Once again German meteorologists are reminding us how the predictions of warm, snowless winters made in 2000 are turning out to be completely false, as Bild writes here, just when Germany gets socked by more snow and cold.
A few days ago I wrote a post about Mojib Latif postponing warm winters by up to 100 years into the future as a result. It seems indeed much of what Latif writes and says needs to be taken with much caution. Not everything he says is accurate. In fact sometimes he plays it a little fast and loose with the truth.
In the very same interview at klimaretter, he is quoted as saying (my emphasis):
When I was a kid in the 1960s, we sometimes still had snow at Easter. In the meantime we have really forgotten how a winter really appears – and there can be winters also in times of global warming.”
Well, he was a kid growing up in Hamburg. So just how many snow-blanketed Easters did Hamburg see in the 1960s? We know it saw one hell of a hurricane that makes Sandy look like a picnic.
Latif used the word “sometimes” to describe the frequency of “having snow at Easter” in the 1960s, implying 3, 4, or maybe 5 times. It would be stretch calling 2 times “sometimes”. Once is certainly not “sometimes”.
Sorry I have to do this, but what follows are the Easter snow ON THE GROUND statistics in cm for Hamburg of the 1960s, looking at Holy Thursday through Easter Monday:
1960: 14-18 April; 0,0,0,0,0
1961: 30 March – 3 April; 0,0,0,0,0
1962: 19-23 April; 0,0,0,0,0
1963: 11-15 April; 0,0,0,0,0
1964: 26-30 March; 0,0,0,0,3cm
1965: 15-19 April; 0,0,0,0,0
1966: 7-11 April; 0,0,0,0,0
1967: 23-27 March; 0,0,0,0,0
1968: 11-15 April; 0,0,0,0,0
1969: 3-7 April; 0,0,0,0,0
Of the 50 days of Easter-time during the 1960s, only one single day saw snow in Hamburg – a whole 3 cm on Easter Monday, March 30, 1964!
Maybe there’s a good reason why people don’t recall the winters that Mojib says we supposedly used to have. Perhaps it’s because they never really occurred as he claims they did. Or did Mojib spend his Easters up in the mountains during his childhood and he’s confusing them with Hamburg?
We don’t want to be too hard on Mojib, as it is true that the 1960s were colder than say the 1990s or 2000s.
But if someday you should ever find yourself drinking a beer together with Mojib and he starts telling his fishing stories, just remember his Easter snow stories.
Mojib Latif is a meteorologist and climate scientist at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel (Geomar). Photo credit: Björn Láczay from Moosburg, Germany. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
To be fair to Mojib, it is reasonable to allow that he didn’t mean Easter itself but the days around it. How was it say for a month later than Easter in the 60s?
Maybe.
I am 2 years older than Mojib and I remember at least one Easter with snow on the ground as it was easier to find the “painted” eggs in the white snow. I guess as a child you remember this much better than any day close to Easter.
Btw.: I lived close to the black forest!
Black Forest climate is quite different from and more variable than Hamburg’s.
True. However,I still remember more green Easter than white ones. Meaning, at least at Easter the snow was not that common.
I was for a long time under the impressionism that snow was more a thing of the south of Germany than the north. That changed in the Winter of 1978/79 when the north of Germany suffered under the white fluffy thing. They had to send tanks out to rescue people. That was big news at the time.
I guess Mojib must have been on Easter holiday in the alps or so. That might be his memory.
yeah, sounds like he just meant snow was still on the ground. Regardless, he is fooling himself about AGW.
He meant the days up to Easter. The snow statistics provided are “snow on the ground” stats. I just added that to the text to make it clear.
If he meant to say “we had occasional snowfall up to Easter (but no snow on the ground)” that would have impressed nobody as occasional snowfall that instantly melts when touching the ground right into April is rather common all over Germany. It might have been a little more rare in the warm 90ies.
There is even a proverb for that “April, April, macht was er will” – April does what it wants.
When I visited Germany in 1993 around Easter (I went for CeBIT and stayed a while), there was definitely snow on the ground around Paderborn.
Weeks later, it was a proper spring. We even had icecream in Dortmund’s Westfalenpark to cool off. It was quite warm on my long walks in the area but there were still some cold and wet days.
Sometimes snow even falls in May in the hills. Normally it’s gone by lunchtime, though.
http://www.wetter24.de/wetter-news/news/ch/dc7d9318cc38278739d7a623f4c2b1a6/article/rekordkaelte_auf_vormarsch.html
Sollten am kommenden Wochenende tatsächlich Eistage, also Temperaturen unter dem Gefrierpunkt von 0 bis 24 Uhr, die Realität sein, so sind dies die niedrigsten Tagesmaxima der letzten Märzdekade seit mindestens 40 Jahren. Lange gab es keine solchen Kaltlufteinbrüche nach dem kalendarischen Frühlingsbeginn. Selbst auf den ganzen März bezogen sind Eistage eher selten.
Maybe Easter came earlier in the 1960? It occurs on the weekend following the first full moon after the spring equinox.
We just learned that AGW increases the risk of meteor barrages by expanding the upper atmosphere. Surely it can slow down the moon? Q.E.D.
Another calamity to add to the list of “Things Caused by Global Warming”.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/globalwarming2.html
Our episodic memory is not organised in a strictly chronological sense. If someone says he knows the weather on specific Eastern days half a century ago, he is bluffing, unless there is a relationship with a well dated event. My parents got engaged in March 1944 and there is snow on the photograph. We need records (as Pierre showed) or photographs to correct our fallible memory.
I think Latif is a ‘Richard head’ of the first order and should be nominated to join the infamous echelons of fellow ‘Richard heads’ , the climate alarmist lunatics, Al Gore and Jim Hansen.
What a team that would be.
We used to go away at Easter to the East coast [of Northern England] – I can remember warm days but more often than not they were bone chilling especially when the wind was in the North East – achingly cold.
[…] the tall tales spread by Mojib Latif. We haven’t forgotten what real winters are. We just haven’t seen anything like this since […]