Historic Blizzard Bust: First time in history entire NY City subway system closed due to snow-but blizzard never happened. Only a few inches in Manhattan. NY Gov. Cuomo said blizzard was proof of global warming. Lack of blizzard also reported to prove global warming

1/27/15, "City at Standstill as Blizzard Strikes," NY1 News, Time Warner, 2:08AM EST

Chelsea, NYC, 2:08AM, NY1

"New York City is without public transportation this morning and non-emergency vehicles are banned from the roads in an unprecedented response to what's quickly become known as the Blizzard of 2015.

By midnight the storm had dumped almost half a foot of snow on Central Park, with more than six inches accumulating at La Guardia Airport.

NY1 meteorologist John Davitt says he expects the storm to drop 12 to 18 inches or more on the city by morning, with the National Weather Service calling for up to 30 inches of accumulation....

  

Included in the shutdown are all subways, buses, Metro-North trains, Long Island Rail Road trains and PATH trains, making this the first time that the entire subway system has been closed to the public due to snow – although many trains are continuing to run empty to keep the tracks clear."...
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1/26/15, "New York governor says massive storms are 'part of the changing climate'," UK Guardian, Alan Yuhas, NY

"Andrew Cuomo says frequency of extreme weather, such as hurricane Sandy and current blizzard sweeping across north-east, ‘is a pattern never seen before’"

"Massive snowstorms such as the one sweeping into the US north-east on Monday are “part of the changing climate”, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, declared at a press conference announcing a state of emergency. 

Cuomo said on Monday that “there is a pattern of extreme weather that we’ve never seen before” – reiterating his comments in the wake of hurricane Sandy, when he said that “anyone who says there’s not a dramatic change in weather patterns is probably denying reality.”"...
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Blizzard or no blizzard both prove global warming:

1/26/15, "Repeating News Story: Global Warming To Make Blizzards Worse," cato.org, Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels

"Over the next couple of days, as the Nor’easter honing in on the New England coast matures and eventually unleashes its winter storm fury, you are going to be subject to a lot of global warming hype.

After all, the climate change alarmist credo is: let no extreme weather event pass without pointing out that it is “consistent with” climate change caused by human industrial society.

The push has already begun.

But this time around, the pushback is also well-prepared.

While the “curator” of the Washington Post’s newly-minted online “Energy and Environment” section Chris Mooney tells us in his article that global warming may make blizzards worse by increasing the temperature of the western Atlantic ocean and thereby increasing the moisture feed into the developing storm, meteorologist Ryan Maue is quick to point out that just the opposite is likely the result—that the elevated sea surface temperatures actually act to make such storms tamer.

Maue goes on to add that it is “easy to make case that global warming weakened this blizzard significantly due to warmer [sea surface temperatures].”

While Ryan is probably being a bit optimistic here, the reality is that this blizzard (in fact pretty much all storm events) are the result of a very complex system of physical interactions—the precise behavior of each one of which is not completely understood, much less perfectly predictable. This makes ascertaining the influence of human-caused climate change virtually (if not entirely) impossible.

Blizzards affecting New York City are perfect examples of this.

A couple years back, during another New York City blizzard, we looked at some of the confounding factors at play in determining how much it snows in Central Park. Our conclusion after reviewing the cases for both more and less snowfall there?

 Which leaves natural variability as the primary driver of just how white New York City’s winters are.

Figure 1 will give you some idea of what we were talking about. It shows the winter snowfall history from New York’s Central Park since the late 1800s.

Figure 1. Winter snowfall totals from New York City’s Central Park.

Kudos to you if you can pick out the patterns formed by global warming. And if you can, please write them up for scientific publication somewhere. The world awaits the definitive answer.

In the meantime, don’t believe the hype." Chart via Cato from NCDC AccuWeather data. via Climate Depot

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Comment: I have a clear view up First Avenue in the 80's in Manhattan. As of 5:21AM there are only 3-4 inches of snow.

 

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