Sierra snowfall consistent over 130 years new study says-SF Chronicle

"Some of the information will be published in the American Meteorological Society's online Journal of Hydrometeorology."

2/15/12, "Study: Sierra snowfall consistent over 130 years," San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Fimrite

"Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday.

The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall - a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

The heaping piles of snow that fell in the Sierra last winter and the paltry amounts this year fall within the realm of normal weather variability, he concluded.

"The dramatic claims about snow disappearing in the Sierra just are not verified," said Christy, a climate change skeptic and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It looks like you're going to have

• snow for the foreseeable future."

Climate experts and water resources officials were immediately skeptical of the report, pointing out that it doesn't come to a meaningful conclusion and uses data from a ragtag collection of people, many of them amateurs.

Christy's study used snow measurements from railroad officials, loggers, mining companies, hydroelectric utilities, water districts and government organizations going back to 1878. That's when railroad workers began measuring the snowpack's depth near the tracks at Echo Summit using a device similar to a yardstick.

"No one else had looked at this data in detail" said Christy, a Fresno native who said some of the information will be published in the American Meteorological Society's online Journal of Hydrometeorology....

"California has huge year-to-year variations and that's expected to continue," Christy said. "California is having a snow drought so far this winter, while last year the state had much heavier than normal snowfall. But over the long term, there just isn't a trend up or down."

Mike Dettinger, a climatologist and research hydrologist at the Scripps Institute of the U.S. Geological Survey, said Christy is picking and choosing data while misleading people about what climate change scientists are actually saying.

For one, he said, snow depth is not as good a measure of the winter weather conditions as water content and density.***

The number of inches or feet of snow on the ground can mean a variety of things, he said, depending on if it is fluffy powder or compacted, wet snow.

Recent studies by Scripps scientists have found that over the last 50 years the southern Sierra snowpack has gotten larger while the northern Sierra pack has shrunk. Although they have predicted the overall state snowpack would decrease over time

• as a result of climate change,
  

nobody has claimed that it has happened yet, Dettinger said."....

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***Ed. note: The lack of snow has been cited many times by government officials and others with financial stakes in the climate "industry" as proof of global warming and therefore the urgent necessity to extract trillions from irritating US taxpayers in perpetuity. Obviously, many people today would have no job were they to admit the multi-trillion dollar climate industry is based on a fraud, ie, CO2 is not a poison, has little effect on earth's temperatures, and therefore all Americans are not criminals guilty of historic climate crimes for which they must pay. The problem is many people cashed in on this not thinking about the day it would all come crashing down. Now it's "too big to fail."

via Instapundit