen, life goes on without a pause. Traffic was running virtually without a glitch.
The routine of it all, though, is a killer for the global warming lobby. They can scream all they like about the planet heating up. Their credibility is shot to hell, covered in layers of white stuff and destroyed by the matter-of-fact sense of humour of a population that knows bullshit when it sees it.
What is really amazing is how slow the politicians are in picking up on this. But then it doesn't snow that often in London and they are so wrapped up their Westminster bubble that they may not have noticed the shift in mood. Perhaps they have - which is maybe why little Dave isn't talking about it.
If he tried raising global warming outside the metropolitan bubble, though, it would probably do now more than reinforce the already dismally low opinion we already have of politicians. It can't get any lower because it's almost certainly as low as it can get. But he can look even more of an idiot than he does already.
Poltically, that can be even more deadly than unpopularity.
CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD
George F Will in The Washington Post argues that, "A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become." Thus, he tells us, "It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions that everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify."
He is not the first to make such an observation, but to find such expression the The Washington Post is a significant step on the road to deprogramming a population which has been held in the thrall of this false creed for far too long.
Another step is a profile of Vijay Kumar Raina in Forbes India. Raina, of course, is the scientist who produced the Indian government's glacier report, of which Pachauri was so rudely dismissive.
What shines out from this profile is a picture of a real scientist, one who has spent a lifetime steeped in his specialist subject and has forgotten more about glaciers than that the posturing golf course owner Pachauri knows or ever will know.
But what is so very helpful is that Raina was also a government scientist, working in areas about which academics would know little. And his knowledge sheds a massive light on the disputed claims about whether glaciers are growing or shrinking.
Because of the remoteness of the majority of Himalayan glaciers – and the inconvenient fact that many of them lie in war zones – many of the baseline surveys, on which the IPCC and others base their claims of shrinkage, were undertaken by aerial photography.
The problem here is that the photography was done in November when the skies had cleared of cloud after the monsoons but, by that time, snows had already fallen, obscuring the outlines of the glaciers. Thus, there was a tendency to over-estimate the size of the glaciers on the maps based on the photography.
Now, however, the surveys are carried out in September by satellite, before the snows and when glacier outlines are a lot clearer. As a result, comparisons tend to over-state the shrinkage.
That problem does not arise to the same extent where earlier satellite imagery exists – and, interestingly, when like-for-like imagery was examined for the Tibet region, a report published last year found that a significant number were either holding their own or increasing in mass.
This was a survey of the Karakoram mountains in the Western Himalayas where, of a group of some 230 glaciers, 87 had surged forward since the '60s, sliding down into lower elevations.
The researchers, imbued with the global warming ethos, clearly failed to remark that their findings depended on comparing like with like, and must have been unaware of the problems in other areas, described by Raina.
Even without the photography though, Raina has another trick up his sleeve. He produces a graph of the rate of retreat of the poster child Gangotri glaciers (pictured above), showing that the rate of retreat started to slow in the 90-96 period and has now stopped completely.
A full appreciation of the situation is nevertheless complicated by the fact that high-definition, multi-sensor satellite monitoring of remote glaciers is only relatively recent, so analysts are usingrelatively short-term datasets, which cannot really support meaningful conclusions when so little is known about natural variability and long-term behaviour.
Despite this, we still have Pachauri squeaking that the glaciers are continuing to melt rapidly, a claim that owes far more to his need to recover lost credibility over the "Glaciergate" affair than it does any science.
In fact, this reinforces Will's thesis. Pauchauri clings in desperation to his shrinking glaciers, not because of any underlying reality but because they are a central tenet of his faith. He must believe this because, without that certainty, the very foundation of his existence is challenged.
Increasingly though, this desperation of the believers, once threatening, now looks pathetic. Their climate change God, unlike the glaciers they so revere, is melting away
CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD
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