17 thoughts on “The Farmer’s Almanac”

  1. Earlier today I saw this, in which LLNL scientists are blaming the post-1998 warming pause on volcanic eruptions. We haven’t had a spike in eruptions since 1998, and the downward spike from an eruption has a relatively short-term effect (based on looking at all the dips that follow eruptions).

    That the throw this crap at the wall must mean that the previous crap about the warmth hiding in the deep oceans is nearing its expiration date.

    I’m working up a paper to show that the missing heat has been hiding in my sock drawer, but can’t decide whether I should publish it in Science or Nature, because at this point they’ll both print anything.

    1. Love it! The immaculate convection always was a monumental flail. But, the fact remains that my socks disappear with regularity. Could be spontaneous combustion.

  2. Maybe the CRU and others should ask the farmer’s almanac for their obviously-more-accurate climate model.

    1. A cyclical event I’m sure. If California had enough water you wouldn’t need to import it all the way from Colorado to begin with.

      1. In the western US, there’s an old saying, “Whiskey is for sipping and water is for fighting over.”

        Water rights have been a serious issue out west for generations. California was settled long before Colorado became a state. When it came time to negotiate water rights, their point of view was that the water flowing into their state in the Colorado River was theirs. In the end, quotas for proportional allocations of Colorado River (and other rivers) were established long ago. It isn’t necessarily that they’re importing water from Colorado, they’re claiming water that flows from Colorado naturally. I lived in Colorado for 27 years including several drought years. Some of the downstream states tried to demand that we send them more water when we didn’t have it to give. We were already on water restrictions and suffering from wildfires. A bunch of us discussed going to the Colorado River and pissing in it, if that would help. Our kind offer was declined. We had to put up with the snow and occassional rain in Colorado but others demanded that we give them water beyond what we had to give.

    2. “We think it will be a winter of contraries, as if Old Man Winter were cutting the country in half,” writes the Farmers’ Almanac. “The eastern half of the country will see plenty of cold and snow. The western half will experience relatively warm and dry condition.”

      You could try looking this stuff up yourself, you know.

        1. Tell us moron, do you think the California drought started overnight, or just this year?

          I suspect Bart recognized 2013 as one of the driest in California’s history, and that the Farmer’s Almanac made that call 3 months in advance. Since then, NOAA predicted an above normal hurricane season, based primarily on global warming models, yet the season was one of the mildest on record.

    4. “Did the Farmers Almanac predict the Drought in California?”

      Yep, and its prediction was worse that NOAA’s. It also predicted the snowfall for the Superbowl, back in August 2013. That said, its accuracy is probably not as good as many think. But if it’s 50%, it beats the climate models.

  4. There was a leader of one of the First Nations, and a member of the community asked this venerable elder about the winter. “It will be a cold winter, gather sticks and firewood for your cabin stoves.”

    That one person was busy doing this led to a delegation from the community asking the elder about winter preparations. “It will be a cold winter, gather sticks and firewood for your cabin stoves.”

    Not being sure about the advice he was handing out, the leader and elder checked with someone with the National Weather Service for a long-range forecast, and he was told it would be a “cold winter.”

    So the people in the community were gathering sticks and firewood, but the leader wasn’t sure about the advice he was giving out and wondered where the National Weather Service got their information.

    He calls them up and gets to someone in authority who tells him, “We aren’t really sure what is going to happen either. The only thing is that the folks on the Reservation are collecting firewood like crazy!”

  5. The Maine-based Farmers’ Almanac’s still-secret methodology includes variables such as planetary positions, sunspots, lunar cycles and tidal action. It claims an 80% accuracy rate,

    We’ve got a crackpot on this side of the world who also claims better than 80% accuracy and uses planetary positions, sunspots, lunar cycles and tidal action (that is Astrology) to predict the weather. The 80% is BS.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ring_%28writer%29

    2. I’m not sure where the author came up with that, because as far as I can find the Almanac doesn’t claim planetary positions (except perhaps ours), tides, or the moon in the predictions, but they do include sunspot cycles and trying to find best historical fits to current conditions. You can actually do pretty well with that because the climate swings are rather cyclical, though complex.

      It was recently observed that you could use a “January index” and get a year’s temperature correct (as in hotter or colder than the previous year) right about 80% of the time. If this January is warmer than last January, the whole year is likely to be warmer than last, and vice versa for colder. Since most of the time we’ll be in a multi-year or decadenal trend, that method is generally right during the shift and wrong at the peaks and troughs.

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