All the more reason to bike there
This story needs more coverage to debunk the Fox News version, and I thought this was a good write-up of it.
How global warming contributed to the snow
A warming world increases atmospheric moisture, which leads to massive snowstormsBy Mike Tidwell
February 14, 2010
You can’t even find your car on the street, the kids have been out of school for days, and “blizzard conditions” is now standard weatherman talk in the D.C.-Baltimore region. So if global warming is happening, why in the world are we literally buried in snow?
It’s a good question, and thankfully, the answer is pretty straightforward. In fact, the growing pattern of extreme snowfall in our region has the fingerprints of climate change all over it — even as temperatures steadily rise across America and the world.
Let’s agree on one thing: Our weather has been totally unrecognizable this winter. Of the ten heaviest snow storms ever recorded in Baltimore since 1870, three have occurred in the last seven weeks. Before this winter, the city had never gotten even two storms of 19-plus inches in a single season, much less a trio. And we’ve shattered the old record for snowiest cumulative winter ever here, 62.5 inches, set in 1995-96. Philadelphia and D.C. have posted very similar snow statistics.
How could global warming be driving a pattern like this? One word: moisture. A warmer atmosphere holds more water. Plus, warmer surface temperatures are triggering more evaporation of ocean water worldwide. That water goes up, up, up into that atmosphere. And what goes up must sooner or later come down.
This is precisely what scientific studies are now documenting. Water vapor in the global atmosphere jumped by about 5 percent in the 20th century, P.Y. Groisman and his colleagues reported in 2004. This while there has been an observed, significant uptick in heavy winter precipitation events in the Northeastern U.S., according to a 2006 study. And all the while, global temperatures have risen sharply, including an average warming of 4 degrees Fahrenheit in the Northeastern U.S.
Consider further: We’ve had “Snowmaggedon” I, II and III this winter not because of record cold weather. The temperatures in our region have been only moderately colder than normal for the Mid-Atlantic winter. No, it’s because of record amounts of moisture here, pushed into our region by repeated Nor’easters. This historic wetness from the south has met cold-enough temperatures here to produce snow levels that neither science nor old-timers can recall.
Just last fall, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, established by Congress in 1990, predicted more violent storms in the Northeast due to climate change. “Strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights,” the agency said. So, yes, we are getting record winter precipitation events here even as overall temperatures are rising.
And, yes, there is the usual caveat: No single storm episode can be blamed definitively on global warming. But the overall trend — the shear freakiness of this winter weather — fits the pattern scientists say will only intensify with more warming.
Read the whole piece here.
–EBR
February 15th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
This is why I’m hesitant to get all worked up about climate change, the Earths biosphere is a self-correcting system… Too much CO2 leading to warming? The result is hot, humid weather and lots more precipitation over more area, leading to an almost explosive proliferation of plant life on land and algae at sea (why do you think they call it the “greenhouse effect?”), which all absorbs radiated solar energy and CO2, churning out more O2, and leading to a global cooling cycle. This isn’t just conjecture – deep core polar ice samples that reveal the earth’s full history of temperature variation show that current temperature patterns are tracking in almost exactly the same natural repeating cycle that they always have for millennia before our distant ancestors pulled ourselves out of the swamp on modified fore-fins. Just because the Johnny-come-lately human race showed up within the last cycle and began our little industrial revolution well into the already established upward slope of temperature increase, only we could boastingly believe that we are somehow in control of that process.
The deep core polar ice data reveals what we should truly be worrying about as a species, and it sure ain’t global warming. The chicken-littles are all worked up about a few degrees Celsius increase, leading to some coastal flooding, unusual weather patterns, and loss of polar bear habitat. Big whoop. The polar ice data shows that we are just a few degrees away (although that does equal hundreds of years in earth time) from the temperature peak where, as past history proves out, the big global temperature drop begins – and I ain’t talking about a few degrees. If the thought of a little coastal flooding keeps you up at night, imagine 1/2 mile high glaciers once again advancing together from the poles across all of North America, Europe, Russia, South America, Africa, etc. wiping clean all evidence of the existence of any city or other human endeavor outside of the tropics. Good thing *I* won’t be here to see it.